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2008A6Rud

Writing beyond the Discipline: Alternative Strategies for “Making It” in Rhetoric and Composition
Reviewed by Mysti Rudd
Mysti.rudd@lamarpa.edu

Though I stumbled into session A.6 a few minutes late, I was delighted to find myself drawn into the parlor of three good friends who had attended graduate school together, and now reunited on this panel many years later to grace us with the stories of their careers. Although I am roughly the same age as these women, they have a fifteen-year head start on me as I am just now wading hip-deep in the sea (or sewage ditch?) of my dissertation. Therefore I was particularly interested to hear their collective wisdom about “making it” in the academy. Which is exactly what Amy Goodburn, Donna LeCourt, and Carrie Leverenz shared as they compared and contrasted their stories with one another and with other feminists in the field of rhetoric and composition.

Okay, I admit it: I am a sucker for narrative. Quote to me facts and statistics and I am likely to respond with a series of soundless snores while I draw butterflies and trees in the margins of my CCCC program. But weave these same figures into the story of your research interests—and I will become such an attentive listener that you might begin to think of me as your own personal back-up singer. And there were many back-up singers in that meeting room that Thursday morning, as heads nodded in agreement when Amy, Donna, and Carrie shared stories of the lives—both professional and private—created by the choices they made. In his book The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative, Thomas King quotes Nigerian storyteller Ben Okri, who claims that

Each of the presenters on this panel challenged the traditional story of what it means to succeed in the academy, particularly in terms of the tenure-tripping trinity of research, scholarship, and service, a rubric that was originally intended to aid in evaluation of faculty, but now has become confining—and perhaps needs redefining. In “Making it Up as I Go Along: Administration, Motherhood, and Models for Scholarship,” Amy Goodburn, the first story-teller, argued for alternative ways to be evaluated for tenure and promotion, urging faculty to “take charge of how their work is framed,” erasing categories between administration and research and teaching that might be inherently reductive. “My work is both rhetorical and pedagogical,” she proclaimed as she told the story of pioneering a new way to be evaluated—one that would include having her administrative work peer reviewed.

Though Amy has achieved repeated success as an administrator, this does not come without its costs, she reminded us. As the mother of three children in elementary school, Amy has made it a point to be “very visible about her role as a mother” in the academy, a workplace whose female childlessness rate is 43%, an unsurprising figure for an institution that “identifies motherhood as a disruption to work.” I was particularly impressed by the courage and tenacity demonstrated by Amy when negotiating a new position in administration, making it clear to the hiring committee that she would not be keeping nine-to-five hours: “No,” I told them, “I will pick up my kids from school every day at three.” Still, she has made sacrifices, such as missing her son’s black belt test in Tae Kwon Do so she could speak to twenty or so of us in a hotel meeting room in New Orleans.

While Amy’s story opened with the words of a grad student who had commented, “I WANT YOUR LIFE,” Donna LeCourt’s began with a student uttering the opposite desire: “No offense, but . . . I look at your life—and I don’t want that.” This student had witnessed the hours Donna put in every week—teaching, researching, writing, mentoring, and attending meetings—and consequently decided not to pursue a terminal degree because she wanted to have time for “a life outside of work.” Donna admitted that her story was bleaker than Amy’s, which we probably could have guessed from the title of her presentation: “Combating Mid-Career Malaise: Is Activist Pedagogy Possible after Administration?” The answer to her question is, in short, “no”—and the optimistic answer is “yes, but only if you adjust your expectations accordingly.” I found Donna’s story to be refreshing in its honesty: she admitted that “the compromises [required of an administrator] start to wear you down” . . . for “if [her] research couldn’t change things even at [her] own institution, then what’s the point [of conducting that research]?” Those of us committed to critical pedagogy might easily relate to Donna’s claim: “I thought my research would lead to real world change,” and also shared the disillusionment she feels right now: “My time in administration made me cynical.” I admired Donna’s decision to take a job in mid-life that didn’t necessarily advance her career, but it did enable her to care for her aging parents. She ultimately made peace with her pedagogy, still fighting for social change, but realizing that FYC should not have to be the single site of this resistance, for that unfairly puts “too much pressure on one course.”

Though I wasn’t entirely sure how the title of the third speaker’s paper fit her presentation, I greatly appreciated the experience and expertise conveyed by Carrie Leverenz as she discussed “the valorization of expertise.” In “the struggle to achieve status” (read: secure tenure), how do we evaluate thinkers vs. doers, scholars vs. teachers? Perhaps, suggests Carrie, we need to “re-define expertise” and “think of ourselves as professionals in higher education, not a particular discipline.” Like her co-panelists, Carrie closed her presentation with a list of lessons learned. I found Carrie’s pro-active stance particularly inspiring, as she encouraged the un-tenured among us to “pay attention to how rank is awarded at [our] institutions.” I heartily endorse Carrie’s coaching for teachers of writing to “teach our students that they have choices,” and for all of us in the academy, including administrators, to commit to taking risks in our professional work—to let others “see [us] struggling to do something new.” This, of course, can lead to failure, which can serve as an important motivator in the work of a researcher. Carrie referenced the words of Cynthia Selfe, whose profile has been published in Women’s Ways of Making It in Composition, edited by Michelle Ballif, Diane Davis, and Roxanne Mountford: “I failed at [something], so I had to figure it out—this has fueled my research. I have risked being an utter failure all of my life.” Could it be that Echart Tolle, Oprah’s current spiritual teacher and a former member of the academy, has written words that could be applied to the field of rhetoric/composition as he states in his latest book, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose: “ ‘Making it’ in whatever field is only meaningful as long as there are thousands or millions of others who don’t make it, so you need other human beings to fail so that your life can have meaning,” (264). Eee gads! Is this a necessary condition for success that we as faculty want to accept unquestioningly? And how does this jibe with our sensibilities as feminists in the academy—our emphasis on collaborative work and community building made possible by reaching across the confines of disciplines? For many females in the field of composition and rhetoric, academic success is tempered by the material reality many of us face as we juggle motherhood, caretaking, and political activism—along with the balls already in the air above most of our untenured heads: teaching, scholarship, and service.

Inadvertently, all three panelists provided at least partial answers to Eckhart’s underlying question, “How do we measure true success?” (270), as they re-envisioned ways of achieving tenure and promotion in the academy. None of these women were satisfied with a model based on “the unconscious assumption that success is a future event, and that the end justifies the means” (Tolle, 271), nor were they willing to settle for a system whose motto is often reduced to the old cliché: publish or perish. “If our work is only defined by what we publish,” said either Amy or Donna or Carrie, “then what we spend most of our time doing is devalued.” All three panelists demonstrated the courage required to challenge the status quo, but I think it was Donna who planted a flag on the moon of my attention gap as she summed up what she had learned about herself in the academy, “Publish or perish doesn’t work for me.”

A lively question and answer session followed the presentation, though there were nearly as many stories told and experiences shared as questions posed to the panelists. I wondered how this single session on a Thursday morning in New Orleans would change how we as compositionists and rhetoricians in the audience would frame success back at our home institutions. Would we continue to buy into traditional instruments of evaluation that compartmentalized and isolated teaching from scholarship from service? Would we allow the majority of our work as academics to be de-valued? Each of the presenters in session A.6 challenged the prevailing concept of “making it in the academy.” But perhaps the most inspiring lesson of all is that they didn’t allow themselves to be defined or confined by others: each panelist asked herself “What does it mean to feel successful?” and had the audacity to demand that a different metric be used to measure her own success or that of her colleagues, relying on her own inventiveness, creativity, and supportive community to come up with a better method for measuring her own success, one that would give meaning to these measurements. In short, they followed storyteller Ben Okri’s advice—they effectively “chang[ed] the stories [they] liv[ed] by” in order to “change [their] lives,” (153).

After the session ended, I was prompted to pose the question to myself, freewriting in my journal about what it means, to me, to feel successful—as a student and a teacher, as a writer and a reader, as a parent and a partner—coming face to face (nose to penny?) with the places where I have been punishing myself by wearing the girdle of some left-over rubric that was not created for me, or by me, nor would aid me in becoming a better teacher/thinker/writer. I had read enough articles in The Chronicle of Higher Education about women academics disproportionately denied tenure to realize that success in the academy was in dire need of revision—that I was not alone in my struggle to see myself as successful.

For Amy, success might be measured by how well she juggles the responsibilities of work and family, vowing not to write at home, and instead to reserve that time to be fully present with her family. Donna relied on her “felt sense that [she] was just somehow doing it wrong” to burst through this less-than-helpful duality, realizing that “there was more than one way to follow the academic path.” Thus she freed herself to choose a job that would allow her to be present on a daily basis with her mom and dad. Carrie championed an interdisciplinarity that at first glance seems counter-intuitive in an age that pushes “the rush to expertise.” She argued for systems of measurement that would credit scholars for the connections they have made with others across borders of personhood, politics, and disciplines.

I admired the stories shared by these friends and former classmates as they sought to discuss “the things we don’t talk about: the parts of our lives that are so privatized.” Though Carrie advocated that “we faculty should fail often and openly” because that would imply risk-taking and subsequent growth that just might alter the status quo, I don’t think a single member of their audience saw any of these scholars as failures that day. Instead, I think we were given the gift of hope—and maybe even agency, as we were encouraged to do our part to create an academy that recognizes the interconnectedness of the personal and the political, thus honoring the juggling that many of us do when deeply committed to both career and family. Why should we have to choose?

Works Cited and Selected Bibliography