Administrative Statement
Early in my career, I did not intend to court administrative work; after all, in academia, administrative work often gets a bad rap: it distracts from scholarship, it turns passionate teachers into dull-eyed corporate automatons; it pits the needs of students against the needs of teachers. With such expectations, imagine my surprise when, serving as Senior Assistant Director of First Year Composition (FYC) at the University of Oklahoma (OU), I discovered not only that I was good at administrative work—I loved it! During my tenure as a Writing Program Administrator (WPA), I have learned that thinking of administrative work as a hindrance to research and teaching has it backwards. Administrative work doesn’t stifle scholarship, it is scholarship; administrative work isn’t selling out to increasingly market-driven initiatives, it is activism in action; administrative work doesn’t undermine students or teachers, it supports the conditions necessary to their success. Administrative work is the place where the rubber meets road, where ideas become practice. It is the work that makes the noblest missions of higher education—teaching and scholarship—possible. I would never claim that administrative work is easy or that all administrative work meets the criteria I have outlined here, but I do believe it is vitally important work. My philosophy of administration centers on supporting and protecting teachers and students by enacting innovative Composition and Rhetoric scholarship, creating ethical employment conditions, and facilitating clear communication.
Administration as Scholarship
Crafting curriculum is one of many ways WPAs (writing program administrators) have the chance to take scholarship from Composition and Rhetoric and put it into action. When I was serving as Senior Assistant Director of FYC at OU, upper administration presented us with a mandate, as well resources for achieving it: make FYC courses not just meaningful, but “life-changing” to students. How we would respond to this call was up to us and, as a part of the administrative team that developed this curriculum, I can sincerely say that we did not view ourselves as going through the motions to fulfill an ultimately meaningless administrative decree: we were energized, excited, and ready to put state-of-the-art scholarship into practice. We recognized this moment as an opportunity to enact Composition and Rhetoric scholarship in ways adapted to our local context. Drawing on ideas of rhetorical education (Mountford and Keith) and the strategies of rhetorical listening (Ratcliffe), we used these principles to design an innovative two semester FYC sequence that incorporates public speaking and rhetorical listening as well as demands student investment. This experience not only allowed us to draw on existing scholarship to complete administrative tasks, it positions us to report on and analyze our experiences moving forward—in short, to use and to do scholarship.
Administration as Activism
WPAs also have the responsibility to advocate for and support their teachers and staff, particularly in terms of creating labor conditions that support excellence in teaching. Staffing sections, training teachers, mediating student and teacher complaints: in these “unglamorous” administrative tasks labor conditions are defined and negotiated. WPAs by no means have total control over the labor conditions they supervise—pay scales, the availability of permanent lines, and course caps are often decided at higher levels of administration—but WPAs can and should be the voice that speaks for and persuasively and ethically represents the needs of their faculty, students, and staff to those upper levels. In my time at in the FYC office at OU, our labor pool transformed from being almost entirely compromised of GTAs and adjuncts to including 12 (and counting) renewable-term appointments. The FYC directors immediately preceding my time in the office, over the course of several years, presented careful arguments for a more permanent labor pool so that, when an exigent moment for enacting that change appeared in retention initiatives aimed at improving freshman course experiences, they were able to seize it and create more ethical and effective labor conditions for FYC teachers. Having seen this change play out and having helped to integrate the renewable-term faculty into our department, I am reminded that though often slow moving and discouraging—there is little academic work more connected to real-life opportunities for activism than administrative work.
Administration as Student and Teacher Support
Administrative work is also about facilitating communication across campus. For example, crafting clear, effective, and useful policy is about helping teachers do their jobs and students succeed. At OU, I wrote several new policies—for instance a program wide revision policy to be included on syllabi—not to impinge teacher authority, but to support it. On our campus revision policies varied so widely that the FYC office found itself responding to many student complaints concerning unfair or unclear policies in individual instructor’s courses. We recognized that students were confused by very different policies (ranging from no allowed revisions to unlimited revisions, as well differing and occasionally unstated stipulations) but also that teachers cared deeply about how they framed and thought about revision in their classrooms. Ultimately I wrote—and submitted to our teachers for feedback, which was then incorporated—a revision policy that includes two options for teachers to choose from. This allows the FYC office to do the work of crafting clear policy (and supports our ability to explain that policy to students who come to the office for clarification), but also respects the different approaches to revision of our talented teachers and makes use of their thoughtful feedback. This seemingly mundane example is a good encapsulation of how administrative work can support teachers and students equally.
Read more about my Administrative Accomplishments
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