GenAdmin. Colin Charlton
Earth with the other elves, that she is forsaking her immortality to be with him, and she says, “I choose a mortal life.” Though our choices have been much less life altering and romantic, they have changed our paths in perhaps subtler, yet still significant ways, and they have led us to commit to think together about what it means to be a WPA and do WPA work. Our choices have led us here, to this moment, to this book, to these types of lives.
Tarez: I think our GenAdmin orientation bears a certain kind of responsibility—more specifically, the responsibility to look at whether and how our discipline has actually made writing program administration viable and feasible and fair in the institutional contexts in which we work. Like Kate, my own experiences before, during, and after graduate school tell me that we have not yet penetrated these institutional contexts sufficiently enough, ideologically enough, to make WPA work equitable everywhere. While visibility is important, making WPA work more visible isn’t necessarily a panacea if there is no way to valuate the work. This is really nothing new, and in a way I merely echo how Andrea Lunsford has been challenging and encouraging rhetoric and composition (as a field) to look carefully at its positioning, to ask itself critically whether its gains represent the best kinds of progress— i.e., field status and recognition, collective vision, intellectual growth, and material support for writing programs—each time she is invited to speak at a national conference.
Colin: While preparing our first full manuscript for the book, I took on another administrative position. Because of shifts above me in positions, I was asked to take over the vice provost’s responsibilities for university-wide program review, in part because of my work as chair of the program review committee at my university for two years. I was untenured and, of course, nervous about meeting with the new president to discuss this opportunity. But I never thought about not doing it, or how much time, energy, and expertise it would take. At some point in the meeting, he said that he expected the job to take 25%—and only 25%—of my time, and he would be fair in determining how that would affect my other responsibilities. I couldn’t quite wrap my brain around the idea that this translated into two course releases (since course releases were being snatched back at a record pace), or that this would take away from my teaching or my writing and research projects. I write and teach and learn in almost every aspect of my work at a university. The distinctions between the types of work we do are, in the end, obstacles to invention, to making choices possible.
Tarez: I don’t think it hurts us to consider whether we are enacting and promoting choice in the best possible way for the current health and future growth of writing program administration and of GenAdmin. For example, if our efforts to ensure compensation and an authoritative voice for the untenured WPA inadvertently create the expectation that a lower tier of WPA-laborers should not have access to these things (because they carry lesser roles), then we have not persuaded our departments or institutions of the long-term viability, reputability, and complexity of the work, or done our part to prove that it takes on many forms, and in all forms is difficult. If our need to relinquish ourselves from harmful “protective” measures keeping untenured faculty from playing the WPA role inadvertently cuts off other WPA-laborers from this protection when they do need it, then we have not increased our market value on campus. Instead, we may still be offering ourselves as too cheap a solution to the symptomatic problem that most university structures still lack an ideological space for valuating any kind of administrative work as substantive, intellectual, commensurate. We may be inadvertently making promises to ourselves and to other junior faculty that the work we do, if quantifiable and justifiable, will be enough to not only get us tenure but also to cause our colleagues to embrace us as intellectual partners, when in fact the more zealously we do the work, the less they tend to embrace us.
I don’t think I am arguing that we should not do the work or should not choose to do it (mainly because I do the work and choose to do it well), but that we realize the opportunity for GenAdmin not only to complicate choice as a generational identifier, but also to heighten and deepen our understanding of all the players in our activity system whose lives and theoretical orientations are affected by our choices. We need to know what they need “choosing” to be. If we can pull it off, this interlude (and the larger book project it serves) may well represent a way of doing institutional critique—a way of pushing for greater ideological disruption. If GenAdmin does not do this, then who will? If GenAdmin cannot help position WPAs in alternative relationships than simply junior/senior, inside/outside, privileged/underprivileged, spoken for/spoken through, then what can?
2 Listening to and Rewriting History
When our present vocabularies prove inadequate for describing the world, a new vocabulary is necessary . . . [and] is the result of conscious questioning of the existing order. . . . [This] new vocabulary allows for different modes of expression than current language allows.
—Valerie Renegar and Stacey K. Sowards
As our experiences in the composition classroom have taught us, the problem of audience is a common one for those entering into an academic discourse community with well-established norms, patterns, and rules. The discourse patterns employed when writing about writing program administrator identity are fairly well illustrated by the titles of volumes that explore these issues, like Kitchen Cooks, Plate Twirlers and Troubadours; The Promise and Perils of Writing Program Administration; or Untenured Faculty as Writing Program Administrators. When we review these narratives and think of our own, the five of us imagine that if we could only find a metaphor to illustrate our experiences, we would have a way of talking about the work that reflects our lived experiences. If we could place ourselves on a continuum between two descriptive poles, either promising or perilous, we would have a foundation for our WPA identities. If we could define ourselves by rank alone, we would know how to place ourselves within the conversation. But because we think of our work—and ourselves as we do the work—more fluidly, there doesn’t seem to be much space for our stories in the narrative patterns established by the field; our stories do not fit the existing narrative patterns. And we expect we’re not alone in this thinking.
The work of this chapter, then, is to position GenAdmin within a context of history and inheritance, to attempt to carve a new narrative space for WPAs whose lives and work cannot be expressed easily in old metaphors, along binary continuums, or by the identification of rank. We seek a new vocabulary with which to discuss WPA work, its historical roots, and its potential to accommodate a wider range of views and experiences. We find agency in our historical positioning, which necessarily includes understanding how certain ideas have been taken up from past histories, reclaiming other ideas that have been neglected or left behind, and acknowledging the narratives we have inherited. We expose and come to terms with our own frustration at being viewed as naive or unprepared in understanding the kairotic moments that inspired past histories and stories. Most importantly, we offer a new way of imagining a history both collective and diverse in order to shed the notion that WPAs are victims and to create a new space for thinking about administration as capable of creating new conditions.
WPA Narratives as Situated Histories
Telling stories is a way of “doing history” (Lerner 199), and this narrative historicization becomes a useful site for the co-construction of WPA identities (Campbell, “Agency”; Howard, “Reflexivity”). Because they help establish norms and values that shape individuals’ behavior and thinking within a community, narratives develop a shared history that functions as a touchstone for later generations as they negotiate their present and imagine their future. This imagining, in turn, gives individuals the opportunity to claim ownership over their own lives and experiences and empowers the community to exercise control over its own self-perception. In the ways that narratives “give messages and instructions; they offer blueprints and ideals; they issue warnings and prohibitions” (Stone 5), they offer powerful representations that legitimize certain ways of being in the world that shape who we were, who we are, and who we are becoming.
Storytelling has become an integral component of WPA professional life and identity, as conventional a part of scholarship as citing sources or participating on the WPA-L listserv. At the 2008 WPA Conference, Amy listened to the ways that presenters used storytelling to frame their public discourse about WPA work. Out of the eighteen speakers she attended (including four panels of three presenters each,