Much of the research in composition about Hispanic-serving institutions focuses on the tripartite of writing program administrators, faculty, and students and the complexities of multilingual learner pedagogies. This article draws on conversational interview methods and data to analyze the servingness of three Floridian HSIs through critical race theory’s interest convergence thesis. The interest convergence thesis advances that institutional efforts toward racial equality will persist only so far as those efforts also preserve the interests of racial dominance in social institutions. Guided by an institutional critique and racial methodological approach, this interest convergence analysis examines the impact of culturally White institutional ideologies on general education writing curriculum choices, professional development, and the ethnic-racial cultural composition of institutional governance. Interviews with WPAs from the three institutions detail how the institutional epistemologies of literacy affect their decisions and opportunities for Latinx-centric programmatic servingness at their HSIs.

Despite statistical evidence that a majority of faculty, students, and WPAs are impacted by trauma, the field has yet to establish a trauma-informed approach to writing program administration. As a result, WPAs are left to operate without evidence-based, field-specific, best practices as we remain mindful of our own trauma reflexes and careful with the trauma responses of our constituents. In an effort to help move the field forward, this article incorporates concepts of compassion fatigue and vicarious trauma while unpacking data of the types of trauma impacting students, faculty, and WPAs. Moreover, this article proposes steps to take in order to (1) add our voices to the interdisciplinary field of trauma studies and (2) establish intersectional trauma-informed WPA leadership practices specific to higher educational settings.

This article describes and theorizes a failed writing program assessment study to question the influence of “the rhetoric of agreement,” or reliability, on writing assessment practice and its prevalence in validating institutional mandated assessments. Offering the phrase “dwelling in disagreement” as a queer perspective, the article draws on expertise theory and notions of ambience and attunement in rhetorical scholarship to illustrate the complexity, unpredictability, and disorder of the teaching and assessment of writing. Adopting a queer sensibility approach, the article marginally disrupts “success” as assumed by order, efficiency, and results in writing assessments and explores how scholars might reimagine ideas, practices, and methods to differently understand a queer rhetoricity of assessment and learning.

In Carolyn Miller’s Rhetorical Community: The Cultural Basis of Genre, she revisits her assertion that genres are cultural artifacts and questions the nature of the relationship between micro-level, individual speech acts, and macro-level genres and systems. To demonstrate this relationship, I analyze meta-genre accounts of the dissertation posted on the Writing Program Administrator (WPA) listserv, a forum for Computer Mediated Communication (CMC). Within this discourse, I identify transitional threads —moments when the discussion shifts, which show the relationship between micro- and macro-level interaction on the listserv as well as constructions of the dissertation within Writing Studies. CMC highlights how micro-level speech acts aggregate and are impacted by macro-level culture, and it showcases the heterogeneity inherent in the rhetorical community of the listserv.

In this profile we describe changes to the composition program at Missouri University of Science and Technology, prompted by the hiring of the university’s first writing program administrator (WPA). We describe our efforts to implement evidence-based best practices in undergraduate writing courses in a context where very little program specific evidence was available. We also describe how challenges of effecting change at a university largely composed of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) students has meant that many of the changes have been framed by the spirit of Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) initiatives. Several new methods of assessment have been introduced to the program, including instructor feedback, student surveys, and skills tests. Allowing assessment to drive standardization has begun a process of measuring the transfer of student knowledge we believe other departments will find interesting. We close by outlining unresolved issues and ongoing challenges as the program moves forward.

This program profile describes the efforts needed to develop a new writing program at a small college. The author explores how she cultivated relations with disciplinary faculty to collaboratively redefine a “problem” into an opportunity by adopting Krista Ratcliffe’s technique of rhetorical listening. She then outlines the Writing-Enriched Curriculum (WEC) and Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) components of the writing program. Additionally, the author offers lessons learned about writing program development and building productive college-wide relationships as well as some precautions. Overall, the profile contributes to existing scholarship on small college writing programs by addressing issues of program development and explores the possibilities of rhetorical listening for writing program administrators.

This article offers strategies for administrators who struggle to contextualize their writing programs in institutional climates increasingly focused on recruitment and retention, rather than discipline and discovery. As composition scholars negotiate disciplinary and institutional values, there are productive juxtapositions of university mission statements, writing program goals, and The Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing , which was jointly published by the Council of Writing Program Administrators, the National Council of Teachers of English, and the National Writing Project in January 2011.

Writing program administrators need to be as concerned about sustaining the cultural ecologies of our communities as we are about the material economies of our institutions—we need to attend to the diverse linguistic and rhetorical ecologies within which twenty-first century student writers are exercising agency. In order to respond productively, ethically, and appropriately to the increasingly diverse language and literacy practices of 21st century college writers, this profile will focus on a program that reconfigures the intellectual operating spaces of Composition Studies by training junior writing program administrators in how to promote rhetorical action alongside the study of composition pedagogy and praxis and by advocating on behalf of ethno-linguistically diverse communities within and beyond the university.