Untenured Faculty as Writing Program Administrators, by Debra Frank Dew and Alice Horning. West Lafayette:
Parlor Press, 2007. 316 pp.
Reviewed by Amy Rupiper Taggart, North Dakota State University
When I agreed to review this book, I had just stepped into the Writing Program Administration (WPA) position
at my institution after an “appropriate” waiting and preparation period of 6 years. To be fair, I was still technically a
jWPA (a junior WPA, according to this volume, is anyone doing the job without tenure, regardless of prior experience)
because my tenure case was not finalized, but it had passed through department and college without a hitch and all signs
suggested tenure was on its way. So, unlike many of the contributors to this volume, I had dodged the pre-tenure WPA
bullet and was in a supportive department where the writing program was largely respected or at least understood to be
valuable. The program had also recently been run by rhetoric and composition professionals, including me as a member
of the first-year English committee. I knew my situation was a good one, and somewhat unusual. I expected, then, that
this book on untenured faculty as writing program administrators would almost exclusively offer the kind of sage
warnings I had received when I turned down first-year out, fresh, green WPA jobs in departments, especially where I
might be the only composition and rhetoric specialist. I anticipated it being relevant to graduate students in preparation
for their first push onto the job market. It shouldn’t have surprised me so much to see the range of stances taken by the
contributors to this volume: if the issue were as black and white as “don’t do it,” a whole book wouldn’t be warranted.
The issue is far from black and white: it’s grayscale. WPAs take these jobs, often early in their careers, for a
wide range of reasons: they are geographically bound, they are energetic and passionate, they would rather take an
administrative job than no job, they recognize contextual factors that make such a position reasonable, or they are able
to collaborate with colleagues on the work. This book offers all of these perspectives and more, often shifting between
the rich narratives of WPAs in a wide range of contexts and policy and theory about administrative work. In “Defining
Junior,” Suellynn Duffey talks about being a highly experienced professional who took a pre-tenure WPA job and had
much more authority than jWPAs without her level of experience; she challenges generalized statements about taking
these positions without tenure on the basis of her individual situation and others that might be like it. Martha
Townsend’s narrative on “Negotiating the Risks and Reaping the Rewards” also suggests there are ways to make it to
tenure and be successful as a pre-tenure WPA. Taking a balanced, cautious stance, Ruth Mirtz and Roxanne Cullen
address the issue of the “call” so many administrators seem to hear to serve in the vocational sense: the call may be
motivating but may also be dangerous if it leads to burnout and a sense of martyr status. Debra Frank Dew seems to
agree: she suggests the desire to do this work might come from a working class sense of “good labor,” from a sense of
service and activism and argues that our products are material, rhetorical, scholarly and humane. The sage warnings,
too, are here. In particular, Alice Horning’s “Ethics and the jWPA” takes a strongly oppositional stance to anyone
taking the job without tenure. Martha D. Patton and Jo Ann Vogt take a system-based stance, as well, arguing for the
overturn of a two-tiered (or more) system dependent on an “underclass.” Even graduate student program coadministrators have a voice here, and the narrative told by Brenda M. Helmbrecht and Connie Kendall seems like it
might represent an extreme degree to which graduate students could be used (the verb choice is quite deliberate) to do
this work. Perhaps because of the extreme, we should “hear” their voices and consider what we offer when we offer
administrative experience to graduate students.
While the book is written with new, pre-tenure WPAs in mind, I found its arguments—valuable for my own
thinking as I entered the position—both depressing and motivating. Because what I knew, but perhaps didn’t like to
think about, was what this book highlights again and again: there are numerous ways in which administrative work
doesn’t “count,” doesn’t really fit the categories that manage to persist, even as the field morphs and moves. Essay after
essay in this collection cites the volumes of arguments, from Boyer’s Scholarship Reconsidered to the Portland
Resolution, for administrative work as legitimate scholarship, the advancement of thought and practice in a field. Yet
essay after essay acknowledges that little movement has been made institutionally to recognize the two important pieces
of the argument: [1] to build good programs, one must build a scholarly base of knowledge and keep that base vital, and
[2] the impact of our administrative work is far more vast most of the time than even the impact of our scholarly
articles, read by so few and valued almost exclusively as the basis for tenure, promotion, and merit pay. Richard
Gebhardt’s almost bibliographic essay, “The Importance of Untenured Writing Administrators to Composition and
English Studies” argues that we need young, fresh minds directly in touch with theory and scholarship to motivate
change in the field. As important to my reading (and perhaps yours) was the arsenal of equipment Gephardt offers for
WPAs to use to make arguments about valuing this work. I finished reading the article considering how I might write a
clear job description for myself, one that worked a bit like a contract and could include recognition of the scholarly
dimension of my work. Such a job description could be applied as part of my case for promotion later. Martha
Townsend’s essay makes a similar move, as though to say from two very established and successful WPAs—keep
drawing on these common resources, making the cases, and soon enough precedent might become practice.
Part 4 complements these bibliographic essays by offering “Rhetorical Strategies for Mediating jWPA
Locations.” Rebecca Taylor Fremo suggests that there are particular rhetorical constraints in the small, liberal arts
college setting where a program director works largely with other tenured and tenure track faculty; she uses
marginalized rhetorics to argue from her marginal position. Sandee K. McGlaun also works from her position in “the
betweens,” considering the various constituencies, issues, and constraints among and between which a WPA must
navigate and negotiate. Paul Ranieri and Jackie Grutsch McKinney offer two views of running the same program and
suggest that contextual issues and timing must be considered to respond appropriately. They draw on the classical
rhetorical notions of phronesis, logos, and kairos to suggest how to make arguments for a program.
Is there a gap in the text? Of course. Again, if all the arguments could be made in a single book, our university
presses would be in greater danger than they are now, and we would have nice, neat answers to the complex questions
of our field. Given the number of women doing this work, it was unusual not to hear a feminist analysis, but these can
be found elsewhere. “Demystifying the Asian-American WPA” by Joseph Eng is the only statement from someone
likely to be othered on the basis of appearance and culture of origin in a WPA position. Eng’s essay opens up a whole
range of issues that likely deserve more discussion. As I prepare as a WPA to guide non-natives into a classroom where
I am certain they will be challenged just on the basis of accent, I desire more insight into navigating this tricky position.
So, I was a little bit surprised by the suggestion that sometimes the jWPA position was actually a reasonable
one based on contextual circumstances, but I was more surprised by how inspired (fired up?) I was as a soon-to-betenured WPA after reading Untenured Faculty as Writing Program Administrators. The book is relevant for those of us
who’ve been doing this work for a while because it offers important reminders about the labor that surrounds WPAs and
because it discusses the way the work is valued (or not) in general in the institution. As I think about merit pay, about
promotion to full professor, these arguments also prove important for me to hear and think about. The readership for this
book should include the graduate students considering this path, new WPAs (tenured and untenured), and experienced
WPAs alike. Even those who may not be WPAs but are invested in improving labor practices in the institution will
likely find portions of this book quite useful to making cases and finding activist allies.
Fargo, North Dakota
Works Cited
Boyer, Ernest. Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate. Princeton: Carnegie Foundation for the
Advancement of Teaching, 1990.
Hult, Christine, and the Portland Resolution Committee. “Portland Resolution: Guidelines for Writing Program
Administrator Positions.” WPA: Writing Program Administration 16 (1992). 88-94. Available
http://wpacouncil.org/positions/portlandres.html.