The confluence of three forces--artificial intelligence tools for writing, academic labor, and university responses to demographic (and other) pressures--makes it vital for university writing programs to organize themselves on new principles, with different ways of operating, including in university bureaucracies. This panel of three senior scholars from different types of institutions theorizes the principles we should follow and demonstrates how these ideas have been enacted.
These talks (abstracts below), each 15-20 minutes, thus leaving 15-30 minutes for discussion, extend existing scholarship that includes:
Cox, Anicca, et al. “The Indianapolis Resolution: Responding to Twenty-First-Century Exigencies/Political Economies of Composition Labor.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 68, no. 1, 2016, pp. 38-67.
Crowley, Sharon. “Composition’s Ethic of Service, the Universal Requirement, and the Discourse of Student Need.” JAC, vol. 15, no. 2, 1995, pp. 227-239.
Cucciarre, Christine. “Non-Essential: Adjuncting During COVID-19.” WPA: Writing Program Administration, vol. 44, no. 1, 2020.
Gunther, Kimberly. “Advocacy, Independence, and the Painful Kairotic Moment for Rhetoric and Composition.” WPA: Writing Program Administration, vol. 43, no. 1, 2019.
Kahn, Seth. “We Value Teaching Too Much to Keep Devaluing It.” College English, vol. 82, no. 6, 2020, pp. 591-611.
Marche, Stephen. “The College Essay Is Dead.” The Atlantic. 6 December 2022.
Dismantling the Writing Program Gig Economy: Futures for Staffing Writing Programs
(Davies)
One benefit of the emergence of ChatGPT and other AI writing technologies is they invite the big questions: If the “college essay is dead,” does that matter (Marche)? Don’t we hope for more than an essay when we ask students to be writers in our programs and our classrooms (Murray; Yagelski)?
Creating a coherent writing program that can respond to innovations like ChatGPT requires faculty who have the time to participate in ongoing programmatic conversations, an expectation that evaporates in the current landscape of the university, with its gig adjunct faculty labor, continued public divestments, and partisan attacks on academic freedom (Kahn; Cox et al). This is to say that the future of writing cannot be divorced from the labor issues baked into the wiring of writing programs (Crowley; Cucciarre; Gunther). This presentation will address one possible programmatic future through the creation of tenure-track instructor lines at a regional state university. These lines have invited big questions, too, from challenging the composition of a traditional English department to inventing new kinds of courses and connections in the liminal spaces within and beyond the university.
When Instructors Are Alumni: Auguring a Strong Future for the Humanities in a Teaching Postdoctoral Fellowship
(Ianetta)
The Britton Postdoctoral Teaching Fellowship Georgia has a record of placement far above national averages for newly minted humanities PhDs. In the past year, for example, this program has placed 21 recent PhDs into desirable full-time positions related to their area of graduate study. This paper draws upon programmatic assessments as well as a national survey of teaching postdoctoral faculty at other institutions to describe best practices in postdoctoral teaching programs and, more broadly, to argue that writing programs that use contingent faculty must not only consider faculty futures in their program outcomes but also develop programming that supports instructors’ future success. Ultimately, this paper argues that contingent faculty are program alumni and must be treated as such.
Paper Pushing for Institutional Change: Writing Programs that Reimagine the Rules of Engagement
(Gindlesparger)
We often think that America’s greatest institutions—from democracy to banks to education—are guided by an “invisible hand” of their ideals. In fact, they are guided by their paperwork: the rote, even ceremonial, channels of textual communication that delineate responsibility and accountability. This communication is at the mercy of paper pushers, or people who we associate as gatekeepers of the status quo. AI writing tools further accelerate the futility of written bureaucracy, which thrives in impersonality. Yet minutiae can either perpetuate injustices or prevent them (Walton, Moore, and Jones). Technical and professional documents within institutions, particularly those that deal with regulation, are sites of advocacy where the ideals of an institution can be invoked and defended (Gindlesparger 2020, forthcoming 2023). This presentation first rehabilitates the paper pusher as an individual actor who works for social change within a written communication system and then suggests that writing programs have a responsibility to re-imagine paper pushing as a site of democratic advocacy that hinges on collaborative reading and writing practices. If WPAs are serious about the university’s capacity for social change, we will train students across majors to push paper in a way that also pushes boundaries and institutional expectations of who can author rules.