power and decentered/shared power—in order to participate in ideological conversations where our institutions might see or feel them the most quickly and urgently.
We end the book with a chapter that helps us consider GenAdmin philosophies for retheorizing other aspects of the university and profession. In Chapter 6, we offer a concomitant ethics for GenAdmin that relies on hope as a collective and critical endeavor. Part of theorizing a GenAdmin identity for WPAs means replacing stories of reluctance, disappointment, default, or defeat with those of eudaimonia, or flourishing. A GenAdmin identity helps the five of us to construct and enact an ethics that recognizes our potential as change agents and reflects our desires to have a productive impact on our worlds. This ethics is characterized by agency and by a reconsideration of responsibility as more than a set of tasks attached to a job description but rather as part of a scholarly, administrative ethic. While we respond to the daily challenges or practical demands of the job (and try to come up with ways to solve them), it is not this practicality that drives us as much as it is a desire to do the job humanely, creatively, reflectively, and critically.
Conversations and Interludes
Because this is in every way a collaboratively written book, we do not present a singular perspective about the philosophy or practice of WPA. In fact, the five of us are a small model of dissensus in action. We agreed to write together, to work through ideological differences and to challenge each other’s definitions, in order to try to arrive at something after understanding. One dimension of our interactions that a coherent theoretical text cannot replicate is the dimension of anecdotal dialogues or the power of narrative. As five friends, colleagues, and collaborators working on a book project, we have talked at length through email, extended conference meetings, and document creation and revision activities using interfaces like Google Docs. The consequence of these dialogic sessions is the interstitial philosophy and explication that is the book—one voice derived from many. But we do not want to lose the flavor of our differences and dialogues and how individual anecdotes lead to ingenious connectivity and invention, especially since these dialogues are a major force in keeping our ideas in oscillation rather than stagnation.
One way we juxtapose the necessary univocality of our book with dialogue is to include shorter extended illuminations or interludes between the major chapters where we have noted fault lines in our theorizing. These interludes are culled from a range of texts to (1) serve as interesting and thought-provoking bridges between chapters and their main ideas and (2) illuminate the way that GenAdmin enjoy thinking and rethinking about the daily issues we face. In the development of this book, we noted particular hotspots or contact zones regarding the complexities of choice, expertise, and empathy; the definitions and ways of strategizing in WPA work; and the practice of productive advocacy in the administration of higher education. In contrast to the rest of the book, each interlude is singly voiced and individually written (or compiled in the case of the first interlude “On Choice”) to represent how one of us has navigated a contact zone by theorizing individual experiences. We have left the authors of the singly voiced interludes unidentified to keep the emphasis on the individual experience while demonstrating the near arbitrariness of the narrative “I.”
While working on this book, we also began circulating Flip Ultra HD video cameras to WPAs and those with WPA interests around the country in order to collect responses to the questions driving our book in a kind of unscripted and aggregating conversation. We have created a supplemental website (www.sites.google.com/site/assemblageproject) where we have been and will continue to collect and index these clips. We call it The Assemblage Project to connote any number of texts, objects, or pieces gathered into a single set and context. This site will allow us to illuminate the book’s text with particular videos or sets of videos that extend conversation on an idea or topic. As a public site, other contributors will also be able to create original assemblages for any number of projects. Our purpose, other than experimenting with new ways of collecting and connecting knowledge, is to put our questions and ideas into play with a larger set of voices by creating an archive of interaction, providing either a quick entrance to the conversation or a more extensive source for research by our colleagues. Such a dialogical practice is commensurate with our understanding that GenAdmin, both as a working identity and a philosophical practice, never rests. As we live out the theorizing of GenAdmin, it remains explicitly under construction, allowing for the connections, inventions, and unforeseens we thrive on.
Interlude
On Choice
Jonnika: I live with the desire to both fit in and be different. I left my home and parents to go back to graduate school, picked up and moved with Colin and our then-two-year-old son Ian over eight hundred miles away to a place that, compared to where I had spent the last twenty-six years of my life, was cold, gray, and huge. It was an extremely difficult choice to make, one I agonized over for the first few years of school, but one I knew would make a significant change in the trajectory of my professional life. But it was the reason I was leaving almost everything I knew and it was breaking my parents’ hearts, so I clung to a vision of myself as a WPA as a way to justify my choice to move.
I like to think about the big picture, and I love the viral potential of doing administrative work. It must be linked to my desire to do something big with my life, always seemingly unfulfilled, that makes me want to be a WPA, a real one, a respected one. I had been the interim writing center director at the university where I got my MA, and while I knew my colleagues had confidence in me, I also knew they wanted the position to be tenure-track, which meant I would not be able to keep it. I had to go back to school. I chose my graduate program because of its secondary area in WPA, and I immediately embraced what that program had to offer—a commitment to the intellectual nature of WPA work. I knew that was my path towards respect.
Colin: While Jonikka defined and chose a path for a PhD, I went along for the ride. I knew I wanted to teach writing, and I knew that, unlike a range of couples we would meet in our doctoral program, Jonikka and I would be together, working together, even if I eventually went outside of academia for a job. So moving to Indiana, for me, wasn’t a choice I ever had to make. But I did choose to have a programmatic voice, even though I struggled with the definition of rhetoric and my role in a rhetoric and composition program for many years. And that started from day one when I met with our incoming graduate student mentor group. Shirley K Rose asked us pretty directly, “Why are you here?” I couldn’t answer that question, and she bugged me about it until I could. In fact, she kept asking until I had incorporated it into my internalized reflections, my ways of thinking about teaching and learning, about being anywhere.
At the time, I didn’t know that asking such a question would lead me to learn about an area connected to administration. But that word wasn’t a bad word to me. I think I was in middle school when my dad was promoted to being in charge of a lab at a government contractor, and I remember his prep-work including reading Miyamoto Musashi’s The Book of Five Rings, which I read in turn. Such a self-education taught me several things about what my dad called management: (1) administration doesn’t circumvent creativity and should in fact stimulate it; (2) assessment isn’t useful or relevant if you can’t give a five (on a one to five scale) to your people—it’s just a rationalization for financial choices that will be made at an administrative level higher than yours; and (3) interdisciplinary reading should increase exponentially with your pay-grade, while management-related trend texts were barely worth a library card and a quick read for main points. In short, a classic book on the way of the samurai can be quite a relevant read for anyone in a position of authority and responsibility if you’re not asking questions you already have the answers to.
Amy: Like Jonikka, I’m a big picture-thinker and I’m a planner. I like to think about what could be and what has to happen in order to make the could be what is. While I like thinking about and reading theory, I’m a practical person by nature, and WPA work gave me the chance to take the theories of rhetoric and composition and put them into practice in ways that supported student writers and their teachers. To me, it felt like work that mattered. I could see the outcome of my writing and thinking as a WPA that I couldn’t see if I tried to imagine myself as a theorist. I don’t support the theory-practice divide that seems to pervade much of the field because I think that writing program administration is a blending