CCC 61:2 / december 2009
Debra Frank Dew
WPA as Rhetor: Scholarly Production and the
Difference a Discipline Makes
This article defines applied rhetorical work as integral to the intellectual work of writing
program administration and asks our professional organizations to classify it as such
within our position statements. With a specific case, it offers a generative framework
for representing and assessing the work’s scholarly commons for professional review.
O
n a snowy Friday morning in October, I steal away from my office in pursuit
of sage advice, a professional mud wrap administered lavishly by senior women
faculty who have navigated the tenure journey. As junior faculty and WPA, I
construct the snow as the day’s constraint shaping my professional path. I drive
north to the University of Colorado Women’s Faculty Symposium in Denver.
Two hours later, desired advice comes my way: “Shut up and write! Junior
faculty always think they can change the world. You can’t change the world
until you have tenure. You need to shut up and write!”
“Ok, then,” I assert, “I will close my office door and do just that.” For a
compliant moment, I imagine my office door closing, listen for the purposeful
click of a secured handle, but then regain my disciplinary senses. I am a writing
program administrator.
“Not exactly,” I resist.
CCC 61:2 / december 2009
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Moving beyond the simple surety of my “not exactly,” WPAs as rhetoric and
composition scholars are rhetors by training. Rhetorical production is not just
what we study, but some of the most theoretically exacting and intellectually
exhilarating work we do. WPAs do not just enjoy a textual relationship with
a subject matter; we employ our rhetorical training to establish a sound writing enterprise within the local context. Much of our rhetorical activity serves
these ends, but we yet struggle to intelligibly represent the work for review.
We may exclude it from our professional records, imagining advocacy as our
peculiar burden given writing’s history, or tolerate the work in loyal service to
our programs.
Colleagues who are yet unfamiliar with administrative work may construct
our advocacy as service, asserting that the discursive frame of the refereed
article captures all intellectual work. Perhaps, too, the field has so integrated
advocacy across other areas of work (program creation, curricular design) that
we do not yet recognize the WPAs’ applied rhetorical work, the activity itself
as inquiry on its own terms. Though integral, advocacy remains invisible and
conceptually unacknowledged for purposes of tenure and promotion. But what
if your tenuring scholar is a rhetor by training, the WPA hired specifically to
produce a writing program as a work product? Should we then admit the difference a discipline makes as we define intellectual work?
WPAs who generate applied rhetorical work struggle with the constraints
of research as traditionally conceptualized. In preparing my dossier for my
comprehensive fourth-year review, I strove to capture the scholarly nature of my
rhetorical work by framing it with active verbs that resonated with rhetorical
energy—“secured,” “negotiated,” “mediated,” for example. Given their expertise
in rhetoric and composition, external reviewers acknowledged the work with
the following claims: “[She] takes her administrative work more seriously than
most,” and further, “[She] is a change agent on your campus.” These reviewers
respectfully read the work as “serious” and hailed me as a “change agent” but
did not constitute it as intellectual work. A single verb such as “negotiated”
embedded within a vita line did not represent the work accordingly. A refereed
article on a vita line is readily apprehended in its familiar frame, but applied
rhetorical work does not garner the same.
Rhetorical advocacy is an area of inquiry that is epistemologically integral
to our field’s methods of generating, integrating, and applying knowledge. Our
standards of excellence in writing administration include evaluative criteria
and outcomes that depend upon advocacy. Our Council of Writing Program
Administrators’ (CWPA) “Guidelines for Self-Study to Precede WPA Visit,” for
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example, maps the WPA’s scope of work, such as: Item III. Faculty, A. Status
and Working Conditions, and B. Faculty Development (4–5). Elsewhere, the
“CCCC Writing Program Certificate of Excellence” includes similar criteria:
“the program offers exemplary development experiences”; “the program treats
contingent faculty respectfully, humanely and professionally”; and “class sizes
are appropriate” (1). If we are to realize these standards, advocacy as the WPA’s
applied rhetorical work is essential.
In this essay I ask that we affirm applied rhetorical work as intellectual
work and classify it as such within our official position statements. Then I offer
an illustrative case of rhetorical work framed within a Carnegie template that
maps its scholarly commons for the purpose of tenure and promotion review.
Applied Rhetorical Work as Grounded in Disciplinary Knowledge
In our own CWPA’s “Evaluating the Intellectual Work of Writing Administration,” we claim that intellectual work “derives from and is reinforced by scholarly
knowledge and disciplinary understanding” (4). The discipline’s knowledge base
shapes our agenda for rhetorical work. How would we identify instructional
and material needs without analytical tools afforded us by critical, cultural,
and feminist theory, and the principles and strategies of literacy and writing
theory? How would we advocate for the material and discursive “space” we need
to enable instruction without rhetorical theory, and the strategies offered as
programmatic advocacy advanced before us? Our disciplinary expertise equips
us for our applied rhetorical work.
Applied Rhetorical Work as Generative of New Knowledge
As CWPA standards further expect, the work must first “advance knowledge—its production, clarification, connection, reinterpretation, or application,” such that, second, its “products or activities can be evaluated by others”
(“Evaluating” 7). As are other WPAs, I was hired to review, revise, and advance
a writing program. Contractually, I was charged with resolving an extensive
list of exigent programmatic issues—my rhetorical workload. These matters of policy, practice, workload, material need, and stressed and evolving
institutional relations warranted language-mediated solutions all grounded
in my disciplinary understanding. Writing programs are rhetorical systems
reconstituted daily through claims of policy and practice. A WPA’s rhetorical
work sustains a contingent, relational nexus, wherein the program coheres as
the effect of its teaching and learning relations. I work with writing faculty to
define problems, analyze situations, mediate local constraints, and deliberate
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with stakeholders through language. All policies generated, practices instituted,
and initiatives advanced flow out of this activity. WPA work is quintessentially
rhetorical, the real thing. The WPA’s ongoing argument of and for a writing
program is necessarily informed by the discipline’s theoretical foundation,
and the documenting of an advocacy initiative constitutes the advancement
of our rhetorical knowledge (be it newly produced, or variously reinterpreted,
connected, or applied) for the benefit of others.
Rhetorical Work as Integral to the Intellectual Work of the
Discipline
Rhetoric and composition scholars regularly ground, if diversely conceptualize,
the work within our research traditions. Calls for advocacy (White; Schuster;
Hansen; Schell), political work (Hesse; Adler-Kassner), leadership (Phelps), or
institutional critique (Porter et al.; Fox), all rhetorical efforts, are not new. We
have a research tradition in applied rhetorical work even if we have not yet
framed nor documented and evaluated rhetorical work as such.
In 1991, Ed White spoke of such work as vital to administration—“[we]
must empower ourselves [. . .] to do our jobs” (6). Casting the institutional
landscape as WPAs’ work space, White encourages us to establish “good allies”
in “the administrative chain of command” (7). We should utilize “good arguments, good data, and good allies, mixed with caution and cunning” (7). We gain
“institutional power through the administration of a good program” (10). When
White claims “power is ultimately a matter of perception,” (11) he defines power
as influence secured in and through language. WPAs advocate “for the good of
our programs” because they “cannot afford the luxury of powerlessness” (12).
Charles Schuster hails WPAs as agents of institutional reform. Even as
WPAs “sleep better when the winds are calm,” “[r]eal progress and programmatic reform do not occur in temperate times, but in turbulent ones” (xi).
Effective WPAs “nudge a crisis along” as an “opportunity for change,” which
is perhaps their “most effective means for accomplishing significant reforms”
(xii). Schuster sets preconditions with his strategies: A rhetorical “[c]risis must
emerge from curricular and programmatic flash points” (xiv). Take risks, as
“a little bit of the dare devil is worth cultivating,” especially “once you have
established yourself as an able, flexible, well-regarded [WPA]” (xiv). Finally,
“make sure you have power,” and “be willing to use [your] office” even if it
means “expending symbolic capital and moving out of administration” (xiii ).
Crises are “best scheduled annually,” “one good crisis at a time” (xiv). Working
to reform writing’s work is not simply the making of political or curricular
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scenes for their own sake—crises arise naturally, and WPAs frame them and
mediate theoretical solutions.
Kristine Hansen’s advocacy for better working conditions for adjunct
faculty transpired when she admitted an ethical responsibility for faculty wellbeing within her work. She asked, “How [can I as a WPA] in good conscience lead
a program that is built on exploitation?” (24–25). Hansen deploys her rhetorical
training to hold her institution accountable for its professional mistreatment
of instructors. Her advocacy works from the premise that “administrators who
are brought into a relationship with part-time faculty” may “respond caringly
in the face of the other,” as “relationships are the venue for ethical action” (41).
Hansen advises WPAs to “professionalize writing faculty” and “insist on ethical
treatment for them” (42).
Eileen E. Schell also offers strategies for improving faculty’s working conditions. She claims “quality writing instruction cannot happen when [contingent] faculty do not have quality working conditions” (183). Coalition building
may be the “the key” to “achieving lasting changes” (184), and the linking of
working conditions with the quality of writing instruction frames a value that
institutions may appreciate (187). Through her data-rich analysis of faculty
exploitation, Schell synthesizes strategies into the reformist, conversionist,
unionist/collectivist, and abolitionist approaches. Schell’s research does much
to map a field-specific agenda for change. Our rhetorical charge is clear—field
documents and national data can shape action plans for improving the working
conditions and professional status of our writing faculty.
Framing advocacy as political practice, Douglas D. Hesse defines “politics”
as “the art of moving people or groups to action on matters that require their
assent” (41). For Hesse, “WPAs simply must be politicians—and, of course
rhetoricians” since the “quality of a writing program depends upon the conditions in which the program exists” (41–42). These political spheres include
“the departmental, the institutional, the professional and the public” (42)
with specific strategies complementing a given sphere. WPAs should know
the system, have a place at the deliberative table, construct an effective ethos,
write strategic reports, and form coalitions (43–56). His impulse reaffirms a
WPA commonplace—the “desire to accomplish some good” (57).
In The Activist WPA, Linda Adler-Kassner offers a compelling call for
civic engagement given writing’s own urgency of now—the “glaring light of
accountability and assessment” stories that our governmental agencies are
spinning our way (22). In response, WPAs may appropriate tactics and strategies offered by civic organizers and meet these narratives head on (22). We
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should reframe public discussions by drawing upon our position statements,
which reflect “consensus positions on issues” that are integral to our work
(17). Adler-Kassner offers three questions as generative frames for the telling
of stories: “How should students’ literacies be defined when they come into the
composition classroom;” “what literacies should composition classes develop,
how and for what purpose;” and “how should the development of students’
literacies be assessed at the end of these classes?” (14). As topics for invention, our stories can do more than “critique” and “refute analyses” if we “take
actions reflecting our interests and those of others” (83). We should choose an
organizing framework (interest-based, issue-based, and value-based) to engage
in “activist intellectualism” as “intellectual work” (83–84).
Classifying rhetorical work as leadership, Louis Wetherbee Phelps aims
to recast administrative work as “the refuge of those less talented as scholars”
into “intellectual leadership” (3). Conceptually, leadership is “an interdependent function of a dynamic system,” a system where we might “cut through
the layers of [the] academic organization and find leaders all the way down”
(5). In our field, leadership “require[s] specialized disciplinary expertise in
the intellectual work of administration” (5). Leading is valued much less than
publishing about it:
Despite strenuous efforts to assert that the contextualized activity itself embodies inquiry and is intellectually generative under the umbrella of the paradigm,
this radical notion of intellectual work in and through administration tends to
slip constantly toward a more conventional one of researching, theorizing and
publishing about administration. (15)
Our work “in and through administration” is thus an intellectual product.
Arguably, her call for leadership is for rhetorical work of a WPA who delivers
the “contextualized activity” itself.
James Porter et al. ask us to include institutional critique and change
“in the realm of what counts as research in rhetoric and composition” (612).
While we have field standards as ideals and principles, we yet lack “rhetorical strategies” for getting our standards adopted (616). The exigency comes
with their call for rhetorical strategies as new knowledge. They recommend
“institutional critique [. . .] as an activity of rhetoric and composition,” which
seeks to “change the practices of institutional representatives and to improve
the conditions of those affected by and served by institutions” (611). Institutions “contain spaces for reflection, resistance, revision, and productive action”
(613), and the intellectual work of identifying “spaces” (local sites) is central
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to our work. Advocating for change to benefit stakeholders, WPAs “can (and
do) rewrite institutions through rhetorical action” (613). They call for agendas
of change (629) and situated theorizing (632). Clearly, this methodology for
critique and change is administrative activism that imagines better writing
instruction as its ends.
CWPA Guidelines for Evaluating the Intellectual Work of
Rhetorical Advocacy
Guideline One of “Evaluating the Intellectual Work of Program Administration”
identifies five areas of intellectual work: Program Creation, Curricular Design,
Faculty Development, Program Assessment and Evaluation, and ProgramRelated Textual Production (9). Most areas are directly linked to curriculum
and instruction. Applied rhetorical work as a sixth area would capture advocacy
as institutional critique that changes the policies, practices, and conditions of
work for diverse stakeholders across a writing enterprise.
The work also meets more than one of the document’s criteria for intellectual work identified under Guideline Two: 1) “It [. . .] applies knowledge
based on research, theory, and sound [. . .] practice”; 2) “It requires disciplinary knowledge available only to an expert”; 3) “It requires highly developed
analytical or problem solving skills derived from specific expertise, training,
or research”; and 4) “It results in products or activities that can be evaluated
[. . .] as the contribution of the individual’s insight, research, and disciplinary
knowledge” (9–10). These four criteria inform the planning and delivery of an
initiative that first critiques and then seeks to change the policies and practices
of writing or its conditions of work.
Guideline Three offers evaluative criteria for reviewing the work, and the
relevant standard here is: “Improvement/Refinement: The WPA makes changes
and alterations that distinctly and concretely lead to better teaching, sounder
classroom practices, etc.” (10). Our professional organizations have deliberately
established baseline teaching and learning standards to define the necessary
conditions for effective instruction. When advocacy succeeds, the impact of this
intellectual work on workplace climate, culture, and productivity is significant.
The fourth and final CWPA guideline emphasizes peer review. The WPA
may generate a portfolio of scholarly work (10). Here we imagine work products, evidentiary materials, and reflective analysis documenting the applied
rhetorical work. If our advocacy (understood as the construction of arguments
that are intellectually framed, strategically delivered, and theoretically and
materially effective) is grounded in disciplinary understanding, flows out of
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and extends that knowledge, requires highly developed analytical problem
solving derived from a WPA’s expertise, and produces outcomes that enhance
a writing enterprise, we should be able to document this activity—the real
rhetorical thing—for peer review and dissemination.
Making Sense, Right Here, Right Now
Whether we change curricula or revise policies, secure support for professionalizing faculty, or build a theoretically sound and effective infrastructure for the
writing enterprise, we draw from field standards and animate principles and
strategies from our research traditions. Given the nature of our work, and the
discipline’s ongoing call for new knowledge linked to critique and change, the
sage advice to “shut up and write” asks me to abnegate my professional charge.
As institutions hire WPAs to produce and sustain large-scale programs, they
need to recognize and respect this work. WPAs must document the work so
those who mean well when they admonish junior faculty to “shut up and write”
can grasp its scholarly commons.
Adopting a Carnegie Framework for Representing Scholarly
Work
A framework for documenting the scholarly commons of applied rhetorical
work may be found in Charles E. Glassick, Mary Taylor Huber, and Gene I.
Maeroff ’s Scholarship Assessed: Evaluation of the Professoriate. The goal of their
study is the culling out of standards for assessing scholarship in all its forms.1
They gathered the following data: an exhaustive survey of colleges and universities on the “reexamination of faculty roles and rewards;” a review of faculty
handbooks and policy statements; and a review of criteria for manuscripts as
employed by university presses, granting agencies, and journals (ix–x). Glassick,
Huber, and Maeroff discovered “standards that can be applied to each kind of
scholarly work that can organize the documentation of scholarly accomplishments, and can also guide a trustworthy process of faculty evaluation” (5). The
standards “involve a sequence of unfolding stages” that guide the inquiry, and
these stages may frame the work for peer review as follows: 1) clear goals, 2)
adequate preparation, 3) appropriate methods, 4) significant results, 5) effective
presentation, and 6) reflective critique (24–25). This framework offers a generative template for documenting and assessing a WPA’s applied rhetorical work.
Can a WPA’s record of applied rhetorical work and successful advocacy
be documented to encompass these standards and thereby constituted as a
scholarly product for peer review?
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I believe it can, and what follows is my test case.
Responding in part to Porter et al.’s call for critique and change, I offer an
analytical account of an agenda for change and strategies for professionalizing
faculty at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. Whether the record is
delivered as a research statement for a tenure or promotion file, or as a successful proposal for a local initiative, it is the work itself that I represent for review.
Setting Goals and Preparing for the Definitional Argument
With my WPA appointment in 2000 came the charge to review and revise writing
curricula and advocate for the Writing Program. Writing faculty, all instructors
and adjuncts, identified exigent matters, some within the program and others
external and across the institutional landscape. The program’s mission was
defined as general writing skills instruction fully in service to our disciplinary
peers. Given its paraprofessional status and skills-intensive nature, the Writing
Program was an optimal site for critique and change because the program in
the majority of its functions did not meet field standards for excellence. Writing faculty were savvy folks who saw a need for advocacy and wrote this work
explicitly into my appointment.
To prepare for this rhetorical work, I considered field research (as mapped
within my literature review) as well as CWPA standards for the teaching of writing. The CWPA in collaboration with NCTE and the CCCC sets standards that
may be read as administrative outcomes or work products that are realized via
our advocacy. These standards do not simply exist a priori at an institutional
site, nor are they implemented upon an institution’s “discovery” of their disciplinary sense or ethical value; rather, they are produced, delivered incrementally as inquiry across time. It is the WPA’s applied rhetorical work quite often
collaboratively delivered by committed faculty that moves a program forward.
This work begins with a review of the program and the planning of a course of
action with strategies for short-term and long-term goals.
Writing faculty and I mapped our issues and needs, and I then proposed a
definitional argument to reframe and reconstitute the Writing Program—our
curricula, our practice, and our mission—as a disciplinary enterprise, even as
its programming was housed within the Department of English and remains
so. The vision of gaining disciplinary structure would be realized across time
through the incremental “disciplining” of subsets (curriculum and instruction)
as our short-term outcomes. Our curricula warranted theoretical revision,
and faculty needed development venues to increase intellectual control over
their work. Faculty also asked for healthy workloads and secure positions with
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adequate compensation, including health benefits. We would remake faculty’s
adjunct and contingent selves into more professionally secure faculty. Reconstituting the whole of writing is integral because writing’s subsets are all linked
in inextricable conceptual relations, each constraining the whole program.
The large-scale argument moved incrementally across multiple fronts with
moments of definitional dissonance, ideological and practical dissent followed
by new understanding, and incremental breakthroughs. Writing’s work changed
substantively: 1) We integrated rhetoric and writing theoretical content across
our first-year curricula to give intellectual presence to the discipline within the
classroom; 2) we implemented a required professional development series for
writing faculty; 3) we professionalized faculty appointments; 4) we reconfigured
workload by lowering course caps; and 5) we initiated an ongoing review of
salary and compensation standards with a 30 percent increase in our writing
instructors’ base salary to date.
Thus far, I have identified our definitional goals, detailed our planning
and preparation for the initiative, and forecasted the outcomes as products of
our applied rhetorical work. Our outcomes are those field standards that give
programs their disciplinary integrity. After seven years, we have reframed and
reconstituted the program by moving from a general skills service mission of
subdisciplinary status to a program of substantive disciplinary integrity. While
summative at times, the following account encompasses the remaining stages
of Glassick, Huber, and Maeroff ’s template: appropriate methods, significant
results, effective presentation, and critical reflection.
Redefining Our Curricula: Rhetoric and Writing Studies Rising
We reviewed first-year outcomes and decided that the skills-heavy, currenttraditional foundation lacked much of the theoretical content that the “WPA
Outcomes Statement for First-Year Composition” imagines. The categories of
rhetorical knowledge and process knowledge are as much content outcomes
as performance outcomes. Students are to “understand” principles of rhetoric
and writing theory, including the “collaborative and social aspects of writing
processes” and the “relationships among language, knowledge, and power” (2).
They are to know of the field’s knowledge base as it is this knowledge (theories,
principles, concepts) that critically enables writing. We integrated readings
with an emphasis on language matters and rhetorical theory for instruction.
Then we chose documented analytical essays as the genre of our first course
and extended inquiry and argument for the second.
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With the integration of rhetoric and writing content to enable invention
and textual analysis, we revised our mission and systemically refigured our
disciplinary relations. Students read and discuss language matters, and employ
rhetorical theory to write analytical essays as they do in history or philosophy,
rather than working in restless anticipation of real academic work. We orient
students to academic reading, writing, and discussion in service to core goals,
but beyond this mission, we introduce students to rhetoric and writing as a
discipline unto itself (for details, see Dew).
Goodbye Adjunct Worker: Hello Writing Faculty
As our curricular revision transpired over three years, so did our conversion
of faculty’s invisible and contingent selves into professional faculty. When we
began, all of our courses were taught by instructors and adjuncts with few
recurring appointments and benefits. The institution had no defensible cause
for staffing writing with contingent faculty except for the perceived nature of
our work and its low market value. When we considered how to enhance faculty
status, I reasoned that better salaries and professional appointments for the
same work were less viable than development stipends for curricular review
and revision. The stipend would be followed by a later-day argument for merit
increases. Curricular development was new work, and writing faculty were to
visibly deliver this work in the company of peer faculty across the disciplines.
Teaching and its partner, professional development, are legitimate work
and merit institutional rewards. No matter their rank, writing faculty share
teaching as a category of faculty work with their tenure-track others. To position faculty in the company of these colleagues, we reconstituted the program’s
monthly norming sessions as curricular review and development sessions. As
the new theoretical work arose, faculty rightfully expected institutional support.
Academic Affairs granted faculty a stipend of $500 to start the process. I also
wrote many local grants and a CU-system President’s Fund for the Humanities
grant to bring rhetoric and writing scholars on campus. Faculty worked with
Susan Jarratt, Dick Fulkerson, Keith D. Miller, and Shirley Wilson Logan to
enable our theoretical shifts as integrated within our FYC curricula.
The shift from norming events that sustain curricula and grading standards to development sessions with readings and the ongoing design of new
instructional materials was not without struggle and conflict. A number of
experienced instructors with established practices variously read critique and
change as unwarranted or too much like a return to grad school or otherwise
too costly to wield. Some left the program for more familiar contexts, where
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they might keep their practice intact and not reconstitute their professional
selves to advance a program. After the stipend, the salary and workloads did
not reward them for new and exacting labor.
For our development work to be visible and appreciated, faculty secured
access to other campus forums sponsored by the Teaching and Learning
Center and the Student Achievement and Assessment Committee. Beginning
with paired (WPA and instructor) proposals, we gained access to grant pools,
and then instructors partnered with other non-tenure-track faculty (NTTF)
across the disciplines. When instructors applied on their own, their proposals
ran parallel to tenure-track faculty (TTF) proposals. NTTF are not TTF, yet
one may identify with the other in the common pursuit of good teaching, and
mixed grant pools are a productive venue for the work.
With the development and grant work underway, we asked our English
chair and the LAS dean to work with us to revise instructors’ annual review
forms, which were tenure-track forms by default. We unpacked “teaching”
as their sole category of work into “teaching” for annual instruction and the
“development of teaching” as related and integral work. The revised review
template professionalizes their teaching as it establishes a dynamic self-reflexive
practice. Teaching includes self-assessment, goal setting, and ongoing development work with subsequent institutional support through grants, workshops,
and some travel to conferences.
As we more fully professionalized instructors’ working relations with peers
across the college, we positioned ourselves for a policy change in hiring. Our
new curriculum with its theoretical outcomes required stronger credentials
and development work. By contract, our adjuncts had no development requirements. As a result, we needed to convert adjunct lines and hire more instructors,
so all faculty participated in ongoing development. Our definitional work on
curricula and the addition of a professional development standard for reviews
justified a new hiring policy and reconfigured appointments.
A related factor was a timely surge in first-year enrollments in the fall of
2002. I could not hire enough adjuncts to meet the demand, but I had some
who would teach a 4/4 load with access to benefits—despite a low salary. Our
dean considered our recent work along with the enrollment situation, and then
agreed to hire full-time instructors. With a salary of $21,000 for a 4/4 load, I filled
the positions because applicants found our new curriculum and development
opportunities intellectually refreshing. They needed health and retirement
benefits, and the prospect of merit increases offset salary concerns. Due to the
enrollment surge and the urgent need to hire for a 4/4 load, we implemented
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instructorships as our standard. We hired instructors whose appointments
were .50 or greater by choice. Monthly development sessions are required, and
in exchange they receive benefits and earn annual merit increases.
Defining Instructor Workloads to Enable Quality Instruction
A fourth area of advocacy was faculty workload, which encompasses quantity
of work (number of students, number of essays) and ways of working, such as
the one-on-one writing conference. Our workload had to theoretically enable
our revised curriculum and practice.
At the start of our initiative, our course cap was 22 students, so faculty
with a 4/4 load taught 88 students per term and assessed 616 essays (one diagnostic, plus six essays per course) per term. Most faculty required revision
and offered conferences outside of class. Consider the pedagogical implications
of this workload given the CCCC’s standard of no more than 20 students per
section or 60 writing students as one’s total workload (“Statement”). Clearly,
the heavy workload negatively impacted teaching and learning conditions.
I had full control over the number and types of essays assigned, so the question was whether reducing numbers would enhance learning and instruction.
The first course required one diagnostic, three out-of-class essays, and three
in-class essays. Students learned to write “good” in-class essays by writing three
in succession. This premise was not theoretically defensible, so we dropped
down to four essays to secure more “adequate time for reading and response
to students’ writing” (“Statement”). The workload fell from 616 essays to 352
essays, a recovery of about 88 work hours. The change only required theoretical
justification inside our program.
I addressed the workload issue from the inside, where rhetorical influence
is more of a given, out toward the institutional terrain, where agency was more
a matter of aligning program values, material needs, and theoretical interests
with those of the institution and its mission. Policies on enrollment caps differ by institution. Some deans police caps and mandate increases. Elsewhere,
room size may set caps. We had caps of 22 in computer classrooms with 24
stations. The number of FYC sections, approximately 50, warranted approval
beyond our department. English enjoyed some control, but a program-wide
drop in caps required negotiation.
In the spring of 2002, an unexpected surge in first-year enrollments broke
an earlier pattern of spring drop-offs. In January, I discovered heavy FYC waitlists, and I did not have adjuncts on call. How could I seat wait-listed students
if hiring was not an option? I had an urgent situation—an appealing surge in
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enrollments—and, fortunately, a rising institutional interest in FTE growth
given our state’s deep economic downturn. I mediated the issue by emailing a
proposal to the chancellor:
Our first-year courses are heavily waitlisted, and hiring new faculty midyear is
not an option. One of our goals is to align course caps with NCTE standards for
quality writing instruction. Currently, our courses are above the recommended
cap. We are excited by the enrollment surge and know that everyone gains if we
seat these students. Writing faculty could lift spring caps by one student across
all sections and seat them. We would do this if you would agree to drop our caps
by one student across FYC next fall. We propose a one-for-one exchange, which
would cost us about 1.5 new instructors for fall when we surely would have time
to hire another instructor or two.
The shortest distance between two points is a straight line, but the
resolution to an administrative crisis seldom is. By emailing the chancellor, I
luckily discovered a straight line. She emailed me back within the hour to say
she would consult Academic Affairs about the salary costs for fall. Further, she
thanked me for “thinking outside the box” and problem solving on behalf of the
institution. I emailed writing faculty and awaited word from Academic Affairs.
A phone call from the VCAA’s office sealed the agreement, and then it was
back to the matter of lines. I was mildly reprimanded for cutting across the grass
and emailing the chancellor; after all, there were my chair, the dean, and then
Academic Affairs under the chancellor. I had considered the administrative folks
between us, but the chancellor had recently linked enrollment growth to budget
forecasts for the next year. She thus arose as the administrative audience most
capable of action. My training tells me to advocate where agency resides, but
politically, I can only do so with relational trust secured by competence at levels
between the program and the “space” where agency resides. Now I habitually
announce intent and proactively secure relations for work before I negotiate
change. It is also the case, though, that kairotic situations arise unexpectedly,
and I do engage them.
Our one-for-one exchange actually launched our course-cap initiative.
In the fall of 2002, we hired more instructors and dropped the FYC cap to 21.
The loss of four students meant about 6 fewer hours of grading and response
per term. Enrollments rose again in fall and surged impressively in spring. I
called Academic Affairs and proposed another one-for-one exchange, where
we would enroll 22, and drop to 20 come fall. All agreed, so we moved forward.
In the fall, we reset our cap at 20, when the VCAA’s office called to offer
us a cap of 19 across the Writing Program. They discovered the positive efW53
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fect of lower caps was a higher ranking for quality instruction. In Colorado,
we have performance contracts, where we are merited for quality, and course
caps under 20 is a criterion set by U.S. News and World Report’s ranking. Our
institution desired a higher ranking, and Writing a healthier workload. The
program’s size, work, and front-door location made it an appealing context
for lower course caps. Our workload dropped by 12 students, 48 essays, about
16 fewer assessment hours.
My initial proposal to the chancellor assumed that the Writing Program
governed its own caps. Writing, I proposed, would enroll one more if the institution rewarded us later. The program asserted the power to negotiate caps
and control faculty workload. As Ed White reminds us, “power is a matter of
perception,” and we must “empower (ourselves) to do our jobs” (11). By calling upon the institution to negotiate with me, I realized influence and gained
material ground.
The enrollment crisis arose naturally, and I invented a reasonable solution.
I nudged the wait-lists along (as Schuster advises) by not compelling students
to enroll in unpopular evening sections or asking faculty to overextend with
a fifth section for adjunct pay. Wait-lists built across high-demand, daytime
slots and generated an exigent situation requiring a rhetorical solution. We
recovered space and time to improve teaching and the well-being of faculty.
Our lower cap serves students, faculty, and the institution and exploits none,
so it is a defensible and just change.
Redefining Salary and Compensation Standards for Writing
Professionals
Of all the subcomponents of our agenda for change, renegotiating faculty
salaries and compensation was predictably challenging. In “certain fields of
study,” following Michael Bérubé, “some forms of advocacy are not merely
permitted but positively mandated” (193). Some disciplines must “advocate
the existence—and, on bold days, the growth—of their programs (women’s
studies, ethnic studies) in a way that no professor of economics” would arguably advocate (192). Moreover, Bérubé urges us to recognize that advocacy “for
one form of social organization or another” can be “an integral part of one’s
professional protocols” (194).
I would naturalize such a mandate for rhetoric and composition, where
adjunct exploitation is a commonplace, where we yet justify our existence and
“on bold days” advocate for “growth,” for the professionalization of faculty and
integrity of our work. Not advocating impedes our work, and silent complic-
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ity meets Bérubé’s standard of unprofessional behavior. If “professionals are
supposed to serve their clients” and “constituencies” (194), “not doing so is,
strictly speaking, unprofessional” (194). As I have argued, our rhetorical work
is integral, and securing a living wage for our faculty is an ethical charge we
share in this “certain field.”
A Budget Crisis as Cause for Working and Rewarding Otherwise
Even as the UCCS campus was marked for growth, our enrollment surges between 2001 and 2003 barely offset budget cuts of about 40 percent of our state
funding. The goal of raising instructor salaries had to respond to extraordinary
financial constraints. Understanding the complexity of advancing a salary initiative in a distressed economy, we delivered other work (our curriculum and
development) and contributed visibly to the institution’s call for FTE growth.
We first established productive institutional relations to enable a salary initiative—but in better times.
Despite the budget cuts, or perhaps because the cuts forced all of us (administrators, faculty, and staff) to collaboratively review resources, prioritize
needs, and clarify values, writing secured support for a salary initiative with
compression raises and incremental increases in base pay. While the Writing
Program does not deserve full credit for the institution’s progress on the salary
issue, we purposefully framed low salaries as an exigent situation and advocated in two critical “spaces,” within our Faculty Assembly and directly to our
chancellor, Pamela Shockley-Zalabak.
Since my arrival, writing faculty relentlessly pressed me for compensation
in response to their new work. No matter the intellectual appeal of curricula
and workload gains, the low salaries systemically depressed our workplace climate and culture and damaged morale. Faculty couldn’t support themselves as
$21,000 was not a living wage, so annual turnover rates were about 20 percent.
In the spring of 2004, faculty learned that no merit increases would be
given. With that news, faculty pressed me the hardest because the promise of
relief had fully stalled out. Deep salary concerns informed our department’s
external review, which was delivered in collaboration with a CWPA Self-Study.
The official review included NTTF salary concerns and a clear charge to the
department and the university to redress compensation issues (Knoblauch,
Holdstein, and Shiedley 4, 6). With no merit pay in view, I barely held back a
flood tide of radical strategies, including a walkout. My face-to-face interactions with exploited writing faculty, still burdened by workload, the psychic
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costs of curricular change, and financial stress, moved me to advocate despite
the budget crisis.
By the fall of 2004, I decided to reach out to our chancellor. Every October,
the Women’s Faculty Committee sponsors a brunch at her home, an informal
gathering that brings women of all ranks, disciplines, and interests together for
a few hours of meaningful conversation and support. Our chancellor defines the
brunch as a “listening and learning event,” “useful for gathering information,” a
forum “where faculty may cross boundaries in a fluid way and enjoy a lot more
freedom of exchange” (Shockley-Zalabak). In this space, one may interrogate the
institution with greater ease than with an executive appointment in Main Hall.
Imagining such spaces, James Porter et al. invoke David Sibley’s “zones of
ambiguity,” where “boundary instability” makes critique and “interrogation”
possible (qtd. in Porter et al. 625; also see Sibley). These “zones of ambiguity
within institutions can often [. . .] be found within the processes of decision
making” (Porter et al. 625). Theoretically, these processes are “rhetorical systems,” and such systems are the “very structure of the institution itself ” (625).
On that memorable Sunday in October, I entered an ambiguous zone with a
strategic plan—I would define low salaries and faculty attrition as an exigent
situation and ask the chancellor to work with me to redress it.
At the brunch, I first tested appeals on two of my English colleagues, who
both felt it was appropriate for me to raise salary concerns. Then our Faculty
Assembly (FA) president came over and asked, “Do you have any initiatives
you would like FA to pursue this year? I am looking for a few key projects.”
Once more, I described our salary situation, and she agreed to facilitate an FA
discussion. By the time I asked for ten minutes at the close of our brunch, I was
resolved to make the chancellor aware of the problem and secure her support
for future discussion. “Will you work together with me on this issue?” was my
primary appeal. Here is the substance of my petition as I delivered it on that
Sunday morning in 2004:
The loss of merit this year has hit writing faculty particularly hard as it has all of
us. I am especially concerned for my faculty, because, as you know, they have been
working very hard on revising curricula through extensive development work.
Our base pay is now $21,000 for a 4/4 load, and this is for career instructors with
graduate degrees. The salary is not a living wage. I am losing four to five faculty
every summer because they cannot pay their bills. They want to teach here at UCCS,
but they cannot afford to do so. What is truly sad, and most dire, is that some of
my most effective instructors are so stressed by financial need that they are challenging their peers. Most recently, an instructor confronted a peer in the mailroom
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and petitioned her for access to an additional summer section. She invoked her
senior status to persuade her colleague. Her strategy worked. The junior instructor
came to me and offered to give up her summer section. Our salaries are so very
low, good people are systemically compelled to choose dehumanizing strategies
to secure themselves financially. I want you to know what is happening within our
program. I myself do not need a salary increase, and I imagine many of us would
fare well enough if we simply chose to help NTTF faculty out. I want to know if
you will work with me on the issue and discuss our situation with writing faculty.
Our chancellor began her career at UCCS as an adjunct instructor in communication, so she adeptly drew from her experience and engaged my ethical
appeals with little pause. Yes, she would work with me, and yes, she would surely
meet with faculty to fully explore their needs.
Our Faculty Assembly president and the chancellor followed through and
addressed the salary issue in diverse governance forums throughout the fall.
Writing faculty met with the chancellor in the fall and again in the spring. Faculty Assembly resolved to allocate a portion of faculty merit money for salary
compression increases for all faculty. Since then, we have sustained four years
of ongoing salary and compression initiatives, and writing instructors (both
the largest NTTF group and among the neediest) have gained some ground.
In fall of 2008, we hired at $31,722 for a 4/4 load, a $10,722 increase secured
incrementally over four years. When our Faculty Assembly passed another base
salary resolution in the spring of 2007, the proposal included a salary floor of
$28,800 in the humanities (an amount linked to writing’s market value and
salaries at peer institutions) and a resolution to lift that base each year by the
prior year’s average merit increase awarded to like faculty. The FA resolution
began a five-year aggressive salary initiative with experienced instructors
gaining ground through compression and new instructors through increases
at the salary floor. To sustain this momentum as a discipline, we need our peer
institutions and the field to push the issue since writing’s market value at the
MA level still does not afford us any external leverage for salary growth.
Professionalizing salaries and compensation began with a compelling
account of an exigent financial situation in our workplace and a subsequent
agreement with campus leaders to prioritize the need and collaboratively pursue
change across time. No immediate fix was ever imagined, expected, or promised.
Once I defined the issue and established working relations with institutional
leaders, I redirected my energy toward writing faculty and the program. I did
not drive deliberations in Faculty Assembly or in budget committees. A number
of our writing instructors joined these committees and participated deeply as
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NTTF representatives. The chancellor embraced the goal and committed herself
to working with the campus budget committee to incrementally lift salaries.
Good people across contexts came together during dark financial times—in the
midst of a budgetary crisis so dire that everyone was compelled to take ethical
stock of our priorities—and collaboratively granted the value of instructors’
professional contributions to our mission. Raising faculty salaries was always
integral to our initiative, and our earlier definitional work on curriculum and
instruction made relational way for this work.
Critical Reflection, Looking Back, and Moving Forward
Reflective critique is the final stage of Glassick, Huber, and Maeroff ’s framework,
and to extend my reflective analysis, I will now critically recap the project.
The primary goal of the advocacy initiative was to reconstitute writing as a
disciplinary enterprise by setting incremental short-term goals (revising our
curriculum and instruction) and then building upon the work as value added to
our program to scaffold arguments for subsequent changes in faculty workload,
status, and compensation. Our definitional work gave us visibility and credibility
across the institutional landscape with which we incrementally secured the
material resources we need to grow and enrich the program. We have realized
the majority of our goals over a period of seven years.
We consistently grounded our rhetorical work in the discipline, always
aligning our claims with the theoretical foundations and values that sustain
our field. Writing faculty worked the hardest as they deeply revised their work,
reframed their identities, and advanced writing’s “new” work. Considering
these challenges, we should ask whether it is ethical to ask NTTF to deliver
additional work in order to earn decent pay. Should NTTF have to work without
much compensation over a period of seven years just to merit the following
field standard: “the program treats contingent faculty respectfully, humanely
and professionally” (CCCC, “CCCC”)? The chronic state of NTTF exploitation
remains an issue that most of us care about but few redress. Our gains are so
minimal as to seem improbable on a grand scale.
My sense of our advocacy is largely this: Along the way, we lost writing
faculty, good faculty, who chose not to reconstitute their work just to earn what
was truly due to them long ago—a living wage. We revised our curriculum for
theoretical reasons, not just as a strategic reframing of the work. Some who left
did not grant the differences, understanding development work to be beyond
their contractual terms, even with benefits and more security. Faculty who
stayed did so because they valued development and embraced our vision even
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as we had no guarantee that advocacy improves salaries. Incremental successes
helped, but change came too slowly for some to wait. Recalibrating an adjunct’s
learned relations to work—the work that its material conditions expect, no
matter how well adjuncts may deliver it—is no easy task.
The argument of and for writing’s disciplinarity is largely granted, if by
that I may claim that our instructorships are much improved, our tenure-track
writing faculty numbers are rising (three by fall of 2008), and we approved a new
English major with a rhetoric and writing emphasis. All that we have gained
will continue as our momentum continues, so the work is ongoing—our disciplinary grounds are ours for the sustaining and advancing. Not everyone in
our program (or the field) understands the need for disciplinarity, but locally
we trust that as long as disciplinary frameworks define our peers, writing will
aspire to equitable relations in all of its work. Disciplinary frames are rhetorical constructs subject to local articulation and quite capable of ethical action.
With our frame, we are more familiar, more integral to the academic enterprise.
Another key concern that this initiative raises is whether administrators can understand and appreciate advocacy from their middle managers.
To reflect responsibly on my rhetorical work as a WPA, I met with Chancellor
Shockley-Zalabak after the salary initiative had progressed to ascertain her
understanding of my advocacy with its strong measure of institutional critique
and change. I also sought critical feedback on the appropriateness of a middle
manager’s advocacy for her program and discipline. As WPAs, we need feedback
from our executive leaders if we are to sustain relations. The chancellor shared
the following insights:
People who make final policy decisions or take leadership actions must be informed and [. . .] must have valid critique [. . .] to use to make informed decisions.
How do [you] get the information [. . .] to make those decisions? You look readily
to your leadership in that middle arena. I cannot be expected to understand what
needs to happen in a composition program. You need thoughtful and informed
critique, which is linked to advocacy in my mind. Critique has to bring a form of
advocacy with it, a risky thing in some organizational structures. [Critique works
well] when you not only tell me very articulately what is wrong, factually based
and affectively based, but then you tell me what we might do, and then you take
responsibility to help to inform other people, other decision-making bodies like
Faculty Assembly. [Critique] is an absolutely critical responsibility.
The chancellor theoretically frames “informed critique” as rhetorical activity:
a problem-solving argument informed with factual and affective detail and
enabled by responsible advocacy. Perhaps the nature of her own work as chief
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advocacy officer of our institution enables her understanding. As she recognizes
common values, needs, and interests within an initiative, she may collaborate
with writing to serve our common mission. An insight I have discovered here
is that forward movement is the first step, no matter the scope of the problem.
A first step may simply be a conversation that identifies goals, defines the
problem, and seeks no more than a joint recognition of the need and a shared
commitment to work to redress the issue incrementally.
“ You Never Hesitate to Tackle the Most Difficult Problems,
Lucky Numbers 10, 19, 20, 44, 46”
We might readily agree that our discipline “never fails to tackle the most difficult problems,” and our institutional conditions of work remain our toughest.2 Tom Fox’s critical insight on the issue complements my aims here. When
“institutional change is not valued by official retention, tenure and promotion
processes [. . .] that leaves institutional change to be done by those who have
succeeded in the institution and who are less likely to want to change it” (Fox
98–99). As we do not “have much recognition for this research in our field,” we
may understand why it is that “institutional change is not often taken on by
untenured professors” (98). Admonishing junior faculty to shut up and write will
not help us improve our conditions of work writ large. When we classify applied
rhetorical work as intellectual work, those of us whose professional appointments expect advocacy are encouraged and rewarded for work that realizes
our discipline’s standards for excellence in writing. Rethinking the shut-upand-write commonplace, we might serve our programs if we affirmed applied
rhetorical work as the real thing, and collectively invented frameworks such
as Glassick, Huber, and Maeroff ’s model for documenting our ever-expanding
array of intellectual work. To that end, our colleagues across the disciplines may
better grasp the scholarly commons of our applied rhetorical work.
Acknowledgments
I thank Tom Fox, Deborah Holdstein, and an anonymous reviewer for their comments on an earlier draft of this essay. I also thank Kathleen E. Welch, who habitually hailed me as rhetor during my graduate studies.
Notes
1. This report follows the Ernest Boyer Report of the Carnegie Foundation for the
Advancement of Teaching with its compelling argument for a broader definition
of scholarly work. The report scaffolds CWPA’s “Evaluating.”
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2. On a whim, I pulled this fortune out of a cookie the day before our brunch. Several
fortune slips are tacked to my desk’s backboard. By administrative happenstance,
my take-out fortunes affirm a value, assert a principle or charge me to remember
why I advocate for the program.
Works Cited
Adler-Kassner, Linda. The Activist WPA:
Changing Stories about Writers and Writing. Logan: Utah State UP, 2008.
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Debra Frank Dew
Debra Frank Dew is associate professor of English and director of the Writing
Program at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. With Alice Horning,
she coedited Untenured Faculty as Writing Program Administrators: Institutional
Practices and Politics (Parlor Press, 2007). Her current project assesses the impact
of writing conferences on students’ affective response to first-year writing as it
imagines that student narratives of institutional critique and change may ground
arguments for enhancing writing’s teaching and learning conditions.
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