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Future Perfect: Administrative Work and the Professionalization ofGraduate StudentsRichard McNabb; Roxanne Mountford; Christopher Diller; Scott F. Oates; Margaret K. Willard-Traub;
Stephen D. Jukuri; Suellynn Duffey; Ben Feigert; Vic Mortimer; Jennifer Phegley; Melinda Turnley
Online publication date: 19 November 2009
To cite this Article McNabb, Richard , Mountford, Roxanne , Diller, Christopher , Oates, Scott F. , Willard-Traub, MargaretK. , Jukuri, Stephen D. , Duffey, Suellynn , Feigert, Ben , Mortimer, Vic , Phegley, Jennifer and Turnley, Melinda(2002)'Future Perfect: Administrative Work and the Professionalization of Graduate Students', Rhetoric Review, 21: 1, 40 87
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Future Perfect: Administrative Work and the
Professionalization of Graduate Students
Richard McNabb
Long Island University
Introduction1
In Present Perfect and Future Imperfect, Miller, Brueggeman, Blue, and
Shepherd conclude from their national survey that by and large, students . . . are
greatly worriedor, frequently, know very littleabout the future tense, about
the broader professional realities to which they are endeavoring to adapt them-
selves (CCC 48.3, 393). In response to their article, this Symposium offers
ways to cultivate a more future perfect outlook for graduate students by sug-
gesting the kinds of experiences faculty should be making as part of students
professionalization.
One of the broader realities we identify as missing in graduate training is
the recognition of intellectual work as political work. We argue that giving stu-
dents greater opportunities to participate as writing program administrators en-
hances this perspective of intellectual work and makes clear, as well, that schol-
arship, teaching, and service are all manifestations of intellectual and political
endeavors. Participating in such programs as WAC, portfolio assessment, and
first-year composition, each of the contributors describes how experiences dur-
ing graduate training have given him/her a broader perspective of the profes-
sional realm of rhetoric and composition studies.
For instance, Christopher Diller and Scott Oates discuss their experience
with the University of Utahs Liberal Education Accelerated Program, discov-
ering that their assumptions and views derived from their disciplinary training
became questioned and contested. Margaret Willard-Traub reflects on her ex-
perience developing assessment criteria for reading student portfolios. She ar-
gues that such professional work gives her first-hand knowledge of the myriad
ways in which institutional politics are woven into the very fabric of intellec-
tual work in the field. Stephen Davenport Jukuri explores how his experiences
show him that the nature of our academic communities is a function of how
individual interactions are structured by our academic programs. Suellynn
Rhetoric Review, Vol. 21, No. 1, 2002, 4087
40 Copyright 2002, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
SYMPOSIUM RR
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Duffey, Ben Feigert, Vic Mortimer, Jennifer Phegley, and Melinda Turnley tell
a story about collaboration, authority, and professional development in a writ-ing program. They demonstrate how their WPA positions have given them a
first-hand glimpse into how theories of collaboration often clash with institu-
tional structures that place a premium on authoritative hierarchies. Introducing
these accounts, Roxanne Mountfordwho does writing program administrative
work along with her other faculty responsibilitiescontextualizes the issues
being raised in this Symposium. As the contributors conclude, their work as
administrators has enabled them to gain knowledge about the future tense of
their lives as rhetoric and composition professionalsknowledge that was not
derived from coursework alone. These experiences have helped foster their un-
derstandings about rhetoric and composition as a profession and as an institu-
tional structure situated within other institutional structures (Miller et al. 398).
Note
1I thankRR reviewers Thomas P. Miller and Edward White for their insightful comments. I
also thank Theresa Enos for her enthusiasm and support for our Symposium.
Richard McNabb is an assistant professor of English at Long Island University, C.W. Post
Campus, where he teaches courses in rhetoric and composition theory. He is also the Director of
Composition.
Roxanne MountfordUniversity of Arizona
From Labor to Middle Management: Graduate Students in
Writing Program Administration
(In Memory of Eric Walborn)
Our discipline and other humanities are imbued with such a profound
skepticism of authority and the exercise of institutional power that we
are unable to articulate a conception of legitimate and ethical exerciseof power or to own our own power, such as we have.
Louise Wetherbee Phelps
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No other program faculty in English Studies carry the onerous burden
of administration that writing faculty do.
Theresa Enos
This essay opens a special Symposium on graduate students in writing pro-
gram administration, a subject that is dear to me because I have been both a
graduate student assistant to the writing program administrator (WPA) and a ju-
nior faculty WPA. The authorsall graduate students or academic professionals
involved in WPA workagree that practical experience prepares graduate stu-
dents for the intellectual work of being a WPA but not for the institutional poli-tics of this very difficult job. They theorize about that politics and call on the
profession to train graduate students to deal with it. My essay underscores their
insights and serves as an invocation to their work. In underscoring the need for
better theorizing about the nature of WPA work, I suggest that the WPA might
best be understood as a kind of academic middle manager. Squeezed between
the needs of teachers and upper administration, the WPA is often viewed as a
politically ambiguous figure in the lives of the instructor-laborers with whom
she works. The WPA may be ambivalent about her own work. Having once been
one of the instructor-laborers, she considers herself an insider, an advocate; butas an administrator with budgets and mandates from upper administration, she
finds herself to be a representative of institutional interests. In order to illustrate
this point, I draw on my own experience as an untenured WPA. I argue that our
own ambivalence about the WPAs position in the academy may prevent us from
better theorizing about the nature of such work.
Who Is the WPA?
It is a hot, muggy day in the middle of August, and I am sitting on the floor
next to my institutional green desk, unpacking boxes. The morning sun filters
through the smudges on the nineteenth-century window. There is a faint breeze
under the door from the air-conditioning in the computer lab next door. I am a
newly minted assistant professor. This is my first day at the university.
There is a knock on my door. A young man about my age stands in the
doorway, waiting for me to look up. I do. Dr. Mountford, he says, do you
have a minute? I am the graduate student who has been running the writing as-
sessment program. Im getting ready to leave tomorrow, and I want to give you
the files. I search my memory for some reference for this conversation. I met
this student during my on-campus interview. He was at one end of a crowded ta-
ble of graduate studentsan athletic-looking person. I remember his question:
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Would you put your job on the line to stop us from teaching more than 24 stu-
dents per section? I remember returning his stern gaze with a smile and saying,Yes. Absolutely. I have been hired to train graduate teaching assistants and to
build the curriculum; I am the Director of Writing. We look at each other, my
confusion obvious. They didnt tell you about me? he asks. He takes a deep
breath, expels it. I ran the assessment program. We give an entrance exam to
every freshman. You are taking over my job now. He steps through the door, de-
posits a box of files, sits in the chair next to my desk. I am stunned. During the
hiring process, I remembered no discussion of the institute-wide placement test
being a function of my job. Perhaps I managed to block this information from
my memory. Some ten minutes into the list of my unexpected duties, I can feel
my eyes begin to burn. When the graduate student finally leaves, I close the
door, put my head down on my desk and cry. I had been prepared to train gradu-
ate students and to work with them on the curriculum; I was ready to be their ad-
vocate. I was not prepared to be the gatekeeper, and I dreaded the institutional
politics that would come with this onerous responsibility.
* * *
Becoming a writing program administrator after graduate school is not un-
like being selected for middle management in a company in which you have
been a blue-collar worker. Like all laborers, graduate student teachers (GTAs)
spend time complaining about the writing program and all the ways it controls
their world. Indeed, all of us are skillful critics of institutions because of our
graduate school training. Louise Wetherbee Phelps argues that the academy at
large socializes grad students to hate administration and distrust administrators
(online posting). That is not to say that our complaintsand the complaints of
those who are now graduate studentsare ill placed. On the contrary, that the
work of a GTA is worknot a kind of apprenticeship for which universities can
award poverty-level wageshas been underscored by the efforts of graduate stu-
dents to unionize nationwide. Many of us agree with Michael Brub that uni-
versities opposing the unionization of its GTAs because they are students is po-
litically obtuse, shortsighted, and self-serving (39). However, even without such
politicization, few graduate students leave their PhD programs without having
viewed the WPA as an equivocal figure in their academic lives. Unionization
only brings into sharper focus the role of the WPA as a middle manager in the
university hierarchy.
Nevertheless, many of us seek this very difficult job because we love to
teach and are thoughtful about curriculum development. If we are honest, some
of us believe we can do better than the WPA we knew. Some of us prepare our-
selves to do such work through coursework; still others take a job assisting the
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WPA in order to put some of our ideas into motion. However, graduate students
who prepare themselves for the intellectual work of the WPA may carry withthem unacknowledged feelings of conflict about the job. The graduate student
values herself as a teacher, activist, and scholar and maintains skepticism about
upper administration. As a faculty member, she values herself in the same terms:
She values autonomy in the private worlds of her classroom, research site, and
home office; she carries on with her political activism; and she retains her sense
that the administration is to be tolerated but certainly not trusted.
But the faculty member who becomes a WPA must embrace a different
model of work or suffer schizophrenia. The WPA has fewer private worlds
indeed she is likely to spend most of her time in collaboration with others.
She must channel political activism through her job, when it is possible at all.
But the greatest change in values is likely to come through her contact with up-
per administration. She becomes, in effect, one of them by taking on some of
the basic business of running the university. In such a role, the thoroughly accul-
turated, new PhD may be shocked to hear herself say for the first time, Well, Id
love to do that for you, but Administrator X will not allow it, or Yes, I under-
stand that this practice is unfair, but I have no control over it. In the cultural
logic of the academy, she has become someone she may have once regarded
with suspicion.
* * *
The phone call came in September. I picked up the receiver and heard a
pleasant, masculine voice say, Hello, Roxanne. We havent had a chance to
meet. Im Dick Lawrence,1 Dean of the Undergraduate College. I want to talk to
you about the writing assessment test. How do our numbers look?
Me: Well, orientation is over, and 400 students failed the test. And frankly,
now that Ive had a look at the exams, Im surprised that were not teaching a
larger percentage of these students. Many of the students who failed are basic
writers. But the next level of student writer needs instruction, too.
He: Oh, you know that we cant open any more sections. Im just calling to
make sure that you dont fail more students than we have sections for.
Me: Dean Lawrence, are you suggesting that we go back and pass students
who failed the test?
He: I know you all use that holistic scoring method, so couldnt you reread
the exams, and just set the anchors lower?
Me: You want us to rescore the exams.
He: Well, its not my place to tell you how to do it, but we cant have more
than five sections, and Im sure you dont want to see the ceiling raised on
course enrollments.
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Me: There is no funding for additional sections.
He: No.Me: Then what is the point of having an assessment test?
He: Well, you know, we just want to make sure that only the lowest-ability
students are placed into composition. Your test tells us who they are.
I had been in the job only three weeks.
* * *
Nevertheless, the WPA has some power to define the terms of middle man-
agement. For example, many politicized WPAs have tackled some of the diffi-
cult labor issues in our field. One of those persons is Eileen Schell. In her bookGypsy Academics and Mother-Teachers, Schell dispels myths about the reasons
postgraduates of English take on part-time teaching (the bottom line is that they
want to do what they were trained to doteach in higher education) and offers
suggestions about how to change their working conditions. No longer is the Wy-
oming Resolution taken as the best strategy in all cases; for instance, institutions
like Syracuse University and the University of Arizona are creating new classes
of teaching professionals and offering them benefits and job security. Schell lists
four strategies for changing the working conditions of adjunct faculty, all of
whichwith the exception of unionizationrequire a WPA to exert extraordi-
nary leadership and to gain the support of upper administration.2 Given the right
leader and institutional conditions, such changes are possible.
A more difficult problem is the working conditions of graduate teaching as-
sistants. Some institutions have maintained the same number of core tenure-
track faculty for twenty years or more but have managed the ebb and flow of en-
rollment figures by shrinking and swelling the number of GTAs. These teacher-
students work for poverty wages, often pay high prices for abysmal health insur-
ance, and fight for time to study. Many GTAs are required to teach two sections
of compositionwith 25 students in each sectionwhile maintaining a full-
time class load. Brub argues that WPAs or other sympathetic administrators at
institutions opposing unionization of graduate students should take graduate
students out of the classrooms in which they work as graders, assistants, and in-
structors; maintain their stipend support at its current levels; and give them pro-
fessional development and training that does not involve the direct supervision
of undergraduates (3738). Of course, such a move requires far more than the
support of a WPA.
Institutional conditions affecting graduate student labor are complex. We are
in the midst of a decade-long downsizing of higher education. In many institu-
tions tenure lines are not being filled, and tenure itself is under attack in some
states. Yet undergraduate enrollment figures are on the rise, and students must be
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taught. Graduate student admissions offer one way to meet these demands. Yet
most agreeespecially in the case of literary studiesthat there is a seriousoversupply of PhDs for the number of positions available. Brub calls on fac-
ulty in English to begin discouraging students from pursuing the PhD and for
graduate programs nationwide to voluntarily reduce their graduate programs.
For the graduate students who remain in the PhD, Brub calls for job condi-
tions far closer to postdoctoral positions, in which a salary and benefits are the
norm. Of course, one might ask who will be hired to replace the graduate stu-
dents who keep composition programs afloat. Part-time instructors?
Given these deeply disturbing trends, some composition scholars are calling
for the abolition of the universal writing requirement. The WPA could entertain
such an option, for many institutions would be happy to cut funding to the com-
position program. In her now-famous essay on the subject, A Personal Essay on
Freshman English, Sharon Crowley writes, I doubt whether it is possible to
radicalize instruction in a course that is so thoroughly implicated in the mainte-
nance of cultural and academic hierarchies (165). She argues for turning com-
position into an elective, which could rid programs of such problematic practices
as entrance exams and oversubscribed graduate programs. She, in turn, has been
supported by such scholars as Lil Brannon, David Jolliffe, and Charles I. Schus-
ter (Connors 59). In his history of the abolition debate, Connors notes that unlike
earlier periods in which abolition was seriously considered, the New Abolition-
ists are in positions to make their critique stick (61). However, his concern for
this radical proposal is one shared by Eileen Schellnamely, that the scholars in
rhetoric and composition who support the New Abolition will be bitterly op-
posed by the nontenure-track faculty who depend on composition for their liveli-
hood. Working people, says Connors, have vested interests even in jobs from
which they are alienated (The Abolition Debate 63). Given the obstacles to
abolition, Connors admits sympathy to this cause. Schell, who is interested in
improving the lives of adjunct faculty, is more skeptical. She worries that upper
administration could use the abolition of the composition requirement to dis-
mantle whatever gains part-time faculty have made (116). Dismantling the com-
position program would likely not end a need for part-time faculty, and it may
very well do away with the very person who could work to protect them: the
WPA.
* * *
It was the summer before my pretenure leave. My Chair was on the phone,
asking if I would attend a meeting of the Faculty Senate Curriculum Committee.
The Committee wanted to abolish the writing assessment test. Would I defend
it? Reluctantly putting my writing away as I had had to do in all the previous
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summers on the job, I moved into attack mode, firing off reports to the Commit-
tee in advance of my scheduled appearance. I wanted to use the opportunity toexpose the lack of support for writing in the university. When the day came for
my appearance, I found that I was supported by everyone around the tableex-
cept for the dean of my own academic college. I told them that I was all for
doing away with the assessment test, but in its place I wanted writing to be made
a universal requirement. The engineers and scientists around the table were
thrilled. The provost was not. There was no money to increase sections.
The dean of my academic college suggested to the Committee that the
writing program be dissolved and replaced by a writing-intensive program that
would spread the precious funds for GTAs then concentrated in my department
to other departments. There was no one at the table who could find fault with
this proposition. My dean suggested that there was widespread support for such
a plan in our college. From the results of a recent faculty vote, I knew that there
was not. I remember taking a deep breath, and saying to myself, You have two
choices. You can defer to your own dean and protect yourself. Or you can save
the writing program. I chose to save the writing program, which involved ex-
posing the deans misrepresentation of the will of my colleges faculty.
While my Chair was overjoyed that the writing program was spared, the
rumors of the deans displeasure with me began immediately. We received no
more sections. I could not support an unethical assessment test (though the
Committee voted to leave us alone). A sympathetic senior colleague proposed
that we turn the writing requirement into an elective, with the placement test
used only to give students some idea of their writing ability so that they might
choose whether or not to take a writing course. It worked. But I was left with
concerns over my relationship with the dean and the role our conflict might play
in my future bid for tenure.
* * *
Thus far I have drawn a picture of the context in which writing program ad-
ministrators find themselves today. There is much more to say, of course. There
are the stern debates in composition journals and in writing programs over the
nature of writing instruction. Sharon Crowley suggests that these debates largely
mask the fact that we are still relying on current-traditional, skills-based curric-
ula in our required writing courses (Around 1971). Anne Ruggles Gere argues
for reconsidering the genres we ask our students to engage in by looking outside
the university to the extracurriculum of writing. John Trimburs latest textbook
is based on genres of public writing and the role of civic discourse in the class-
room. The role of writing across the curriculum, the potential of computer-medi-
ated instruction, and the struggle to understand what politics we bring to our
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teaching are the day-to-day debates that rhetoric and composition faculty, gradu-
ate students, and adjunct faculty engage in. And these were the debates I mostreveled in while working with GTAs to build a dynamic writing program of
which we were all very proud. These were the academic debates that I was pre-
paredto engage in after my graduate training in rhetoric and composition.
But as the vignettes I have offered throughout this essay suggest, I was dis-
mayed by the institutional politics that are the province of the WPA. I had been
warned by my adviser not to take a WPA job without tenure. Knowing that I was
somewhat good with people and could handle the intellectual work of writing
program administration caused me to overestimate my ability. Indeed, one might
argue that institutions that hire assistant professors to lead their writing programs
have not studied the nature of a WPAs work. A classic middle manager, the
WPA must bear the criticism of those above and those below. Without tenure, it
is sometimes dangerous simply to do ones job. Far savvier than I, the authors in
this Symposium were better prepared for such work by working with the hier-
archies and politics of writing program administration while still in graduate
school. Therefore, in the last part of this essay, I discuss my own experience as a
graduate student assistant to the WPA at Ohio State University and then turn to
what the essays in this Symposium teach me about that experience.
Graduate Students in Writing Program Administration
It was a beautiful spring day in Ohio. The four of us who had been hired to
assist the writing program administrator were sitting in a tiny office, knee-
to-knee, working on the curriculum. It was our job to map out the assignments
that the new GTAs would use in the fall semester to teach English 110. In the of-
fice with me were Eric Walborn, Sue Lape, and Kris Ratcliffe, three wonderful
teachers and students of composition. Over Erics desk was a sign that read,
Teaching is Performance. Our curriculum didnt differ much from the curricu-
lum the year before, but I remember the excitement of working through sugges-
tions made by GTAs at the end of their semester-long training course and talking
about how to improve each unit.
We were lucky to be chosen to work on Frank OHares team of administra-
tive assistants, graduate students who were paid to watch over the teaching of
their peers and to provide input into both the curriculum of the composition
course and the teacher-training course that was required of all new GTAs. We
had the opportunity to learn how to handle conflicts between GTAs and their un-
dergraduate students, to motivate and support new teachers, and to think about
teaching from a programmatic vantage point. In addition, we wrote prompts and
read placement exams for the program. This administrative experience led me to
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several others, including a year with the Center for Teaching Excellence, where I
worked on research on college teaching, led workshops for faculty on activelearning, and wrote book chapters on teaching for the university. It was wonder-
ful training for the intellectual work of directing a writing program.
But it had not prepared me for the political realities of being the WPA.
Frank trusted us to represent the program when dealing with other administra-
tors, faculty, and staff and shared with us difficulties with upper administration,
such as the constant pressure to increase class size. But he took care of the poli-
tics. Frank dealt with these difficulties with the force that came from his position
as a full professor, a lesson that was not lost on us. He was not always popular,
and it bothered him. But, I reasoned to myself when signing the contract for my
first job, Frank was head of the writing program at one of the larger universities
in the country. His job was more difficult. My job would be far smallera mi-
cro-WPA job compared to his. I could use the force of my personality and my
intellectual knowledge to navigate this difficultbut seemingly more manage-
ableterrain. But I was naive.
The dominant theme in the essays in this Symposiumincluding my own
is that graduate students need sustained opportunities to reflect upon the na-
ture of power and authority in higher education. The informality that pervades
many graduate programs, where tenured and tenure-track faculty regularly share
responsibilities with graduate students in a kind of apprenticeship model, all the
while protecting them from the more difficult politics of the institution, has be-
gun to strike me as an inadequate form of professional training. What we need,
as Margaret Willard-Traub argues, is to begin to help graduate students under-
stand the way that institutional politics are woven into the very fabric of intel-
lectual work in the field of Composition. However, the unfortunate fact, as Ste-
phen Jukuri illustrates, is that informal apprenticeship models most often expose
graduate student WPAs to the internal politics within composition programs. For
instance, in his essay Jukuri illustrates the way that teachers protect their class-
rooms and pedagogies as private spaces, under their own control and separate
from what others do when faced with the prospect of participating in portfolio
assessment. Such is the case in Suellynn Duffey, Ben Feigert, Vic Mortimer,
Jennifer Phegley, and Melinda Turnleys essay, which explores the difficulties
that attended the development of a peer group facilitator initiative within a
large writing program. The essay develops the problems with the range and
limits of a peer-group facilitators authority and how the peer group facilitators
who authored the piece at first misunderstood their role. While valuable as train-
ing in the give-and-take world of directing writing teachers in their work, it is
clear by the end of these essays that the authors wanted more answers from the
field about the nature of negotiating power and authority in higher education as a
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whole. It is not enough, as Duffey et al. suggest, to simply posit bureaucracy as
an obstacle to free intellectual thought and to institutional reform, when bu-reaucracy is simultaneously the only available agent of institutional change.
Like nested dolls, WPA bureaucracies reflect larger institutional politics: I was
forced to change the anchors on a writing assessment test because my first insti-
tution would not allow me to open more sections of composition to students who
needed it. These kinds of pressures were shocking to me, but they should not
have been unexpected.
Christopher Diller and Scott Oates have the most direct experience with the
larger politics surrounding writing programs. In the writing-in-the-disciplines
program in which they worked, writing instructors had been paired with faculty
in other disciplines. When conflicts arose between the faculty and writing in-
structors over writing assignments, Diller and Oates were involved with develop-
ing a stand-alone writing-in-the-disciplines course that replaced this program.
Through their experience Diller and Oates learned that one of the fundamental
problems with the position of writing instruction in the university is what other
faculty and administrators expect from such instruction. Teaching disciplinary
rhetoric, that is, rhetoric and composition as a content specialization, was the
goal of the GTAs involved in a new University of Utah writing-in-the-disciplines
program, while the faculty in other fields involved in the program understood
writing instruction to be essentially remedial, grounded upon formalist, me-
chanical and transferable criteria for grammar, genre, and content retrieval. So
while the problems that Diller and Oates encountered were, from their point of
view, much about the asymmetrical power relationships involved, they discov-
ered that their larger problem was ignorance over how writing instruction is
understood outside their university writing program. Diller and Oates write,
Our own theoretical training in rhetoric and composition had left us largely
unprepared for [this experience]: we found that the sophisticated arguments we
had purchased in our graduate study held explanatory power within the confines
of the UWP and were not immediately transferable to other institutional con-
texts. They call for efforts in the field to prepare graduate students to move
from graduate study to post-graduate professionalism, through research, theo-
retical study, and opportunities like the one they had.
In her essay Margaret Willard-Traub seeks to make sense of the problems
inherent in the political tug-of-war that graduate students find themselves in
when they participate in writing program administration and when they find
themselves involved in WPA work after graduation. Traub argues that authority
is often constructed as an all-or-nothing category within the institution, leav-
ing us prone to believe that if we only had more authority, certain problems
would be resolved. However, the institution itself shapes not only the growth of
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scholars and deans but also graduate students and adjunct instructors; therefore,
the politics of subjectivity is complex, and authority does not improve this com-plexity. The temptation is to focus on the actions of a particular dean or tenured
faculty member, all the while forgetting the symbiosis between those administra-
tors and oneself. Traubs call for a Foucauldian understanding of institutional
politics in writing program administration provides a fitting close to this Sympo-
sium, for what graduate students need, finally, to become prepared for postgrad-
uate WPA experiences is an understanding that their actions and beliefs are
imbricated in the overall intellectual and political trajectory of higher education
at the dawn of the twenty-first century.
* * *
I want to close this essay by remembering Eric Walborn, a man who as a
graduate student assistant to the WPA taught me much about teaching and ad-
ministration. Rebellion has often been the substance binding my emotional life
to the world, but for Eric Walborn, it was service. I fought becoming a middle
manager, but for Eric it was a calling. After graduation he stayed on as an aca-
demic professional, running the computers in the composition program. Quietly
and in countless ways, Eric served administrators, teachers, and students at Ohio
State, and he was untroubled by the politics that caused me to lose sleep and
rage up and down the halls. Eric took the long view. His grace and good humor
are a loss for the Writing Program at Ohio State, but also for those of us who
benefited from his example when we were graduate students doing WPA work.
He died of complications from AIDS in 1992, just a year after I graduated and
long before I had a chance to thank him. I am thanking him now.
My first Conference on College Composition and Communication was in
New Orleans in 1986, a year after I had begun to work with Eric as a graduate
student WPA. I remember clearly that Kris Ratcliffe, Eric, and seven others piled
into one room to save money. I remember drinking on Bourbon Street and talk-
ing with him and others late into the night about who we would be someday and
how we would run a writing program. I was still learning the answers to those
questions, but Eric had already arrived. He was passionate about teaching writ-
ing, and his passion rubbed off on me. Whatever he knew of the politics of WPA
work he kept to himself, but his commitment to serving teachers and students
while deftly interacting with administrators is his legacy. In 1996 I joined the
Rhetoric, Composition, and the Teaching of English Program at the University
of Arizona, a graduate program that has begun offering a course in writing pro-
gram administration. It is the kind of course that Eric would have taught well,
and I wish that he had lived to do it. In invoking Erics name, I am not merely
seeking a sentimental ending to this essay (although invoking the dead is admit-
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tedly a sentimental thing to do). Rather, I want to underscore the fact that gradu-
ate students have much to teach us about the nature of WPA work.Therefore, I invite the readers to learn from the graduate students (some
now professors themselves) and academic professionals who in the pages that
follow have written about their experiences negotiating the power and authority
questions that surround writing program administration. Their reflections join a
conversation about the nature of the professionalization of the WPA, a conversa-
tion that has begun at PhD programs nationwide and is being led by the Council
of Writing Program Administrators.3 It is a difficult moment to be in writing
program administration, as I have illustrated throughout this essay; more than
one rhetoric and composition scholar has urged us to abandon the job. However,
the authors in this Symposium illustrate reasons why these difficulties should
motivate us to study the politics of WPA work and better prepare current gradu-
ate students to engage it, graduate students whose good thinking about writing
instruction and teacher training should not be disabled by unexpected post-
graduation recognition of the institutional practices that surround and are part of
our work.
Notes
1Not his real name.2The four major approaches outlined by Schell are (1) the conversionist model (the Wyoming
Resolution), (2) the reformist solution (converting part-time adjunct positions into full-time non-
tenure line instructorships), (3) the unionist/collectivist solution (collective bargaining), and (4) the
abolitionist solution (abolishing and/or restructuring the first-year writing requirement) (91117).3Adopted in 1992, the Councils Portland Resolution offers important guidelines on the train-
ing and institutional support of WPAs (Hult, Jolliffe, Kelly, Mead, and Schuster). Interesting in the
context of this essay is the inclusion of business administration on the list of skills needed by the
WPA.
Works Cited
Brub, Michael. The Employment of English: Theory, Jobs, and the Future of Literary Studies. New
York: New York UP, 1998.
Connors, Robert J. The Abolition Debate in Composition: A Short History. Composition in the
Twenty-First Century: Crisis and Change. Ed. Lynn Z. Bloom, Donald A. Daiker, and Edward
M. White. Carbondale: U of Southern Illinois P, 1996: 4763.
. Overpay/Underwork: Labor and Status of Composition Teachers since 1880. Rhetoric Re-
view 9 (Fall 1990): 10825.
Crowley, Sharon. Around 1971: Current-Traditional Rhetoric and Process Models of Composing.
Composition in the Twenty-First Century: Crisis and Change. Ed. Lynn Z. Bloom, Donald A.Daiker, and Edward M. White. Carbondale: U of Southern Illinois P, 1996: 6474.
. A Personal Essay on Freshman Composition. PRETEXT: A Journal of Rhetorical Theory
12 (Fall/Winter 1991): 15576.
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Enos, Theresa. Gender Roles and Faculty Lives in Rhetoric and Composition. Carbondale: Southern
Illinois UP, 1996.Gere, Anne Ruggles. Kitchen Tables and Rented Rooms: The Extracurriculum of Composition.
College Composition and Communication 45 (Feb. 1994): 7592.
Hult, Christine, David Jolliffe, Kathleen Kelly, Dana Mead, and Charles Schuster. The Portland
Resolution: Guidelines for Writing Program Administrator Positions. Writing Program Admin-
istration 16.1/2 (Fall/Winter 1992): 8894.
Phelps, Louise Wetherbee. Re: doin more than thinkin bout quittin. Online posting. 3 Mar. 2000.
Council of Writing Program Administrators Discussion List. 4 Mar. 2000.
Schell, Eileen E. Gypsy Academics and Mother-Teachers: Gender, Contingent Labor, and Writing
Instruction. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Heinemann, 1997.
Trimbur, John. The Call to Write. New York: Addison, Wesley, Longman, 1998.
Roxanne Mountford is an assistant professor in the Rhetoric, Composition, and the Teaching of
English Program at the University of Arizona where she teaches courses in research methodology,
the history of rhetoric, cultural studies and composition, rhetorical analysis, and writing. She haspublished numerous articles in such journals as Rhetoric Review, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, and
JAC, as well as chapters in scholarly books. Her book Sacred Geography: Gender, Preaching, and
the Nature of Rhetorical Space is forthcoming from the Rhetorics and Feminisms Series of Southern
Illinois University Press.
Christopher Diller
Berry College
Scott F. Oates
University of WisconsinEau Claire
Infusing Disciplinary Rhetoric into Liberal Education:
A Cautionary Tale
In their national survey of graduate students in rhetoric and composition,
Miller et al. (1997) explore the tension between the present tense of studentsex-
periences in their graduate programs and the likely future tense realities of their
postgraduate professional lives. They report that although graduate students ex-
pressed tremendous satisfaction with their programs and faculty, they simulta-
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neously displayed deep concerns regarding development issues, job market dif-
ficulties, or the transition from graduate school into the professoriate (397).Likewise, we cast our contribution to this Symposium in terms of the present
tense/future tense: a cautionary tale about training graduate students for the pro-
fessoriate, based uponour assignment to design writingcurriculum and offer writ-
ing instruction in entry level liberal education classes at the University of Utah.
In the spring of 1994, the director of the University Writing Program
(UWP) approached several graduate teaching assistants with a proposal that we
viewed as a supreme opportunity to diversify our professional training: to col-
laborate with liberal education faculty in a pilot project called the Liberal Educa-
tion Accelerated Program (LEAP). This program would infuse the Universitys
required four quarter hours of first-year writing instruction into freshman liberal
education classes so that students could fulfill their writing and liberal education
requirements concurrently within an interdisciplinary and streamlined structure.
After several meetings with key liberal education faculty members, UWP faculty
and instructors decided to deliver the four hours of writing instruction across a
three-quarter, fifteen-hour core liberal education class that focused upon
American autobiography in the fall, Eastern philosophy in the winter, and the
rise of science in the spring. This interdisciplinary seminar was designed to pro-
vide LEAP students with a single teacher and stable peer group for their first
year of university studies; moreover, LEAP students enrolled in affiliated lower-
level courses in such areas as history, economics, philosophy, and ecology to
forge curricular links between LEAP and the disciplines.
As writing instructors and graduate students of rhetoric, we approached our
new assignment with excitement and professional ambition. We believed that we
were ideally positioned to guide and teach students as novices in academic dis-
course, as well as to further our training by designing reading and writing as-
signments with other university faculty. Contrary to our expectations, however,
infusing rhetorically driven writing instruction into this structure proved more
difficult than we imagined: While our graduate training had focused on disci-
plinary discourse practices, many of the LEAP classes, we subsequently found,
were predisciplinary in both theory and practice. Our present-tense training as
graduate students, therefore, did not immediately complement the ways in which
reading and writing were perceived and employed in the liberal education class-
esclasses we now believe to be highly representative of the discourse practices
expected of most entry-level university students.
In the following pages, we use our experience as writing teachers in
LEAP to speak to some of the issues and opportunities graduate students of
composition and rhetoric may find in their present and future professional
lives. Most broadly, we tell our cautionary tale in terms of an institutionalized
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struggle for authority between graduate student teachers of writing and tenured
faculty who assign writing in their courses but do not necessarily value orteach it as an autonomous subject. As Duffey et al. note about our caution-
ary title, one aspect of our tale is that we do not necessarily offer examples of
teaching experiences or institutional structures for emulation by other graduate
programs. But this is not to say that we are cautious about collaborations with
faculty across the curriculum that are designed to develop new ways of teach-
ing writing and training graduate students. Rather, we believe that our story il-
luminates, as Jukuri notes, that the impulse toward privatization in teach-
ingan impulse we explain as a strategy for dealing with institutional power
differencescannot be contested on a theoretical or curricular level alone. But
before we offer anymore of our understanding of our experience in the context
of this Symposium, we need to provide a brief description of how the LEAP
program changed over a three-year period.
The Design and Structure of LEAP, 19941997
Our role as UWP instructors in the first year of LEAPs existence (199495)
was to design and present writing assignments for the core liberal education
classes. In the core class, writing instructors directed students to write about the
core class readings; guided students through drafting, revising, and editing
workshops; and occasionally gave demonstrations on rhetorical issues and ele-
ments in writing for academic audiences (e.g., audience analysis, patterns of pre-
sentation, types and uses of evidence, research and documentation, thesis/topic
sentences, logical coherence, diction, etc.). We also met weekly with the core
teachers to discuss, design, and revise writing assignments as the course pro-
gressed. All grading was handled by the core teachersa feature that at first as-
sured us that we were not merely graders for the core teachers but subse-
quently became emblematic of our adjunct status, our inability to control the
meaning of first-year writing in LEAP, and our doubts as to whether the Uni-
versitys composition requirement was being adequately fulfilled in LEAP.
As Table 1 illustrates, over three years UWP writing instruction was gradu-
ally divested from the core class. During 199495 the UWP instructors delivered
writing instruction within the core classes all three quarters. However, by the
next academic year, writing instructors had come to believe that we were unable
to deliver rhetorically motivated writing instruction solely in the context of the
core class. We therefore lobbied successfully for a two-hour stand-alone writ-
ing class in which to introduce and teach a rhetorical framework for reading and
writing to LEAP students. After the stand-alone class was completed in the fall
quarter, writing instructors then resumed their roles in the core class over the re-
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maining two quarters where LEAP students earned the final two hours of their
four-credit requirement. By 199697 the attempt to infuse UWP instruction into
liberal education courses had come full circle: As Table 1 again illustrates, writ-
ing teachers had lobbied for and secured an independent four-credit writingcourse and thus no longer taught in the core classes or directly assisted core pro-
fessors with their writing assignments. Instead, collaboration was limited to in-
formal discussions with the core faculty and the activities of a miniwriting cen-
ter in which writing instructors provided supplementary instruction for LEAP
students throughout the academic year.
Different Curricular Aims
While the ratio of liberal education to composition credit remained the
same (fifteen hours to four hours) throughout the three years of collaboration,
then, the structure for delivering writing instruction changed dramatically over
time because of the tensions writing and core teachers experienced teaching to-
gether. These tensions centered around the different assumptions and
pedagogies of reading and writing that UWP and liberal education faculty
brought to the class. More specifically, core instructors brought a formalist and
content-driven philosophy to the class, usually asking students to abstract a
theme or motif from a core text (e.g., The Autobiography of Benjamin Frank-
lin) and to trace its development. Later core assignments directed students to
write about thematic links between multiple texts and to discuss these links in
terms of LEAPs umbrella theme: rights and responsibilities. In contrast, UWP
56 Rhetoric Review
Table 1: Three Years of Collaborative Relations between the Core Class and the UWP
Fall Winter Spring
199495 Core class:
Autobiography &
Core Class: Asian
Cultures &
Core Class: Rise of
Science &
15 credit hours
UWP Instruction UWP Instruction UWP Instruction 4 credit hours
199596 Core class: US
Autobiography
Core Class: Asian
Cultures &
Core Class: Rise of
Science &
15 credit hours
UWP Instruction UWP Instruction 2 credit hours
UWP Stand-alone 2 credit hours
199697 Core Class: US
Autobiography
Core Class: Asian
Cultures
Core Class: Rise of
Science
15 credit hours
UWP Instruction:
Academic
Discourse
4 credit hours
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writing instructors viewed the core class texts in light of their present-tense
training in a writing program that espoused a writing-in-the-disciplines (WID)philosophy. According to Chris Anson, WID is a strand of writing across the
curriculum (WAC) and aims to help novice writers to acquire the disci-
pline-specific skills necessary to produce writing acceptable to members of a
specific discourse community such as the field of history, economics, or me-
chanical engineering (773). Writing instructors, therefore, viewed the core
class texts as examples of discoursethat is, as instances of writers drawing
upon deep cultural assumptions to craft strategic self-images to effect intended
(and perhaps unintended) effects for particular audiences within specific
contexts.
Given these two different (not to say irreconcilable) views, we struggled
as writing teachers to integrate our views of writing into the core class. As we
began to realize the implications of these different pedagogies, our first re-
sponse was to design writing assignments that were explicitly rhetorical. We
developed a rhetorical analysis assignment, for example, that asked students to
analyze the prefaces from different English language editions of the I Ching.
The assignment directed students to consider how the packaging and presenta-
tion of the I Ching for Western eyes varied according to the historical and
cultural context of the preface: the nineteenth century, the early twentieth cen-
tury, the 1960s, and a preface that was quite contemporary and new-age.
The core teachers, though, viewed the I Ching as representative of the perdur-
ing traits of Chinese culture to be explored during that quarter. After our pre-
sentation, the I Ching prefaces and the rhetorical analysis assignment itself
were quickly reinterpreted by the core teachers as reading and writing exer-
cises that could reveal latent aspects of the Chinese mind that they wanted to
highlight. As writing instructors, we had crafted the I Ching analysis assign-
ment to show students that knowledge and discourse are always situated, but
the core teachers effectively sidestepped this goal as they developed the class
in accordance with their own assumptions and pedagogies.
Tensions therefore snowballed during the first two years of LEAP as writing
instructors, struggling to achieve the aims of the UWP, continued to craft assign-
ments for ways of reading and writing that simply did not exist in the core
classes. For their part, core teachers and LEAP students gradually perceived
writing teachers as being guilty of overcomplicating tasks and for failing to ac-
cept fully the LEAP mission. Indeed, signs of a potential disjuncture between
the LEAP and UWP programs were seen as early as the summer colloquia in
which university faculty met to discuss the goals of the LEAP program and to
become familiar with their respective courses through presentations about course
content and assignments. Early on, everyone agreed that a central concern of
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A Cautionary Tale
For UWP writing instructors, this all felt like a personal and professional
failure to fulfill the standards of the UWP and to confirm emergent professional
identities. After all, we had been selected for this assignment precisely because
of our experience, leadership, and advanced training in rhetoric and composi-
tion.1 Nevertheless, what we believed to be substantial credentialsnot to men-
tion the vote of confidence from our mentors and advisors in the UWPgave us
only enough leverage to return to where we started: our own classrooms. Even
with the return to an autonomous four-hour composition class, however, we still
felt mismatched with our assignment becausesymbolically, yet quite practi-cally and powerfullywe had been incorporated within the institutional um-
brella of LEAP and its liberal education mission. In this felt disjuncture, our ex-
periences confirm Jukuris contention that academic communities are grounded
in the architecture and structure of a program and that faculty subjectivities
may not be as malleable as some postmodern theory suggests.
We therefore view our experiences in LEAPboth in and outside of the
core classroomas a cautionary tale for using WAC as a means for teaching
disciplinary rhetoric. Our point of caution, however, is not simply that WAC
models sometimes leave writing instructors and, especially, graduate studentsvulnerable to faculty resistance. Rather, our experience suggests that a rigorous
rhetorical approach to writing may simply be incommensurable with the
predisciplinary reading and writing practices assigned to many first-year
students. In retrospect we now understand that LEAP was largely a pre-
disciplinary pedagogical space in which our view of rhetoric and writing
would be perceived, at best, as anomalous. Instead of focusing on the dis-
course conventions that characterize writing in the upper reaches of the aca-
demic disciplines, for instance, we might have moved more quickly to tailor
our writing assignments to the expository modes and genres of general educa-tion that first-year students are typically expected to utilize and produce. In
other words, we might have used writing to design writing andreading assign-
ments or prompts that fostered critical thinking and active learning if not the
self-consciously rhetorical view espoused by the UWP (see Bean). Such a re-
vised view of first-year writing does not necessarily entail a capitulation to a
pedagogy of models and formalism; instead, it involves carefully modeling for
students and faculty how the literacy practices of entry-level classes are the
products of typified and recurrent social action (Miller, 1984; Berkenkotter and
Huckin, 1995).
Our advanced training in composition and rhetoric had left us largely un-
prepared for our LEAP experience: We found that the sophisticated arguments
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we had purchased in our graduate study held explanatory power within the
confines of the UWP and were not readily transferable to other institutional lo-cations. We nevertheless consider ourselves fortunate to have grappled with
what writing means beyond the aegis of those who already subscribe to the
view of writing as discourse. Far from suggesting that writing professionals
should retreat into privatized professional or pedagogical spaces, we believe
our experiences in LEAP illustrate the value of exposing graduate students
(through teaching assignments or internships) to how writing is viewed, taught,
and administered outside of the comfortable environs of writing programs.
Such training not only would provide graduate students with the opportunity to
experience the power (and perhaps limitations) of rhetoric in new locales, it
would also prepare them for the types of courses and faculty views they will
likely encounter in their postgraduate school lives. In our view, then, graduate
students and their mentors should assess such opportunities equally in terms of
how well graduate students fulfill their assignment and, conversely, the assign-
ments costs and benefits as a form of preprofessional training. In this way ex-
periences like LEAP would provide graduate students with extracurricular
fieldwork that can ease their transition from graduate study to postgraduate
professionalism, even as faculty, administrators, and graduate students them-
selves must further envision how rhetoric and writing can be taught across the
university.
Note
1The graduate student instructors chosen by the UWP faculty included two students who had
worked at community colleges as directors of writing and several former UWP teaching counselors.
In addition, UWP instructors had done research and presented papers at such venues as CCCC, RSA,
MLA, and EDE.
Works Cited
Anson, Chris. Writing across the Curriculum. Encyclopedia of Rhetoric and Composition: Com-
munication from Ancient Times to the Information Age. Ed. Theresa Enos. New York: Garland,
1996. 77374.
Bean, John C. Engaging Ideas: The Professors Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and
Active Learning in the Classroom. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1996.
Berkenkotter, Carol, and Thomas N. Huckin. Genre Knowledge in Disciplinary Communication:
Cognition/Culture/Power. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1995.
Miller, Carolyn. Genre as Social Action. Quarterly Journal of Speech 70 (1984): 15167.Miller, Scott L., Brenda Jo Brueggemann, Blennis Blue, and Deneen M. Shepherd. Present Perfect
and Future Imperfect: Results of a National Survey of Graduate Students in Rhetoric and Com-
position Programs. College Composition and Communication 48.3 (1997): 392409.
60 Rhetoric Review
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Christopher Diller was a PhD student in the American studies program at the University of
Utah from 19911999. He now works as an assistant professor of Rhetoric and Writing at Berry Col-
lege in Rome, Georgia. His teaching and research interests include nineteenth-century American lit-
erature, the history of rhetoric, analytical approaches to composition, and WAC.
Scott F. Oates was a PhD student in Educational Studies at the University of Utah from 1992
1998. He now works as an assistant professor of English at the University of WisconsinEau Claire
where he directs the departments undergraduate program. His teaching and research interests focus
on how students learn and negotiate new literacy practices.
Margaret K. Willard-Traub
Oakland University
Professionalization and the Politics of Subjectivity
Lester Faigley sums up one of the main arguments that runs through his
bookFragments of Rationality: Postmodernity and the Subject of Composition,
observing that many of the fault lines in composition studies are disagree-
ments over the subjectivities that teachers of writing want students to occupy
(17). The essays in this Symposiumoriginating within widely different con-
texts illustrate in compelling ways how many of the political fault lines,
along which graduate students and faculty who run writing programs (as well
as those who work in writing centers) find themselves precariously situated,
stem from conflicting notions of the subjectivities that central administrators,
department heads, content faculty, and even graduate student teachers them-
selves, want writing teachers to occupy, or not to occupy. Such desire, espe-
cially when it is accompanied by institutional power not possessed by those
teaching, assessing, and doing research on the (social) practice of academic
writing, can lead to losses for writing programs and the individuals who work
within them. But graduate students and faculty in rhetoric and composition
also can gain valuable insights from analyzing such desire, insights that can
help lead them to collaborate with diverse segments on college and university
campuses, and to shape the dialogue that surrounds the teaching of writing in
higher education across the country.
My own experience with program administration, while in some ways very
different from that of the other contributors to this Symposium, highlights many
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of the same concerns with authority, collaboration, and identity discussed by
these other authors. While I now hold a position as Assistant Professor at Oak-land University in Rochester, Michigan, the three years I taught as part of the
University of Michigans English Composition Board and worked with faculty
from ECB (and from the Institute for Social Research) on developing and evalu-
ating Michigans large-scale entrance writing assessment were crucial for me as
I developed an understanding of the ways in which intellectual work in our field
is bound up with institutional politicsand an understanding of how essential
that knowledge is to the professionalization of graduate students generally.
In my time at ECB, I was a member of two very differently constituted
working groups, one in which I was the only graduate student among nontenured
faculty performing research that was both formative and summative for the as-
sessment project, a group also engaged in negotiating with administrators for re-
search funding; and a group in which I led several other graduate student-teach-
ers (and a fewer number of faculty) in a series of meetings that had as its
primary purpose the development of criteria that we subsequently employed dur-
ing our annual summertime reading of several thousand (more than 4,500) port-
folios of high school writing submitted by entering undergraduate students. The
faculty in the first group included the then director of the ECB and several other
long-time faculty holding nontenured positions in the unit (all of whom have
since moved on to positions at other institutions); the second group consisted of
two of these same faculty, along with advanced literature graduate students who
had several years experience teaching a wide variety of courses in the univer-
sitys writing program.
For the purposes of this essay, I will focus primarily on the former context
and on the relationship that developed between the group of untenured faculty
(and me) and tenured faculty-administrators, as we negotiated for funding of the
research phase in which the group of graduate students was engaged. The pri-
mary purpose of both groups was to formulate both the language of our as-
sessment criteria and the role that criteria played in guiding portfolio readers
placement decisions. We aimed for a language and a form that were not only in-
tellectually rigorous but also practically useful for a large group of readers with
varied levels of teaching experience. Though developing criteria for the place-
ment assessment was our primary focus, also of concern for us in these dis-
cussions were the ways in which assessment might drive curricular reform of the
first-year writing program; how the assessment and the three-day portfolio
reader training scheduled each spring might constitute experiences in teacher ed-
ucation, especially for graduate students trained primarily in literary studies; as
well as how the assessment might constitute a learning experience for under-
graduates, one that might provide them with detailed feedback about their writ-
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ing, and about how that writing compared to the expectations of the discourse
communities they were about to enter at the university.These collaborative, professional experiences not only gave me, early on in
my professionalization, first-hand knowledge of the myriad ways in which insti-
tutional politics are a part of the development and execution of any major curric-
ular project; they also illustrated the unique ways in which institutional politics
are woven into the very fabric of intellectual work in Composition Studies, espe-
cially with regard to how what might be called a politics of subjectivity is en-
acted within the context of such intellectual work.
I would suggest that such a politics can function to diminish not only the
primary subject of our intellectual workthat is, the teaching of writingbut
functions as well to reduce the complexity of the subjectivities of teachers and
students of writing. Such a politics is illustrated by Dillers and Oatess experi-
ences in teaching writing within the context of a Liberal Education core course
headed by general education faculty, for example. And such a politics is strik-
ingly revealed in the context of the negotiations for the research funding that I
describe below, negotiations pursued via verbal and written exchanges between
tenured, English department faculty-administrators, on the one hand, and the
untenured writing program administrators of whose group I was the only gradu-
ate student member, on the other. Though I think the particular example I sketch
out here vividly illustrates how such a politics of subjectivity might manifest it-
self and suggests as well some of the frustrating implications of such a politics,
it is important to say that this is not the only example from my time working at
ECB that I might have examined. Taken together, other momentsoccurring
while we (ECB faculty and I) recruited graduate students from the department of
English to participate in the assessment research; while we shaped portfolio
reader training in ways that tried to maintain the integrity of the assessment pro-
cess during a (politically) complex period during which the English Composi-
tion Board was consolidated with the English department; and while we collab-
orated on writing a scholarly article examining the evolution of the assessment
projectalso illustrate how central administrators, tenured faculty, graduate stu-
dents and untenured faculty all may at times participate consciously or uncon-
sciously in a politics that impacts the intellectual work of teaching, of curricular
development, and of administering writing programs.
Perhaps in the past, I myself may have been complicit in such a politics, as
it operates beyond writing programs and writing centers, in the dispositionper-
haps especially prevalent at large, research institutions like the one in which I
was trainedto view teaching (and teachers) reductively. It is in institutional
spaces where the research and teaching of writing occurs that the sting of this
disposition perhaps is felt particularly acutely.
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But while acknowledging the possibility of a shared complicity, I would ar-
gue at the same time, as Lisa Delpit has done in another context, that it is thosewith the most power . . . who must take the (most) responsibility for such insti-
tutional politics (46). And among the varied individuals with whom I interacted
in the contexts I describe here, those with the most power were tenured faculty
and faculty-administrators.
However frustrating the politics involved in each of these moments were,
these occasions nevertheless comprised extremely valuable (and unusual) oppor-
tunities to enrich my own professionalization and to consider the ways in which
intellectual work, especially in our field, is political work. I believe that these ex-
periences, like the experiences described by others in this Symposium, not only
made my own transition from graduate student to faculty member a more in-
formed and satisfying one, they also led me to think more systematically about
how in general graduate students are educated and about the variety and kinds of
experiences we all need in the course of our professionalization. For I would
suggest that experiences such as mine are in fact an often unacknowledged or
invisible part of all graduate students careers, even when those careers do not
involve administrative work. And I would suggest that such experiences, ap-
proached with a certain intentionality and reflectiveness, are capable of yielding
importanteven crucialprofessional and intellectual insights for those whose
careers will extend well into the twenty-first century.
The particular moment I want to examine a bit more closely came in the
midst of negotiations with tenured faculty-administrators in the English depart-
ment over the terms of the second major phase of ECBs research on the portfo-
lio assessment. What was most striking in the communications to which I was
privy and that were sent by these tenured department representatives, was how
categories of players with an interest in the writing program were not only
identified; these categories were invoked along a hierarchy that seemed to run in-
versely to the experience and expertise in the teaching and assessing of writing
possessed on average by individuals within them. In a sense, the result of this
rhetorical inversion was the enhancement of the professional subjectivities (indi-
vidually and collectively) of tenured faculty who rarely taught writing courses
and the diminishment of the professional subjectivities of untenured faculty and
graduate students who did the lions share of the teaching within the undergradu-
ate writing program.
Over and over again in these communications, tenured faculty were invoked
by other tenured faculty as the most importantparticipants in any definition of
standards for the colleges writing program, at the same time that it was ac-
knowledged that these faculty probably would be unpersuadable when it came
to devoting the kind of time necessary for defining such standards. One fac-
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ulty-administrators e-mail messages to the ECB assessment research group ar-
ticulated well this dilemma:
I am also very uneasy because a project involving a small number of
teachers from 124/125 (who, one assumes, would be mostly GSTAs,
the group invited to participate) would not lead to a definition of
standards for the department or for the college. . . . I am very much
concerned that faculty be involved in this process. It is, I believe, im-
portant that faculty from more than one unit work collaboratively to
define our priorities. . . . Im perfectly happy that ECB has people
with the energy and enthusiasm to promote this goal. My sense is
that ECB needs to remember that faculty in other units have a stake
in this. . . .
This faculty-administrators concerns were valid ones, of course, especially
her sense that tenured facultyparticularly in the English department (her home
department)would have a stake in how standards for assessing student writ-
ing were developed, for it was to the English department as well as to ECB that
other Michigan faculty looked as they judged their students writing abilities.
But for tenured faculty in English, the stake expressed in the context of commu-
nications sent to this group of nontenured teacher-researchers and me often
seemed to be of a more political than an intellectual or scholarly one. As this ad-
ministrator herself pointed out in a subsequent e-mail, the same faculty whom
she said must be involved may well be unpersuadable (with regard to participat-
ing in the research) given the number of hours (involved) and the strangeness of
the study model to (English) faculty.
Tenured faculty who very infrequently taught undergraduate writing courses
and who seemed to have little time for, and often little scholarly or intellectual in-
vestment in, the painstaking work of defining standards thus were represented by
administrators in communications like this one as having a substantial stake in
the outcome of the research program being proposed, but that stake was never spec-
ified. Was it, for instance, more of a stake than graduate student teachers had? A
different kind of stake? The answers to questions such as these were in fact com-
plex, but in the absence of explicit elaboration and within an institutional economy
where status was equated with intellectual and professional expertise, I would ar-
gue that what resulted from such a politics of subjectivity was the implication that
tenured faculty who infrequently (if ever) taught writing courses and who neveras-
sessed entrance portfolios simply knew more about how to define standards for
first-year writing within the college than did the individuals who actually were
teaching writing courses and assessing portfolios on a regular basis.
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This implicit message, which at Michigan was strengthened by the image of
tenured faculty as, for a variety of reasons, aloof and unpersuadable, itself hadmultiple implications. These included the fact that such a politics posited teach-
ing, and the teaching of writing, as lesser intellectual activities that were most
knowledgeably guided by those who did not regularly engage in them. Such a
politics also constituted a loss for graduate student teachers, especially for those
with much experience in composition, since it functioned at least rhetorically to
deny them professional authority (or at least functioned to diminish that author-
ity) at the very same time these teachers were given the greatest responsibility
by the college for the teaching of writing.
Such a simultaneous denial and investment of authority can produce cognitive
dissonance in writing programs, broadly, and in the individuals who inhabit them,
specifically. The participants in thisSymposiumdescribe various manifestations of
such dissonance, for example, as they explore the complicated effects of occupying
subject positions as both administrators and students. Duffey and her colleagues
describe the various fears that are part of their experience of the weird genre
of peer groups, a context within which they might exert too much authorityor
too little; as well as their experience of the various and changing expectations held
by the new TAs with whom they have worked. Similarly, Jukuri represents his con-
flicted experience as Assistant Director of GTA Education, in the context of which
his graduate student colleagues project onto him dual subjectivities, seeing him ei-
ther as an outsider/enforcer in their classrooms or as someone natural(ly)
capable of resolv(ing) and orchestrat(ing) solutions to their differences. And
Diller and Oates, in their representation contained within an earlier draft of the
tug-of-war between graduate-student teachers and core faculty, illustrate how
both sides may have attempted to invest their own position with authority while
divestingof authority the other, as writing teachers resorted to the frustrated belief
that their pedagogy was rhetorical while the core teachershumanistic approach . . .
was a-rhetorical, and as core teachers and LEAP students in turn perceived . . .
writing instructors as overcomplicating tasks.
All of these pieces raise compelling questions about the degree to which
authority is constructed as an all or nothing category within the institution;
about the advisability of assuming that graduate students anxieties about author-
ity are either entirely unique, or entirely natural or inevitable; about the ways in
which the culture of the institution and the process of professionalization them-
selves might be implicated in the prevalence of such fears and anxieties; and
about how this culture and this process might be implicated in the normalization
of a politics of subjectivity that questions the authority of teachers of writing and
that also makes difficult collaborative efforts between teachers with different
amounts of institutional power.
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Returning to my own experience helping to develop a large-scale portfolio
placement assessment, I observed how such a politics could function to de-professionalize (implicitly and explicitly) those who teach the majority of
first-year writing courses at Michigan, at a point in their careers when a sense
of professionalization was crucial. At the same time, I also observed how such
a politics failed to be accountable to traditional notions of validity and reliabil-
ity in writing assessment. Because teaching and assessing are interdependent
intellectual activities, in order to argue that what is being assessed is what is
pointed to as being assessed (validity) and in order to approach a level of fair-
ness or consistency in that assessment (reliability), those primarily doing the
teaching must be invested with the primary (professional) authority to define
standards for assessment. Indeed, Edward White has argued that a professional
is one who knows how to make significant distinctions, one who can rate per-
formance, one who can assess (31). An institutional politics that gives gradu-
ate students the primary responsibility for the teaching of writing but that at
the same time would invest faculty who rarely teach writing with the primary
authority to set standards for assessment denies the professionalism of teachers
of writing at the same time that it fails to maintain the integrity of (any kind
of) assessment.
Fortunately, at Michigan our negotiations yielded a solution: ECB con-
vened focus groups with tenured faculty from the English department to aug-
ment the research group meetings within which experienced graduate student
teachers and ECB faculty revised criteria for the entrance assessment. These
focus groups, however much they served a necessary political function and
were instrumental in jump-starting a long overdue dialogue between the two
units about expectations for writing, ended by tangibly contributing much less
to the development of criteria than did the discussions involving the group of
graduate student teachers. There were many reasons for this, which included
the fact that these focus groups invo