Administrative Work

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Future Perfect: Administrative Work and the Professionalization of

Graduate Students
Richard 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, Margaret
K. , 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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SYMPOSIUM R
R
Future Perfect: Administrative Work and the

Professionalization of Graduate Students
Downloaded By: [University of North Carolina Greensboro] At: 01:35 6 January 2011
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 worried—or, frequently, know very little—about 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 Utah’s 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, 40–87

40 Copyright © 2002, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
Future Perfect 41
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 Mountford—who does writing program administrative
work along with her other faculty responsibilities—contextualizes 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 professionals—knowledge 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 thank RR 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 Mountford
University 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 exercise
of power or to own our own power, such as we have.
——Louise Wetherbee Phelps
42 Rhetoric Review
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 authors—all graduate students or academic professionals

involved in WPA work—agree 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; but
as 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 WPA’s 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. I’m 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 students—an athletic-looking person. I remember his question:
Future Perfect 43
“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 didn’t 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 complaints—and the complaints of
those who are now graduate students—are ill placed. On the contrary, that the
work of a GTA is work—not a kind of apprenticeship for which universities can
award poverty-level wages—has been underscored by the efforts of graduate stu-
dents to unionize nationwide. Many of us agree with Michael Bérubé 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
44 Rhetoric Review
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 with
them 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, I’d
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 haven’t had a chance to
meet. I’m 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 I’ve had a look at the exams, I’m surprised that we’re 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 can’t open any more sections. I’m just calling to
make sure that you don’t 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 couldn’t you reread
the exams, and just set the anchors lower?
Me: You want us to rescore the exams.
He: Well, it’s not my place to tell you how to do it, but we can’t have more
than five sections, and I’m sure you don’t want to see the ceiling raised on
course enrollments.
Future Perfect 45
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 book
Gypsy 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 do—teach 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
which—with the exception of unionization—require 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 composition—with 25 students in each section—while maintaining a full-
time class load. Bérubé 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” (37–38). 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
46 Rhetoric Review
taught. Graduate student admissions offer one way to meet these demands. Yet
most agree—especially in the case of literary studies—that there is a serious
oversupply of PhDs for the number of positions available. Bérubé 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, Bérubé 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 Schell—namely, 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
Future Perfect 47
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 to
expose 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 table—ex-
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 dean’s misrepresentation of the will of my college’s faculty.
While my Chair was overjoyed that the writing program was spared, the
rumors of the dean’s 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 Trimbur’s 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
48 Rhetoric Review
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 most
reveled 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-
pared to 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 WPA’s 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 one’s 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 Eric’s desk was a sign that read,
“Teaching is Performance.” Our curriculum didn’t 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 O’Hare’s 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
Future Perfect 49
several others, including a year with the Center for Teaching Excellence, where I
worked on research on college teaching, led workshops for faculty on active
learning, 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 smaller—a mi-
cro-WPA job compared to his. I could use the force of my personality and my
intellectual knowledge to navigate this difficult—but seemingly more manage-
able—terrain. But I was naive.
The dominant theme in the essays in this Symposium—including 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 Turnley’s 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 facilitator’s 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
50 Rhetoric Review
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
Future Perfect 51
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. Traub’s 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 Eric’s name, I am not merely
seeking a sentimental ending to this essay (although invoking the dead is admit-
52 Rhetoric Review
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) (91–117).
3Adopted in 1992, the Council’s “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
Bérubé, 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: 47–63.
———. “Overpay/Underwork: Labor and Status of Composition Teachers since 1880.” Rhetoric Re-
view 9 (Fall 1990): 108–25.
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: 64–74.
———. “A Personal Essay on Freshman Composition.” PRETEXT: A Journal of Rhetorical Theory
12 (Fall/Winter 1991): 155–76.
Future Perfect 53
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): 75–92.
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): 88–94.
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. <http://lists.asu.edu/
archives/wpa-l.html>
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 has
published 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 Wisconsin–Eau 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 students’ ex-
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-
54 Rhetoric Review
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 upon our assignment to design writing curriculum 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 University’s
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-
es—classes 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
Future Perfect 55
struggle for authority between graduate student teachers of writing and tenured
faculty who assign writing in their courses but do not necessarily value or
teach 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-
ing—an impulse we explain as a strategy for dealing with institutional power
differences—cannot 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, 1994–1997

Our role as UWP instructors in the first year of LEAP’s existence (1994–95)
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 teachers—a 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-
versity’s 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 1994–95 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-
56 Rhetoric Review
Table 1: Three Years of Collaborative Relations between the Core Class and the UWP
Fall Winter Spring
1994–95 Core class: Core Class: Asian Core Class: Rise of 15 credit hours
Autobiography & Cultures & Science &
UWP Instruction UWP Instruction UWP Instruction 4 credit hours
1995–96 Core class: US Core Class: Asian Core Class: Rise of 15 credit hours
Autobiography Cultures & Science &
UWP Instruction UWP Instruction 2 credit hours
UWP “Stand-alone” 2 credit hours

1996–97 Core Class: US Core Class: Asian Core Class: Rise of 15 credit hours
Autobiography Cultures Science
UWP Instruction: 4 credit hours

Academic
Discourse
maining two quarters where LEAP students earned the final two hours of their
four-credit requirement. By 1996–97 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 writing
course 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 LEAP’s umbrella theme: rights and responsibilities. In contrast, UWP
Future Perfect 57
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 discourse—that 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
58 Rhetoric Review
LEAP should be the teaching of writing. Accordingly, writing instructors were

asked to make a capstone presentation for the group about how writing could
best be integrated into LEAP. Our proposal for writing in LEAP emphasized the
core principles of the UWP: that writing is predicated upon the discourse con-
ventions of different social and academic communities and that to write criti-
cally and successfully, students must grasp the critical commonplaces that un-
derpin disciplinary content and arguments.
During the colloquia, however, we were repeatedly challenged. When, fac-

ulty asked, would LEAP students be taught what they “needed”? such as how to
make a complete sentence, how to punctuate, how to write a thesis statement,
and how to document a researched argument paper. One faculty member sug-
gested our time would be better spent if we ran a series of “clinics” that focused
on errors in student writing. Another faculty person proposed that we prepare a
common sheet of correction and editing symbols so that their teaching assistants
could correct student papers consistently. As these anecdotes suggest, our pro-
posal made little headway against an entrenched view that writing instruction is
essentially remedial and grounded upon formalist, mechanical, and transferable
criteria for grammar, genre, and content retrieval.
The views of the core teachers were thus indicative of a widespread view
about writing in the university that directly contradicted the philosophy of the
UWP and the training its graduate students received. Core teachers, to their
credit, were aware of the potential for marginalizing UWP instructors in their
classrooms and worked to create more time for us to present assignments, lead
writing workshops, and conference with students. They even incorporated our
lexicon of rhetoric into classroom discussion and into some of their daily activi-
ties and assignments. Nevertheless, voicing language about rhetoric did not by
itself lead to a significant shift in the prevailing pedagogies of the core class-
room because writing faculty were unable to bring the core teachers to the bar-
gaining table, so to speak. At the beginning of the second year, for example,
Scott began to explain at a weekly meeting with the core teachers that there were
significant differences between the pedagogies of the core and writing teachers
and that until these differences were openly discussed, students would continue
to experience contradiction and confusion around the writing assignments. How-
ever, his invitation to discuss was firmly silenced with a rap on the table from
one of the core teachers and the accusatory question: “Why do you have to insist
on talking about differences? There are no differences.” In the absence of outside
intervention from the UWP and without the possibility of real compromise with
core faculty, writing instructors were effectively relegated to the sidelines of the
core class and were perceived by students as ancillary to the core faculty who, fi-
nally, were their primary teachers and graders.
Future Perfect 59
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 credentials—not to men-
tion the vote of confidence from our mentors and advisors in the UWP—gave 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 because—symbolically, yet quite practi-
cally and powerfully—we had been incorporated within the institutional um-
brella of LEAP and its liberal education mission. In this felt disjuncture, our ex-
periences confirm Jukuri’s 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 LEAP—both in and outside of the
core classroom—as 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 students
vulnerable 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 and reading 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
60 Rhetoric Review
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-
ment’s 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. 773–74.
Bean, John C. Engaging Ideas: The Professor’s 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): 151–67.
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): 392–409.
Future Perfect 61
Christopher Diller was a PhD student in the American studies program at the University of
Utah from 1991–1999. 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 Wisconsin–Eau Claire
where he directs the department’s 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
book Fragments 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 Symposium—originating 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
62 Rhetoric Review
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 Michigan’s English Composition Board and worked with faculty
from ECB (and from the Institute for Social Research) on developing and evalu-
ating Michigan’s 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 politics—and 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-
sity’s 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-
Future Perfect 63
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 work—that is, the teaching of writing—but
functions as well to reduce the complexity of the subjectivities of teachers and
students of writing. Such a politics is illustrated by Diller’s and Oates’s 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 moments—occurring
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
project—also 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 disposition—per-
haps especially prevalent at large, research institutions like the one in which I
was trained—to 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.
64 Rhetoric Review
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 “those
with 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
important—even crucial—professional 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 ECB’s 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 lion’s 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 important participants in any definition of
“standards” for the college’s 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-
Future Perfect 65
ulty-administrator’s 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. . . . I’m 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-administrator’s concerns were valid ones, of course, especially

her sense that tenured faculty—particularly 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 never as-
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.
66 Rhetoric Review
This implicit message, which at Michigan was strengthened by the image of

tenured faculty as, for a variety of reasons, aloof and “unpersuadable,” itself had
multiple 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 this Symposium describe 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 authority”—or
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
divesting of authority the other, as “writing teachers resorted to the frustrated belief
that their pedagogy was rhetorical while the core teachers’ humanistic 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.
Future Perfect 67
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 involved fewer participants, and fewer and
much shorter meetings, than the graduate student group; but one key reason
may have lain in the differences in investment—and in practical knowl-
edge—between the two groups of teachers. This phase of our project thus
ended, despite the apparent desire of faculty-administrators that tenured faculty
comprise the central players in determining its outcome, with criteria for as-
sessment being formulated by those who most often engage in the teaching of
undergraduate writing courses in the college.
Keeping this example in mind, along with the others offered in this Sym-
posium, I would suggest that the professionalization of the next generation of
scholar-teachers should explicitly encourage them to see their own subjec-
tivities not only as delimited by the institutional forces that surround them but
68 Rhetoric Review
also as agents for institutional change. Such a view could be encouraged, I be-
lieve, even in the absence of opportunities to work on the kind of project I de-
scribe here, a project that made quite visible for me the various webs of insti-
tutional politics at Michigan within which the intellectual work of the teaching
and assessing of writing are caught up. This kind of political self-awareness
might be encouraged by formal opportunities in the graduate curriculum—oc-
curring within the context of graduate seminars, TA training workshops and
preliminary exams, for example—for all graduate students to reflect, in rigor-

ous ways, on the politics of subjectivity that shapes their own professional ex-
periences; on their own complex and ever-changing positions as students,
teachers, and scholars; and on the myriad ways in which the intellectual work
they pursue in their teaching and scholarship both shape and are shaped by
these changing subjectivities.
Such guided opportunities for reflection could be constructed, keeping in
mind the specific needs of individual graduate programs, of individual students,
and of the particular writing (and literature) programs within which these gradu-
ate students teach and/or take on administrative work. The popularity among
graduate students of organizations like graduate employee unions, I believe,
speaks not only to the economic conditions of graduate life but also to the dissat-
isfaction among students about the degree to which their programs help them to
think through such institutional politics and the implications of these politics for
their professional lives.
Such formal opportunities would not only help to improve the quality of
teaching and of learning; opportunities for graduate students to theorize the po-
liticized nature of their positions within the institution would help serve the aims
of scholarship as well, providing emerging scholars with occasions for the kind
of epistemic reflexivity that Pierre Bourdieu argues for in support of the pursuit
of disciplinary knowledge. Such reflexivity, which Bourdieu insists helps us to
scrutinize the “collective . . . unconscious embedded in (the) theories, problems,
and . . . categories of scholarly judgment” (40) that shape our intellectual work,
would also help us to examine “the epistemological unconscious” of our own
learning and professionalization, helping us to reconcile the split between theory
and practice; helping us to see scholarly inquiry, service, and teaching as inter-
dependent and mutually supportive enterprises (41).
I would argue that administrative experience readily makes visible the very
immediate ways in which all institutional work—not only administrative but also
scholarly work—is political in nature, shaping and being shaped by larger institu-
tional forces. The politics of subjectivity that is revealed to graduate students
through opportunities to do administrative work—revealed not only through their
varied and shifting relationships with faculty and administrators, but also through
Future Perfect 69
their shifting relationships with their peers and with their students—can be crucial
information to them in their professionalization, and can be crucial as well to their
growth as scholars because of the ways in which it can make visible the powerful
influence of institutional forces on the shaping of the forms and even outcomes of
intellectual work.
In tracing postmodernity’s impact on composition’s conceptualizations of
individual students and their subjectivities, Faigley argues that “postmodern
theory understands subjectivity as heterogeneous and constantly in flux” (227).

I would argue that the kinds of relationships—with deans, tenured and un-
tenured faculty, department heads and educational consultants, peers and stu-
dents—that come with doing administrative work help graduate students see
the heterogeneity and contingency of their own (professional) subjectivities.
Prompted to reflect on their own complicated subjectivities—as students, as
teachers, as professionals and as novices—and on how those subjectivities are
both delimited by and complicit in relations of power, finally both serves the
pursuit of disciplinary knowledge and encourages a sense of authority in grad-
uate students who will find their future careers no less complicated than their
present positions.
Such reflection also might help new faculty in the coming years meet the
kinds of challenges facing higher education sketched out by Patricia Bizzell, in-
cluding increasing their readiness to “help (undergraduate) students from a cul-
turally diverse and far from classless society enter the academic discourse com-
munity” (220), without also requiring these undergraduates to sacrifice a sense
of the heterogeneity and contingency of their own subject positions. Socializing
the next generation of faculty to be reflective about the ways in which subjectiv-
ity is both politicized and ever changing, might thus have benefits beyond the ca-
reer growth of these new professionals; optimally, it would help enhance as well
the future of higher education, and the educational experiences of the students
we all serve.
Works Cited
Bizzell, Patricia. Academic Discourse and Critical Consciousness. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P,
1992.
Bourdieu, Pierre, and Loic J. D. Wacquant. An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Chicago: U of Chi-
cago P, 1992.
Delpit, Lisa. Other People’s Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom. New York: New P, 1995.
Faigley, Lester. Fragments of Rationality: Postmodernity and the Subject of Composition. Pittsburgh:
U of Pittsburgh P, 1992.
White, Edward. “Portfolios as an Assessment Concept.” New Directions in Portfolio Assessment: Re-
flective Practice, Critical Theory, and Large-Scale Scoring. Portsmouth: Boynton/Cook, 1994.
25–39.
70 Rhetoric Review
Margaret Willard-Traub is Assistant Professor of Rhetoric at Oakland University. She teaches

undergraduate and graduate courses in writing and composition studies, and has published in the
journal Assessing Writing. She is a contributor to the forthcoming volumes Personal Effects: The
Social Character of Scholarly Writing (Utah State, 2001), (Re) Presenting Our Practice: Docu-
menting Teaching and Learning in Composition Studies (Heinemann/Boynton Cook, 2001), and La-
bor, Writing Technologies, and the Shaping of Composition in the Academy. She is currently at work
on a book project that brings together her interests in writing assessment and scholarly memoir, ex-
amining the practice and consequences of reflective writing by students and scholars across the
disciplines.
Stephen D. Jukuri
Michigan Technological University
Private Classrooms Made Public: Writing Program

Administration and the Development of a Community of
Scholar-Teacher Colleagues
“Is an e-mail list a community?”

That question divided the class of students in a first-year composition
course I taught several years ago. Some argued that e-mail lists were clearly
communities, for they are groups of people who come together to share knowl-
edge, help one another, and discuss common interests and concerns. And, other
students added, if a contributor to a list said something that did not fit well with
the “community,” that person would then be “flamed” and either stifled or driven
off the list, just as people are often hushed, ostracized, or driven out of their liv-
ing communities for various reasons. Significant differences are not generally
tolerated in a community, they said, but it is a community just the same.
Other students argued that a list is not a community, for reasons that I will
explain as I draw my conclusions. But for now, I must say that when I consider
what we often call the “academic community,” I am as divided as my students.
Although the administrative experience I will narrate here tells me that the above
definition of community is not necessarily the case, I do see much validity in it.
When I read, for example, the piece in this Symposium by Diller and Oates, I
read it as yet another case in which members of an “academic community” have
great potential to learn and share and support one another but instead discover
that incongruent pedagogies, professional values, and institutional power imbal-
Future Perfect 71
ances ultimately pull them apart. The history of how their LEAP program at-
tempted to bring together “content” and “writing” pedagogies, only to have the
writing instructors completely withdraw themselves after three years of degener-
ating negotiation, demonstrates a pattern that I have witnessed many times as a
student, teacher, and assistant administrator: When faced with seemingly ir-
reconcilable differences, administrators, entire programs, and, especially, indi-
vidual teachers often end up defining their classrooms and pedagogies as private
spaces, under their own control and separate from what “others” do.
Counteracting the disintegration of “community” is not easy in our field.
We all have our own idea of what it means to teach writing, what we value in
students’ work, and even what it means to teach and learn in general. But when
teachers drop those debates and discussions, and/or drive one another out of
them, they do not usually pack up and leave the academic community, much less
transfer to a position at another school of like-minded individuals. Instead, I
have learned, they often invest their differences into their classrooms, defining
them as their own private spaces and fiercely guarding their right to shape those
spaces according to their own beliefs. Their motives, I believe, are almost always
good: Teachers want to act responsibly and achieve what they believe is best for
their students. And even if they must suspend all of what we find to be valuable
about “community” to achieve it, they will nevertheless do so in order to protect
themselves and their students.
And, there are many reasons why such actions do not feel incongruous
within academics. Even within departments and programs of people with similar
professional interests, the culture of intellectual inquiry foregrounds conflict and
often rewards, albeit for good reason, intellectual independence, critique, and an
iconoclastic stance even toward those with whom one might have the most in
common. Furthermore, the hierarchies and imbalances of power between those
who teach and those who administer those who teach, like the conflicts dis-
cussed by Traub in this Symposium, easily lead to “subversive” acts whereby
teachers exercise all the autonomy they can when working “unsupervised” in
their own classrooms. And then, when we add in the fact that the work of writ-
ing programs focuses so much on language and the issues concerning all of the
social and political differences that naturally surround such studies, the potential
for collegial relations, trust, and mutual respect become more and more difficult
to fulfill.
And so it is that the academic community frequently looks and feels a lot
like an e-mail list “community”: jolly fun and collegial when you are all in
agreement, and unpleasant, coercive, and fractious when you are not. Both of
these supposedly “nice” communities seem poised, at all times, to break down
into a lot of nastiness. Yet I remain divided in my assessment of academics be-
72 Rhetoric Review
cause the experience I will describe here does indicate that more positive alter-
natives are possible and viable. Yes, on the one hand, it is true that I have seen
the tendency toward “privatization” in full effect with GTAs at Michigan Tech-
nological University, while serving under Diana George as the Assistant Direc-
tor of GTA Education. As past occupants of that position had warned me, it
was clear from the start that many of the continuing GTAs, particularly those
who began teaching without a structured training program, were uncomfortable
sharing their classrooms with me. I felt positioned as an outsider, assumed to

be incapable of understanding their own particular pedagogy and/or likely to
force them to change if I should discover that our approach to teaching dif-
fered. It was disheartening, and like Diller and Oates’s cautionary tale, it
forced me to face reality about how difficult it is for individuals to collaborate
as a community of scholar-teachers united within a shared program. But, as I
will explain, I have also seen that one can, indeed, learn to work against those
tendencies.
Throughout my year in program administration, I assisted Diana George
with implementing a new “Portfolio Response System” for 12 incoming GTAs. I
will describe the process in detail, but want to mention first that overall, this sys-
tem was unlike portfolio systems that function mainly for evaluation and pro-
gram consistency. Instead, it was designed by Diana to take many aspects of the
new GTAs’ teaching out of the private realms of their classrooms and bring them
into constant negotiation with one another (and with us as well). Structurally, it
was an experiment in how to push for collegiality and collaboration and at the
same time reduce the hierarchical pressure GTAs might otherwise feel to follow
(or subvert) our directives. By making GTAs interdependent in their teaching,
they would be positioned to continually shift and adapt their teaching activities
in relationship to one another, making choices and changes based on what they
saw in others’ teaching as well as what they saw in their own (and what they saw
of their own was often, very importantly, not simply their own view but a multi-
tude of perspectives reflected back to them from the others).
In this system new GTAs still designed and implemented their own syllabi,
assignments, and daily class plans; however, they were required to collect essay
drafts on the same dates throughout the term. On those dates we would all meet
and distribute the essay drafts across the entire group, including Diana and me.
Nobody would receive drafts from their own classes, and we would all receive
the same number of drafts, being sure that all other GTAs were represented in
each person’s allotment. We would study the various essay assignments, read the
drafts that resulted from them, and provide written responses to the students ac-
cordingly (as well as, at times, preliminary grades). Students would then revise
their work in response to these “outside readings,” assisted by their teachers who
Future Perfect 73
would read (and sometimes add to) the responses and adjust some of their class-
room pedagogy to match the most common areas of concern that the responses
identified. Sometimes the instructors would collect and respond to their students’
subsequent revisions, or they might conference with their students before or after
such revisions were made.
Students were expected to include these drafts, responses, and revisions
with their final portfolios, which were then given a reading, response, and grade
by two random members of our group, during which special attention was given
to how students had worked on revision in response to their readers’ comments
throughout the term. Grade disputes were negotiated by the two readers, or if
necessary (rarely) resolved by Diana or me. Instructors were free to assign final
course grades that were within one-half a grade level, above or below, that which
had been assigned to each portfolio.
The system was not always easy for ourselves or GTAs, for it forced a lot of
discussion about our differences in what we value at different stages of students’
writing, it required constant interpretation and revision of the program’s goals
and evaluation criteria, and it relied upon a continual, public presentation of
one’s own teaching and the work produced by one’s own students. It is not easy,
as Duffy et al. explain in this Symposium, to avoid what they describe as the
all-or-nothing situation of either forcing everyone to do everything exactly the
same or letting the program drift off into pedagogical relativism as individuals
do their very own thing. The tendency they describe is very much that which
Foucault describes in his essay “The Discourse on Language”: the shifting of
human relations between the forces of institution (highly defined and increas-
ingly oppressive structure) and inclination (the urge of individuals to break out
and go their own way without support or a clear sense of direction). And the key
to moderating our fluctuations between those two extreme tendencies, I believe,
can be found in structures like ours that try to balance those two forces, allowing
for freedom within the continual shifting of power relations somewhere between
structure and nonstructure. In other words, if we structure a program too tightly,
individuals will do anything and everything to break out of it and define their
own, individual territories and subvert our efforts to recapture them, as they
probably should. If we design something too loose, they will go off on their
own, patch together some kind of isolated structure for themselves, and then—as
one could only expect—protect that structure fiercely. I, too, would protect what
I had worked hard to create, especially if some administrator decided that the
only way to gain control and consistency in a slipshod program is by forcing
changes in my carefully constructed classroom. And so, as I have learned, one
trick to fostering a “community” of academic scholar-teachers is to slowly but
surely implement a strong but flexible structure, and in the meantime—and per-
74 Rhetoric Review
haps more importantly—not overreact to imbalances in “institution” or “inclina-

tion” by heaping on its opposite. Or, as was our privilege, start the new folks off
with a carefully planned structure that attempts to balance out those forces from
the start.
As Duffy et al. argue, a structured collaboration like theirs, which I find
similar to ours, helps to keep the focus on learning and yet still preserves the
GTAs’ authority as they make their own decisions. From my own participation in
our program, I believe that Diane, I, and all the GTAs were together positioned
to learn a great deal about how students struggled with a range of different writ-
ing assignments. All of the GTAs learned a great deal more by working together
than they would have learned by working in isolation. They not only got to prac-
tice making their own responses to student writing, but they also got to experi-
ence and review a variety of reader responses to their own students’ writing, and
to watch how each of their students revised and reacted to such a wide range of
feedback. And when it came to reviewing and grading final portfolios, GTAs
were able to see, more clearly than if they were limited to evaluating just their
own students, how the students in other classes responded in writing to the
reader responses they had provided. And yet, as teachers, they were still able to
play off of the ways in which grades motivate students, but at the same time they
were free not to evaluate their own students and could concentrate, instead, on
tailoring their pedagogy to specific stages of the course and teaching their stu-
dents rhetorical skills and strategies for revising and responding to other readers.
GTAs still had plenty of boundaries and checks and balances on their ac-
tions, including those that they placed upon each other, and they were never en-
tirely happy about them. But they also stood to understand that those limitations
were not so much a result of “dictatorship” on our part but were instead a natural
consequence of the fact that the rest of the community was concerned about their
students and their teaching work, as well as the fact that they had become, like-
wise, responsible to and dependent upon the pedagogy of the others. Their
boundaries were defined, in a sense, by the mutual responsibilities that they held
toward one another and all students, and the entire group’s success depended
upon everyone’s continual improvement in their pedagogy. Diana reminded us,
frequently, that the students were truly “all of ours”: Much in the same way it
takes a whole village to raise children, it takes an entire program’s cooperation
to effectively teach writing to a class of students.
And on a programmatic level, this system of partial, continually revised
structure also provided a kind of negotiated “norming” without the oppressive-
ness that people fear when working with an imposed normative evaluation.
When differences first appeared—complaints about other GTAs’ responses, con-
fusion over incomprehensible assignments, disputes over grades and interpreta-
Future Perfect 75
tions of course goals, and very intensely different views over what should be
taught in a writing course and how a teacher should go about doing it—the most
natural reaction of GTAs was to look for and invoke a dominant hierarchy: They
came to Diana and me to resolve and orchestrate solutions. But Diana quickly
realized that we had to send them back to the group to try to work out those
problems among themselves. And as it turns out, I learned that turning GTAs
back to their academic “community,” rather than invoking our institutional au-
thority to “protect” their students from “others,” was a very important step to-
ward moving GTAs out of their “private” classrooms. It brought into existence a
somewhat more social space in which they had to “live together” as teachers, in
a shared program, in collegial (but not always smooth and easy) relationships
that were continually being renegotiated across difficult differences.
In other words, GTAs could not simply drop out of the program and the dis-
cussion by enclosing themselves within a private classroom space. Instead, they
were positioned to develop a more constructive community, one that inextricably
included everyone who was part of the new GTA program. Their differences—
even intense ones—become more publicly debated and negotiated, with work-
able solutions continually developed and revised simply because the people in-
volved were structured with no choice but to go on living (teaching) together.
And to minimize our desire to simply mandate GTAs to change their pedagogy
to accord with our own, we had positioned ourselves somewhat like Duffy et al.
had done with their teaching groups: We structurally held back our authority in
key places in order to see, and rely upon, the teachers’ own abilities to observe
and assess the effectiveness of a wide range of pedagogies. Thus we helped to
preserve their authority and their capacity to exercise a great deal of freedom in
how they made changes in their own work, in ways that would make sense to
them. At the very least, I like to think that we made progress toward overcoming
one significant limitation of the more traditional apprenticeship model of GTA
education that Long, Holberg, and Taylor describe:
. . . because the apprentice model typically operates under the di-

rection of one ‘master’ administrator, teaching assistants learn to ac-
cept one set of assumptions and one image of teaching composition,
rather than to reflect and develop teaching strategies and pedagogies
in conjunction with a larger community. (71)
It is true, in many ways, that this experience of a collaborative, shared, and

negotiated system of portfolio response serves merely to provide one more ex-
ample of the productive ways in which portfolios can be employed in our peda-
gogies. Articles by Susan Harrison and coauthors Liz Hamp-Lyons and William
76 Rhetoric Review
Condon are perhaps better elaborations of such systems, for they discuss the tre-
mendous surge in community and collaboration that can follow from the intro-
duction of portfolios. And both works refer to the efforts of Pat Belanoff and Pe-
ter Elbow, and many others who have laid groundwork for the same conclusions.
But it is also true that some aspects of our system have not been so widely dis-
cussed by others, including the fact that the system served the purpose of GTA
training more than it did the more common purposes of providing students and
programs with a more meaningful and consistent evaluation. And within the
realm of pedagogical considerations, I believe that it is worth noting that in our
program the sharing of student writing happened consistently throughout the
term rather than at the very end (or for evaluation only) and that continual re-
sponse from outside readers helped reinforce for students that writing well is a
continual act of negotiation between themselves and an audience of readers
who, in turn, are continually negotiating and communicating to them the criteria
for evaluation.
And yet what I find most important, when I step back a little further from
the experience, is the same thing that spoke to me across the class divide in that
old discussion of e-mail lists as communities. On the other side of the class-
room, students did not feel that such lists were “true” communities because of
the very fact that people often do, at the first sign of differences and tension,
simply pack up and leave. Real communities, those students said, stick together
through difficult times, even times of internal differences. Unlike real communi-
ties, e-mail lists have no routine and continual “contact points” structured into
them to keep people in negotiation with one another when things get uncomfort-
able. They have no structure to assure that individuals will maintain relation-
ships long enough to see how different approaches can still converge to achieve
shared goals. And they have no hierarchy with enough authority to nudge mem-
bers to seriously consider and learn from one another across seemingly irrecon-
cilable divides. Instead, participants simply seek out confirmation of what they
already believe and go off to wherever they might find it. It appears that just as
our democratic nation requires a hierarchical structure and authority, based on
the constitution, to keep people in some kind of common process of interaction,
any well-functioning subcommunity requires a structure as well, maintained by
some hierarchy of authority, to keep members of the community in balance and
assure some measure of both freedom and responsibility for all, and to all.
I think that most of us know, of course, the futility of debating true and intrinsic
definitions for social phenomena like community. One group of students, we might
say, were realists: They recognized community in the world of e-mail because
those lists operated in ways that are just as pleasing, and just as coercive, as their
own communities. The other group, perhaps more optimistic, was holding out for
Future Perfect 77
the ideal picture of community, one in which people wouldn’t drop out so easily,
presumably because they would be able to productively deal with continual con-
flict and fully participate in shaping their lives together. All groups are real com-
munities, but in the spirit of Michel Foucault, I would simply point out that what we
really need to care about is not what any community is, but rather how each and ev-
ery community of ours functions. And the key to understanding function is in ex-
amining the particular way that human relations are structured.
Thus it is that the structure that Diana implemented required that we take on
some of the real challenges of maintaining a healthy and somewhat self-balanc-
ing community: that is, using hierarchy to create a more democratic and shared
system that would support equality; negotiating through good faith rather than
through force, intimidation, or hierarchy alone; and developing a structure that
included ourselves in much—but not quite completely—the same position as
those we supervised, a perspective from which we, also, stood to learn and
change and negotiate our own pedagogies and our administrations with those
who were doing all of the actual teaching. I see great merit in Traub’s critique in
this Symposium that demonstrates the failures of an institutional politics that
gives one group all the responsibility for teaching and another group all the au-
thority to govern that work. But I also believe, from my experience, that it is
possible to carefully define a program where some do almost all of the teaching,
others maintain most of the ultimate responsibility for their work, and at the
same time the mutual respect, integrity, and professionalism of both is continu-
ally maintained.
And true, one might say that the details of the LEAP program failure dis-
cussed by Diller and Oates are too different from my own experience to draw
comparisons: Although the GTAs we worked with had vastly different levels of
experience and entirely different academic backgrounds, the participants in the
LEAP program were working across even greater differences in power, experi-
ence, and values. But I do think that we can also look at the structures to account
for much of the difference in outcome: Unlike our system, the design of their
program placed writing instructors into a subordinate position from the very
start, and it provided few contact points for continual discussion and good-faith
negotiation of differences in pedagogy. In their case, I don’t fault the writing in-
structors for insisting on privatization of their own domain; it appears to have
been, considering the nature of the system they were in, their only means to fight
for their pedagogical beliefs and, in accordance with those beliefs, act responsi-
bly toward their students. But again, I would conclude that alternative begin-
nings, and thus alternative endings, are possible.
Catherine Latterell states, in support of what I have been saying, that the
most impressive GTA education programs “combat the damaging notion that
78 Rhetoric Review
teaching is an isolated activity—a private act between students and teachers

occurring behind closed doors—by promoting community-building activities
among new GTAs, advanced GTAs, instructors, and tenure-track faculty” (21).
My experience tells me that this is true. But the next question this Symposium
seems to evoke is this: To what extent are those same promotions of community
possible beyond GTA training, in the academy and its institutions at large?
And the question holds for us as individuals as well: I expect we will be facing
that same challenge as we move out of the position of “graduate student” and into
increasingly more administrative positions where we will bear more and more re-
sponsibility for shaping and structuring the work of others. But the details, far from
clear, will of course depend on every unique situation, and thus the future tasks ap-
pear, to be perfectly honest, daunting. In fact, in drawing my conclusions for this
piece, I am supposed to include some explanation of how this professional experi-
ence will ease my transition from graduate school to the professoriate. Ironically,
the opposite is true, for it has created a great unease— albeit a healthy one—as I
consider future possibilities. How much easier it would be, I think, to imagine that I
am merely crossing some line that divides subservience from real power, continual
learning from absolute knowing, sacrifice and servitude from moderate monetary
and scholarly rewards. How easy it would be to merely maintain the status quo and
get my “just rewards” when I cross over, and how nice to simply, finally, be “on the
other side” of the hierarchical divide. I have observed a lot of activity on the part of
professors and graduate students alike that indicates that such an operational un-
derstanding is common.
But how could I continue to see it in such simple and straightforward terms,
given my experience with our program and how differently one can approach one’s
role as a scholar-administrator? And how difficult—though rewarding—it might
be, should I even continue to work in academia, to remain a student of others even
though a professor, and to use authority to shape hierarchies that share and distrib-
ute both power and responsibility, rather than enforce top-down dictations of effi-
ciency, consistency, and the values and practices that I believe are right and best.
Thus I remain dutifully suspicious of ease, and respectful of the sort of unease
that will help keep me, as well as others, in check as I move into positions of greater
responsibility for how individuals come together to work and learn from one an-
other. No small task, as others in this Symposium have demonstrated.
Works Cited
Foucault, Michel. “The Discourse on Language.” The Archeology of Knowledge. Trans. A. M.
Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon, 1972. 215–37.
Hamp-Lyons, Liz, and William Condon. “Questioning Assumptions about Portfolio-Based Assess-
ment.” College Composition and Communication 44 (May 1993): 176–90.
Future Perfect 79
Harrison, Susan. “Portfolios Across the Curriculum.” WPA: Writing Program Administration 19
(Fall/Winter 1995): 38–48.
Latterell, Catherine G. “Training the Workforce: An Overview of GTA Education Curricula.” WPA:
Writing Program Administration 19 (Spring 1996): 7–23.
Long, Mark C., Jennifer H. Holberg, and Marcy M. Taylor. “Beyond Apprenticeship: Graduate Stu-
dents, Professional Development Programs and the Future(s) of English Studies.” WPA: Writing
Program Administration 20 (Fall/Winter 1996): 66–78.
Stephen D. Jukuri received his PhD in Rhetoric and Technical Communication from Michigan
Technological University in May 2000. He currently resides in Benton Harbor, Michigan.
Suellynn Duffey
University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire
Ben Feigert
University of Texas at Austin
Vic Mortimer
Stevensville, Montana
Jennifer Phegley
University of Missouri–Kansas City
Melinda Turnley
Purdue University
Conflict, Collaboration, and Authority:

Graduate Students and Writing Program Administration
In contrast to the cautionary tales told elsewhere in this Symposium, we of-
fer a cautiously optimistic story about generative conflict in collaborative writ-
ing program administration.1 We do so in the hope that our narrative will encour-
age others to think about ways to work for change within the limits of their own
local conditions. Richard E. Miller, in As if Learning Mattered, argues that while
academics tend to demonize bureaucracy by positing it as an obstacle to “free”
80 Rhetoric Review
intellectual thought and to institutional reform, bureaucracy is simultaneously

the only available agent of institutional change. No reform is possible, he argues,
until we acknowledge the “constraining forces that shape local labor practices”
(9). As Miller argues, much of our work in the academy is bureaucratic in na-
ture: committee tasks, program administration, grading, writing letters of recom-
mendation, and so on. How, then, might we prepare graduate students to under-
stand and work for change in the material constraints of our local bureaucracies?
And how can we do so without reifying the either/or dichotomy between private,
individual space and public, communal arenas that Jukuri explores in his essay
for this Symposium?
We will argue that graduate student experiences in collaborative writing
program administration can, under the right conditions, begin to provide answers
to both of those questions. Through our story of the generative conflict that arose
out of our work together, we will suggest that collaboration can foster critical
self-reflection in peer teaching groups and establish a community of teachers
with their own professional identities—identities that will allow them to under-
stand and enact, in powerful ways, their roles as agents of change when they be-
come faculty members.
Great Expectations
In “Feminist Writing Program Administration: Resisting the Bureaucrat
Within,” Amy Goodburn and Carrie Shively Leverenz narrate their shared expe-
rience as graduate student WPAs in a collaboratively structured writing program.
They explore their surprise at discovering the degree to which they had internal-
ized, even at times yearned for, hierarchical power structures in which the lines
of authority, ownership, and power are clearly and decisively defined. They
name this desire “the bureaucrat within,” and they argue that this inner bureau-
crat must be resisted if feminist notions of collaboration are to transform institu-
tional structures.
Goodburn and Leverenz’s initial optimism about collaboration and their
efforts to resist their inner bureaucrats are remarkably similar to our own exper-
ience. We began our tenure as peer-group facilitators with a similar optimism
and ideal: that a collaboratively structured program would invite new graduate
student instructors—and new writing program administrators—to develop, pro-
actively, their own professional identities, philosophies, and practices. This
professional involvement, we believed, would generate energy for change, en-
courage critical pedagogies, and develop an exceptionally complex writing pro-
gram shaped by the experiences, knowledge, and needs of many people rather
than by the single vision of the program director. We expected few difficulties,
Future Perfect 81
among ourselves, since we had spent the previous year collaboratively revising
individual syllabi as well as the core syllabus that the next group of new teachers
would use. In the process we addressed many pedagogical issues and conse-
quently the belief systems surrounding them. By the time we began working as
peer-group facilitators, most of us thought that we had reached agreement on the
relevant theoretical issues concerning the curriculum and collaboration.
We were surprised, however, to find that in the following year we never
achieved a consensus about what specifically would constitute collaboration in

each of our peer teaching groups. Our weekly staff meetings turned into an ex-
tended battle over how much authority to assert as peer-group facilitators and
how formal our groups should be. If our authority was too little and our groups
too casual, we feared that they might be no different from unstructured office
conversations about teaching. Because we wanted our groups to serve the dual
and sometimes conflicting purposes of providing theoretical models as well as
casual interaction, determining how to balance these purposes was central to our
discussions and debates.
An obvious accommodation to diverse approaches was for each of us to lead
our group in the manner we felt most comfortable with (i.e., by privatizing our
individual classroom spaces, as Jukuri might describe it). After all, we had
taught our composition classes and developed individual styles and processes.
Yet this obvious solution proved to be unworkable. Those who wanted more di-
rected meetings felt uncomfortable asking the new teachers to prepare assign-
ments if TAs in other groups did not have to. It seemed to some of us as if we
were in an all-or-nothing situation: Either we all made the same assignments and
conducted the same discussions in our groups, or we all went our separate ways
down the slippery slope of permissive pedagogical relativism.
In these struggles over group structure and dynamics, however, we clarified
the various kinds of authority available to us as facilitators. These struggles ex-
emplify the generative conflict of collaboration, particularly as it is described by
such scholars as Bleich, Miller, Leverenz, Trimbur, and Wolf, who seek to foster
agency for all members of a group, including those who hold and express con-
trary opinions. It is this effort to engage rather than to erase difference that we
advocate here.
The Anxiety of Authority

When we began to formulate our identities as facilitators, we wished to
share power with rather than over the new TAs. We could theorize this ideal, yet
it was considerably more difficult to define and implement a peer-group facilita-
tor role that allowed us to influence others without heavy reliance on the institu-
82 Rhetoric Review
tional trappings of authority. Early on, Jennifer wrote of her conflict about hier-
archical authority:
In my composition class I always know where I stand; I always have

the authority to put a grade on my students’ papers [a powerful insti-
tutional gesture of authority]. In peer group, however, I don’t finally
have the power to do anything and I guess that’s one reason why I
have so much anxiety about my role.
As peer-group facilitators who wanted to forego hierarchical authority, it

initially seemed that we each had little more to constitute our collaborative au-
thority than the desire to help our peers and a year of teaching experience. But
when we looked to our teaching background for help, our teacher identities were
often less than helpful. As Ben commented, we had become connoisseurs and
critics of the teaching moves that others make. Because there is no tougher audi-
ence than one’s colleagues, we implicitly set high standards and anxiety levels
for ourselves. Vic noted another source of anxiety. At first he believed that he
should avoid taking a strong leadership role in his peer group. We were, after all,
“facilitators,” which suggested that our primary job was to invite the TAs in our
groups to set the group’s agenda and engage in problem-posing activities to
decenter our authority and deemphasize the leadership of a teacher. Vic wrote
that it felt like an impossible balancing act: “I didn’t want to hand out answers
since that would imply that there was a . . . one-size-fits-all way of teaching. At
the same time, I did not want to hide my own experience when I thought it might
prove helpful.” Vic’s concern will, of course, be familiar to anyone who has
watched new TAs mistake the notion of decentering authority for a renunciation
of authority.
Another source, however, added more to our anxiety over authority than the
confusion between decentering and renunciation. That source was our complex
positionalities in relation to our peer group members outside the groups and in
relation to each other. First, we took graduate classes, shared offices, and social-
ized with our peer group members. Further, in our roles as change agents, we
also wanted to provide a beneficial experience for professional development,
both theirs and ours. Melinda’s observations in a journal entry illustrate that
complexity:
These peer groups are a weird ‘genre.’ Although they do have pro-
fessional motivations, they also have personal ones. . . . I want . . .
[our] casual interactions . . . [in] other contexts to make their way
into the ‘official’ site of the group. But, how do I balance this with
Future Perfect 83
my administrative responsibility to focus the group meetings on ped-

agogical issues?
Another example shows, further, how our peer group members also compli-
cated their teaching roles. In a peer group evaluation written at the end of the
first quarter of teaching, one new TA has this to say about Jennifer: “I think you
could have been less tentative about having ‘authority.’ I certainly would not
have been offended.” Some TAs in her group were dissatisfied because, rather
than give definitive answers, Jennifer turned questions back to the group in a
gesture that asked for critical thinking.
However, just as our perceptions of authority changed over time, so did the
TAs’, as Jennifer found when speaking to two members of her peer group a year
later. At that point, they recognized that not getting easy answers had allowed
and, indeed, required them to think critically about their own teaching practices.
Speaking from the vantage point of a year of teaching experience and thought-
fully constructed teaching identities, the former peer group members understood
how much they had learned from questioning and experimenting with possibili-
ties rather than getting “easy” or “official” answers from a peer-group facilitator
the first time. In order to foster in new TAs the kind of collaborative, critical
pedagogy that we espoused, Jennifer and the rest of us had to resist adopting the
directive authority that many TAs believed they needed.
As we have shown, one of the first steps in negotiating our conflict was
addressing the concern that we would exert too much authority in the peer
groups. This concern was alleviated by the realization that even in the absence
of the institutional power that accompanies the subject position of “teacher,”
we still were, by virtue of our teaching experience and other training, more ex-
pert than most (if not all) our group members. Indeed, that absence of authori-
tarian power enabled us to enact, no matter how haltingly and hesitantly, a col-
laborative pedagogy in our peer groups. Unlike Traub and Diller and Oates, we
worked in a bureaucratic environment—the writing program—that made a con-
scious push toward a relatively egalitarian collaboration between senior and ju-
nior group members. Nevertheless, we still had to learn how to resist the bad
old bureaucrats within us (and the TAs in our groups) as we struggled to enact
our ideals.
Constructing Individual Identities (Collaboratively)
We know now that while we were facilitating peer groups, we were actively
constructing our roles, our authority, in resistance to institutional and TA expec-
tations: a resistance to authoritarian hierarchies echoing from the bureaucrat
84 Rhetoric Review
within. This was a mostly intellectual resistance since we didn’t have much “bu-
reaucratic” authority anyway. More critically, we resisted TA expectations that
we would dispense wise advice, and we resisted our own and each other’s ideal-
ized criteria for good peer-group facilitating. These criteria having originated in
part because we idealized our predecessor peer-group facilitators. Our idealistic
(perhaps even utopian) theories were fruitfully complicated by our practice, in
both our teaching groups and our facilitator meetings.
The story we tell illustrates that asserting one’s authority through collabora-
tive structures shapes a particular kind of identity formation. Melinda observed:
My personal and professional development is fostered by a sense of

agency and independence—by the understanding that I must take an
active role in my own instruction. I am most content and effective
when I am sharing in both the responsibility and the control of what
I am doing, and collaboration allows for this sort of accountable
independence.
As Traub argues elsewhere in this Symposium, politics are the unacknowl-

edged and invisible part of all GTA experiences. Our explorations of the con-
flicts caused by our collaboration made overt and experientially knowable the
implicit conflicts that collaborative pedagogical theory sometimes acknowl-
edges. Perhaps because the political differences we identified and had to negoti-
ate were embodied in colleagues whom we liked and respected, our understand-
ing of what collaboration entails is much more optimistic than the understanding
of collaboration that emerges from the other essays in this Symposium.
A large part of that optimism stems from the fact that we were working with
people whom we knew and respected, and it was the ethos of each group mem-
ber that we found most persuasive in our discussions and debates. What counted
as successful persuasion was not one member of the group bringing everyone
into agreement with a particular point (although we surely wanted to do that at
times), but rather a commitment to keeping the discussion going in even the
most heated moments. We would argue that this community created and exerted
a “communal” ethos that was greater than that of any one individual. It was in
the context of that ethos that we constructed our identities and authority as
peer-group facilitators.
A significant part of one’s initiation into the profession is developing a
sense of oneself as a teacher and/or administrator. Under the right conditions,
collaboration, as we have suggested, can be a fruitful method for constructing
the boundaries of one’s identity within the academy. Further, a collaborative
administrative structure can deliberately challenge the privatization of class-
Future Perfect 85
room space in a way that is, we contend, more ethically responsible to the
need for our discipline to educate graduate students fully about the politics in-
herent in our field.
Epilogue
Diller and Oates, as well as Traub, remind us of how fortunate we were.
Because we were graduate student administrators working with peers, we did

not have to face the same power imbalances between faculty members and TAs
that they recount. Indeed, the peer groups at times functioned as relatively
“safe” places from which TAs could critique the policies and curriculum of the
writing program. TAs are, after all, acutely aware of their low status in the
academic hierarchy, and the peer groups were (among other things) our at-
tempt to prevent potentially productive dissensus from going completely under-
ground. From an administrative standpoint, then, we were able to (and in fact
had to) shape a collaborative administration—a hierarchy, if you will—that en-
abled collaboration.
As one of the reviewers of this Symposium wrote, “hierarchies have an in-
escapable power over our work. We can only escape them by retreating to ap-
parently free private spaces where we have disciplinary power.” We would like
to follow the implications of that statement by suggesting that if bureaucratic
hierarchies and disciplinary power are not the same thing, then the boundaries
between them are blurred indeed. To blur those boundaries is, of course, to
suggest one way in which writing program administration is (or can be) schol-
arly. Our collaboration as writing program administrators did not and could not
escape hierarchy, but our experience does suggest that faculty members and
graduate students can, if they choose, engage in collaborative practices. Such
an engagement allows for a transformation of, rather than a resistance to, our
inner bureaucrats.
In our collective exploration of the limits and possibilities of collaborative
writing program administration, we have strengthened our commitment to al-
ternative, collaborative philosophies. We believe that this enhances the ability
of each of us, as future faculty members and WPAs, to negotiate conflicts with
other power brokers in ways that do not force retreat to “apparently free spaces
of disciplinary power” as the only option. Further, all of our narratives of col-
laboration point to ways that reformers of higher education can—and ought
to—respond to criticism about its insularity. Such collaboration as ours has the
power to influence reform at several levels: in privatized classroom spaces, in
GTA subjectivities shaped by forces that privilege research over teaching
identities, and in interpersonal/professional interactions with academic col-
86 Rhetoric Review
leagues who are, it can be argued, among the most profoundly individualistic
of all our citizens.
Note
1While we write as a unified “we,” the pronominal construction is clearly a fiction. During the
academic year 1994–95, Suellynn Duffey directed the First-Year Writing Program at Ohio State Uni-
versity. The rest of us were part of a group of eight graduate students who assisted in the administra-
tion of the First-Year Writing Program by working as peer-group facilitators (PGFs). In the peer-
group facilitator meetings, each of us assumed different roles. Nonetheless, a collective “we” strug-
gled in those weekly meetings, and subsequently, to articulate, from our varied positions, the nature
of the conflicts surrounding administration and authority. We tell this story from our collective, doc-
umented memory, those documents including written logs and position papers created for staff meet-
ings during our initial collaboration.
In the process of drafting this essay, we struggled to make the “we” that tells our story reflect
our multiple viewpoints. This struggle has been, to our minds, only partially successful (thus this
lengthy note). For example, we suggest that we like collaboration because it allows room for differ-
ence, yet we elide differences by trying to unify our voices textually. During conference presenta-
tions on this topic, this contradiction was avoided by our physical presence as different bodies. In
turning this account of our work into a disembodied text, however, we don’t have that luxury. Still,
we feel that we have come to a consensus that reflects the kinds of productive compromises we en-
acted as participants in a collaborative administrative structure. The graduate student instructors cho-
sen 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 re-
search and presented papers at such venues as CCCC, RSA, MLA, and EDE.
Works Cited
Bleich, David. “Extended Collaboration.” Writing With: New Directions in Collaborative Teaching,
Learning, and Research. Ed. Sally Barr Reagan, Thomas Fox, and David Bleich. Albany: SUNY,
1994. 179–96.
Goodburn, Amy, and Carrie Shively Leverenz. “Feminist Writing Program Administration: Resisting
the Bureaucrat Within.” Feminism and Composition Studies: In Other Words. Ed. Susan C. Jarratt
and Lynn Worsham. New York: MLA, 1998. 276–90.
Leverenz, Carrie Shively. “Collaboration, Race, and the Rhetoric of Evasion.” Who Does the Teach-
ing? Learning in Different Directions. Ed. David Bleich and Mary Boland. Special issue of JAC
16 (1996): 297–312.
Miller, Richard E. As if Learning Mattered: Reforming Higher Education. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP,
1998.
Miller, Susan. “New Discourse City: An Alternative Model for Collaboration.” Writing With: New
Directions in Collaborative Teaching, Learning, and Research. Ed. Sally Barr Reagan, Thomas
Fox, and David Bleich. Albany: SUNY, 1994. 283–300.
Trimbur, John. “Consensus and Difference in Collaborative Learning.” College English 51 (Oct.
1989): 602–16.
Wolf, Thia. “Conflict as Opportunity in Collaborative Praxis.” Writing With: New Directions in Col-
laborative Teaching, Learning, and Research. Ed. Sally Barr Reagan, Thomas Fox, and David
Bleich. Albany: SUNY, 1994. 91–110.
Future Perfect 87
Suellynn Duffey currently is Director of Composition at the University of Wisconsin–Eau

Claire. Long interested in writing program administration (basic writing, first-year composition, and
writing across the curriculum), she thanks her coauthors for the stimulating work environment they
helped create at Ohio State University.
Ben Feigert teaches ninth- and eleventh-grade English at Seattle Academy of Arts and Sci-
ences. He is also a PhD candidate at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is writing a disserta-
tion about literacy instruction in nineteenth-century American common schools.
Vic Mortimer lives in western Montana, where he studies the poetics of place, the composition
of mountain ranges, and the rhetoric of rivers.
Jennifer Phegley is an assistant professor of nineteenth-century British and American literature
at the University of Missouri–Kansas City. She has published articles on writing program adminis-
tration and collaborative textbook production as well as nineteenth-century periodicals and women
readers. Currently, she is working on a book titled Educating the Proper Woman Reader: Victorian
Family Literary Magazines and the Professionalization of Literary Criticism and coediting a collec-
tion of scholarly essays called Reading Women: From Literary Figures to Cultural Icons.
Melinda Turnley is a PhD candidate at Purdue University, where she continues her collabora-
tive administrative work as a comentor in both the computer composition and professional writing
programs. Her dissertation, Re-Mediating Writing and Re-Writing Media: A Critical Investigation of
Mediological Assumptions in Composition Pedagogies, focuses upon the pedagogical and adminis-
trative implications of incorporating various media (both new and familiar) into writing instruction.

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Rhetoric Review, Vol. 21, No. 1, 2002, 40–87

being raised in this Symposium. As the contributors conclude, their work as

From Labor to Middle Management: Graduate Students in

No other program faculty in English Studies carry the onerous burden

This essay opens a special Symposium on graduate students in writing pro-

nior faculty WPA. The authors—all graduate students or academic professionals

Who Is the WPA?

that the administration is to be tolerated but certainly not trusted.

Me: There is no funding for additional sections.

Graduate Students in Writing Program Administration

whole. It is not enough, as Duffey et al. suggest, to simply “posit bureaucracy as

have been unexpected.

Infusing Disciplinary Rhetoric into Liberal Education:

(UWP) approached several graduate teaching assistants with a proposal that we

The Design and Structure of LEAP, 1994–1997

UWP “Stand-alone” 2 credit hours

UWP Instruction: 4 credit hours

Different Curricular Aims

class texts as examples of discourse—that is, as instances of writers drawing

LEAP should be the teaching of writing. Accordingly, writing instructors were

During the colloquia, however, we were repeatedly challenged. When, fac-

(through teaching assignments or internships) to how writing is viewed, taught,

Professionalization and the Politics of Subjectivity

of the same concerns with authority, collaboration, and identity discussed by

is bound up with institutional politics—and an understanding of how essential

But while acknowledging the possibility of a shared complicity, I would ar-

these occasions nevertheless comprised extremely valuable (and unusual) oppor-

ulty-administrator’s e-mail messages to the ECB assessment research group ar-

I am also very uneasy because a project involving a small number of

concerned that faculty be involved in this process. It is, I believe, im-

This faculty-administrator’s concerns were valid ones, of course, especially

This implicit message, which at Michigan was strengthened by the image of

Returning to my own experience helping to develop a large-scale portfolio

intellectual activities, in order to argue that what is being assessed is what is

preliminary exams, for example—for all graduate students to reflect, in rigor-

theory understands subjectivity as heterogeneous and constantly in flux” (227).

Margaret Willard-Traub is Assistant Professor of Rhetoric at Oakland University. She teaches

Private Classrooms Made Public: Writing Program

“Is an e-mail list a community?”

sharing their classrooms with me. I felt positioned as an outsider, assumed to

haps more importantly—not overreact to imbalances in “institution” or “inclina-

. . . because the apprentice model typically operates under the di-

It is true, in many ways, that this experience of a collaborative, shared, and

teaching is an isolated activity—a private act between students and teachers

Conflict, Collaboration, and Authority:

intellectual thought and to institutional reform, bureaucracy is simultaneously

achieved a consensus about what specifically would constitute collaboration in

The Anxiety of Authority

In my composition class I always know where I stand; I always have

have so much anxiety about my role.

As peer-group facilitators who wanted to forego hierarchical authority, it

my administrative responsibility to focus the group meetings on ped-

Constructing Individual Identities (Collaboratively)

My personal and professional development is fostered by a sense of

As Traub argues elsewhere in this Symposium, politics are the unacknowl-

Because we were graduate student administrators working with peers, we did