This reference guide provides a comprehensive review of the literature on all the issues, responsibilities, and opportunities that writing program administrators need to understand, manage, and enact, including budgets, personnel, curriculum, assessment, teacher training and supervision, and more. Writing Program Administration also provides the first comprehensive history of writing program administration in U.S. higher education. Writing Program Administration includes a helpful glossary of terms and an annotated bibliography for further reading.

Historical Studies of Writing Program Administration: Individuals, Communities, and the Formation of a Discipline collects essays that shine new light on the early history of writing program administration. Broad in scope, the book illuminates the development of the profession in the narratives of the individuals who helped form the discipline prior to the emergence of the Council of Writing Program Administrators in 1976, including those narratives of Gertrude Buck and Laura J. Wylie, Edwin Hopkins, Regina Crandall, Rose Colby, George Jardine, Clara Stevens, Stith Thompson, and George Wykoff. Drawing from deep archival work, these narratives offer rare glimpses into writing program administration and the development of composition as a college requirement. In addition to eleven chapters from contributors, Historical Studies of Writing Program Administration includes a preface by Edward M. White, a concluding essay by Jeanne Gunner, interviews with Erika Lindemann and Kenneth Bruffee, and a detailed introduction by the editors, Barbara L'Eplattenier and Lisa Mastrangelo.

Influenced by Erika Lindemann’s A Rhetoric for Writing Teachers, A Rhetoric for Writing Program Administrators delineates the major issues and questions in the field of writing program administration and provides readers new to that field with theoretical lenses through which to view those issues and questions. In brief and direct though not oversimplified chapters, A Rhetoric for Writing Program Administrators explains the historical and theoretical background of such concepts as “academic freedom,” “first-year composition,” “basic writing,” “writing across the curriculum,” “placement,” “ESL,” “general education,” and “transfer. ” Its thirty-nine contributors are seasoned writing program and center administrators who, in a range of voices, map the discipline of writing program administration and guide readers toward finding their own answers to solving problems at their own institutions.

Historical Studies of Writing Program Administration: Individuals, Communities, and the Formation of a Discipline collects essays that shine new light on the early history of writing program administration. Broad in scope, the book illuminates the development of the profession in the narratives of the individuals who helped form the discipline prior to the emergence of the Council of Writing Program Administrators in 1976, including those narratives of Gertrude Buck and Laura J. Wylie, Edwin Hopkins, Regina Crandall, Rose Colby, George Jardine, Clara Stevens, Stith Thompson, and George Wykoff. Drawing from deep archival work, these narratives offer rare glimpses into writing program administration and the development of composition as a college requirement.

Editors Staci M. Perryman-Clark and Collin Lamont Craig have made a space for WPAs of color to cultivate antiracist responses within an Afrocentric framework and to enact socially responsible approaches to program building. This collection centers writing program administration (WPA) discourse as intersectional race work. In this historical moment in public discourse when race and racist logics are no longer sanitized in coded language or veiled political rhetoric, contributors provide examples of how WPA scholars can push back against the ways in which larger, cultural rhetorical projects inform our institutional practices, are coded into administrative agendas, and are reflected in programmatic objectives and interpersonal relations. Editors Staci M. Perryman-Clark and Collin Lamont Craig have made a space for WPAs of color to cultivate antiracist responses within an Afrocentric framework and to enact socially responsible approaches to program building. This framework also positions WPAs of color to build relationships with allies and create contexts for students and faculty to imagine rhetorics that speak truth to oppressive and divisive ideologies within and beyond the academy, but especially within writing programs. Contributors share not just experiences of racist microaggressions, but also the successes of black WPAs and WPAs whose work represents a strong commitment to students of color. Together they work to foster stronger alliance building among white allies in the discipline, and, most importantly, to develop concrete, specific models for taking action to confront and resist racist microaggressions. As a whole, this collection works to shift the focus from race more broadly toward perspectives on blackness in writing program administration.

In this pointed appraisal of composition studies, Donna Strickland contends the rise of writing program administration is crucial to understanding the history of the field. Noting existing histories of composition studies that offer little to no exploration of administration, Strickland argues the field suffers from a “managerial unconscious” that ignores or denies the dependence of the teaching of writing on administrative structures. The Managerial Unconscious in the History of Composition Studies is the first book to address the history of composition studies as a profession rather than focusing on its pedagogical theories and systems. Strickland questions why writing and the teaching of writing have been the major areas of scholarly inquiry in the field when specialists often work primarily as writing program administrators, not teachers. Strickland traces the emergence of writing programs in the early twentieth century, the founding of two professional organizations by and for writing program administrators, and the managerial overtones of the “social turn” of the field during the 1990s. She illustrates how these managerial imperatives not only have provided much of the impetus for the growth of composition studies over the past three decades but also have contributed to the stratified workplaces and managed writing practices the field’s pedagogical research often decries. The Managerial Unconscious in the History of Composition Studies makes the case that administrative work should not be separated from intellectual work, calling attention to the interplay between these two kinds of work in academia at large and to the pronounced hierarchies of contingent faculty and tenure-track administrators endemic to college writing programs. The result is a reasoned plea for an alternative understanding of the very mission of the field itself.

This handbook offers wisdom and guidance from experienced college writing program administrators. It is intended for WPAs at all levels of experience.