Landmark Essays on Writing Program Administration

Kelly Ritter is Professor of English and Writing Studies and Associate Dean for Curricula and Academic Policy at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She has seventeen years’ experience as a WPA across three different universities. Her most recent book is Reframing the Subject: Postwar Instructional Film and Class-Conscious Literacies (2015). From 2012 to 2017, she was editor of College English. Melissa Ianetta is Professor of English and Unidel Andrew B. Kirkpatrick Jr. Chair in Writing at the University of Delaware, where she has served as a WPA in both the university’s writing center and the English department’s composition program. She is the current editor of College English and, with Lauren Fitzgerald of Yeshiva University, she co-authored The Oxford Guide for Writing Tutors: Practice and Research.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Canon Fodder? Surveying Our WPA Landmarks – Melissa Ianetta and Kelly Ritter

Section 1

Historicizing WPA






Emerson C. Shuck, Administration of the Freshman English Program



Gary Olson and Joseph M. Moxley, Directing Freshman Composition: The Limits of Authority



Barbara L’Eplattenier, Finding Ourselves in the Past: An Argument for Historical Work on WPAs



Charlton, Jonikka and Shirley Rose, Twenty More Years in the WPA’s Progress



Neal Lerner, Searching for Robert Moore
Section 2

Defining WPA




Joseph Harris, Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss: Class Consciousness in Composition



Marc Bousquet, Tenured Bosses and Disposable Teachers



Shirley K. Rose and Irwin Weiser, "The WPA as Researcher and Archivist



Paul Kei Matsuda, Let’s Face it: Language Issues and the Writing Program Administrator



Amy Vidali, Disabling Writing Program Administration



Anne Ellen Geller and Harry Denny, Of Ladybugs, Low Status and Loving the Job: Writing Center Professionals Navigating Their Careers



Thomas Amorose, WPA Work at the Small College or University: Re-Imagining Power and Making the Small School Visible



Tim Taylor, Writing Program Administration at the Two Year College: Ghosts in the Machine
Section 3

Theorizing WPA




Jeanne Gunner, Decentering the WPA



Bruce Horner, Redefining Work and Value for Writing Program Administration



Donna Strickland,The Managerial Unconscious of Composition Studies



Laura Micchiche, More than a Feeling: Disappointment and WPA Work



Linda Adler-Kassner, The WPA as Activist: Systematic Strategies for Framing, Action and Representation



Melissa Ianetta, If Aristotle Ran the Writing Center: Classical Rhetoric and Writing Center Administration



Rachael Green-Howard, Building A WPA Library: A Bibliographic Essay

Index