CFP: THE FUTURE OF GRADUATE EDUCATION IN RHETORIC AND COMPOSITION

Full Discussion and Extended List of Questions

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In its Final Report published in December 1997, the MLA Committee on Professional Employment noted a "disparity between the expectations [. . .] that most graduate programs inculcate in their Ph.D. candidates and the actual work most of those candidates will do. . . ." (23). This mismatch between the training English graduate students receive and the demands of their professional lives is even more poignant if there is any truth to Richard E. Miller's claim that "even the best and brightest in the profession have begun to sense that the academy is changing." We may even, Miller suggests, be "working in the twilight of the academic profession" (As If 33). If so, what kinds of work will new Ph.D.s be doing? How should graduate programs prepare them?

The premise of our project is that this question is especially crucial for graduate programs in rhetoric and composition. As a "new" field, rhet/comp is already necessarily caught up in the dynamics of change. New rhet/comp Ph.D.s occupy an anomalous position in this shifting landscape for a number of reasons, among them their unusual relations with students, their ambiguous location between local and business communities and the traditional academic space, and their often embattled status within English departments and across campus. Not the least of their unusual challenges is the probability that many if not all will, at some point, be called up to do administrative, even clearly bureaucratic, work. As is well known, such work can enervate, frustrate, and endanger a junior faculty member. But, paradoxically, Miller claims that the most effective advocate for social change in what Randy Martin et al. term the "managed university" is a hybrid intellectual/bureaucrat, one who understands and knows how to work within the profession's institutional constraints. If so, it may be that rhetoric and composition faculty are, as Miller argues in Profession 1999, uniquely positioned to influence the future, not just of composition, but of the institution of higher education itself, albeit in less-than-apocalyptic ways. Our question: what part can and should graduate education in rhetoric and composition play in preparing junior faculty in the field for such challenges--both those already upon us and those ahead? We invite papers that examine issues such as the following:

1. Is there a current standard for rhetoric and composition graduate training? If so, is it effective? What specific changes, if any, are in order?
2. What demands do the changes taking place in higher education as an institution place on new rhetoric and composition graduates? What can graduate programs do to prepare students to address these changes?
3. How should graduate programs address what may be an increasing disciplinary divergence from traditional English programs? How should rhet/comp graduates be trained to deal with other English faculty in professional situations?
4. What kinds of preparation do graduate students in rhetoric and composition need to deal with increasingly diverse cadres of composition teachers: graduate students in English and other disciplines, full-time and part-time nontenure track teachers, and tenure track faculty? What special skills, if any, will be needed, and can these skills be taught? What kinds of training might prepare new writing professionals to deal with the working conditions of the people they direct?
5. How central should an understanding of the politics and economics of technology be to rhet/comp graduate training?
6. To what extent can the "osmosis" model (that is, the slow acculturation of an individual within a particular institutional culture) that new faculty traditionally have relied on be converted to a generalizable set of teachable concepts? To what extent is local knowledge and experience the only source of useful information a junior faculty member can cultivate?
7. What, if any, are the strengths of new faculty members with administrative expertise? In what ways can such expertise be fruitfully incorporated into rhet/comp graduate programs?
8. What dangers do rhet/comp graduate programs face in incorporating bureaucratic and administrative skills into graduate training? What kinds of generalizable skills and knowledge should such training impart? Should all rhet/comp students receive it, or only those specifically expecting to become WPAs?
9. What is the relation between the WPA and other rhetoric and composition specialists? Should rhet/comp graduate programs attempt to delineate differences between these two types of graduate training?
10. What, if any, are the relations between rhet/comp faculty and creative writing faculty, and in what ways, if any, should graduate programs attempt to shape these relations?
11. What role should contexts and experiences outside the traditional academy play in graduate rhet/comp training? What pitfalls will students moving into such interactions face?
12. To what extent, if any, do attitudes and ideological stances inculcated in current models of graduate education affect a junior faculty member's perception of higher education as a cultural institution? How do they affect the ability to bring critique and administrative action into fruitful relationship?
13. To what extent should new rhet/comp Ph.D.s be aware of the institutional and economic conditions of work in the modern university as a whole, and how, if at all, does such awareness differ from the kinds of awareness presented in current versions of doctoral preparation?
14. In what ways are rhetoric and composition specialists different from other academics, and in what ways, if any, should graduate students be prepared for such differences?
15. In what ways do the relations between the rhet/comp discipline and university administrations differ from the relations between administrations and other disciplines? In what ways should rhet/comp graduate students be introduced to the question of university administration?
16. In what ways do the relations between our discipline and other academic disciplines tend to differ from the traditional relations among disciplines? In what ways should rhet/comp graduate students be introduced to the question of disciplinary interaction if at all?

As may be obvious from a number of these questions, we especially hope to include pieces that expand traditional disciplinary critique to what James E. Porter, et al., in the June issue of CCC, call "institutional critique"¾ critique that looks beyond issues of classroom practice, curricula, and intra-departmental alliances and conflicts to expressly examine the relationship between rhetoric and composition graduate training and the larger material, social, and cultural structures within which decision-making and advocacy must always take place. Further, we particularly invite work that takes into account the shifting ground of modern higher education and the mandates potentially imposed on rhetoric and composition by this shift.

We welcome pieces by junior faculty reflecting on the relationship between their graduate training and their professional situations, and pieces by senior faculty with experience in writing program administration or graduate program design and administration. We also encourage papers by graduate students undergoing preparation for positions in a much altered higher education landscape.

Works Cited

Martin, Randy, ed. Chalk Lines: The Politics of Work in the Managed University. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1999.

Miller, Richard E. As If Learning Mattered: Reforming Higher Education. Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1998.

___"'Let's Do the Numbers': Comp Droids and the Prophets of Doom." Profession 99. New York: MLA, 1999. 96-105.

MLA Committee on Professional Employment. Final Report. New York: MLA, 1997.

Porter, James E., Patricia Sullivan, Stuart Blythe, Jeffrey T. Grabill, and Libby Miles. "Institutional Critique: A Rhetorical Methodology for Change." College Composition and Communication 51 (2000): 610-642.

Submissions Deadline: September 1, 2001

Send 500-word abstracts by post or email to

Virginia Anderson School of Arts and Letters KV 110 Indiana University Southeast 4201 Grant Line Road New Albany IN 47150	Susan Romano Department of English Humanities 217 University of New Mexico Albuquerque, NM 87131
vanderso@ius.edu	sromano@unm.edu

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