ABSTRACT
The issue of professional status for contemporary writing program administrators (WPAs) and their relationship to other administrators in higher education is difficult at best. Typically WPAs are faced with the question of how their knowledge of writing program administration can be “certified,” or affirmed professionally in meaningful ways. Because our professional knowledge of theoretically sound, best practices is not always well known, some chairs may think anyone in the department could head the writing program, but simply holding the English PhD (or a related degree) does not convey what WPAs know and do. English department chairs, to whom most WPAs report and by whom WPAs are appointed and removed, do not, by and large, have a theory about administering their departments, something much more likely in the repertoire of a WPA. Chairing departments is understood as management of resources, as training on the job, and for many faculty members, as something to be avoided rigorously, and certainly not something about which one would theorize. WPAs, however, either have trained specifically as scholars in rhetoric and composition, or, if originally trained in literature, have retrained along the way. Increasingly, WPAs have also had specific graduate course work in writing program administration or have attended the summer workshop for new WPAs sponsored by the Council of Writing Program Administrators, or both. Thus, although the WPA may have the most direct knowledge—in the department, in the college—about administering an academic program, the WPA’s knowledge is professional rather than management knowledge. On a larger scale, the rhetoric of professionalism, that of the WPA, competes with the rhetoric of management, that of higher education administration. Although this competition is focused in this entry on that of WPAs and higher administration, we can anticipate similar problems in any program associated with teaching languages— English-as-a-Second-Language programs and foreign language teaching— where principles of research and scholarship guide program development and practices, rather than cost/benefit and efficiency analysis.
