ABSTRACT
As Susan McLeod, Theresa Enos, and others point out in this book, most of us who specialize in rhetoric and composition will take our turn in administration. Developed composition programs need not only writing program administrators (WPAs) but also, depending on the program, writing center directors, assessment coordinators, writing-across-the-curriculum directors, faculty writing workshop leaders, graduate program directors, developmental writing coordinators, even deans of writing. Indeed, administrative jobs are so much part of the university composition landscape that it is a surprise to discover that only a few graduate programs are preparing their students for that work. As of this writing, at the opening of our new century, only about a dozen graduate courses concerned with administrative issues are offered in the sixty-five PhD programs in rhetoric and composition. The issue is of substantial importance, in the light of the usual condescending attitudes toward administration that many beginning faculty members seem to have absorbed: Administrators are mindless bureaucrats, our new assistant professors tend to believe, the opponents of creative teachers, agents of an oppressive set of anonymous institutional rulers—in short, the enemy. But that set of attitudes strikes at the functions most of us will undertake. One of the shocks of becoming a WPA is to discover that we are enmeshed in and enforcing the machinery of our institution; we have met the enemy, and, in the words of cartoonist Walt Kelly, “he is us.”
