[Lucas:] Do you feel like talking about recent changes at DePaul? What’s been going on with you, your colleagues, and the program?

[Vandenberg:] We’re really excited about what’s happened. We’ve split from the English department.

There are seven of us who have dissertations in rhetoric and composition. Darsie Bowden and I are there. Matthew Abraham, Christine Tardy, and Melinda Turnley all did their Ph.D. work at Purdue University. Julie Bokser did her work at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and Shaun Slattery did his at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. We just hired two new faculty members who are coming in the fall: René Agustín De los Santos from University of California, Santa Barbara, and a young professional technical writer from Penn State, Tony Ceraso. So, there’ll be nine of us in the fall with dissertations in the field, and we’re really excited about having a group of people that is larger than you’d find in some Ph.D. programs.

Our proposal came as something of a surprise to some folks in the English department, but there’s not really a handbook to follow for separating departments. I think it’s always a little bit messy, but we’re looking forward to opportunities to collaborate with the people in English. I personally feel that some of the personal relationships that have become strained through the process are probably going to strengthen again when we’re not actively involved in competing with each another for courses and departmental resources and that sort of thing. So I’m looking forward to a brighter future for both the English department and those of us in the new department that will be called Writing, Rhetoric, and Discourse.

We’re calling it Writing, Rhetoric, and Discourse because we wanted a name that would signify meaningfully for us, for students, for the rest of the university, and for the broader profession. We thought those three terms were really valuable to keep linked together. Writing is, of course, important to everything we do, and we feel like that’s a term that students are going to recognize. But we’re also at a school where writing is lapping up on all shores (as it does everywhere, of course), and we thought it might be inappropriate to call a particular department a writing department when the university is trying to stress writing across the curriculum. We feel the same way about a program. You don’t want a B.A. or an M.A. in writing when you also have writing-intensive courses across the discipline. So we thought that we wanted to modify that term with a couple of other terms, and we thought that rhetoric, of course, is central to what we do, and we engage in rhetorical study a little more broadly than writing, and in conventional terms we didn’t want to be constrained by other people’s expectations that writing only meant the alphabetic. Finally, we see discourse as a broader, more expansive term that in some ways incorporates the other two, and it also makes room for the ways in which we’d like to grow (e.g., Christine Tardy works with English as a Second Language, and her work is really at the intersection of rhetoric and composition and ESL, and we want to make sure that she has kind of conceptual elbow room to work there).

Are you still in the same college, or have you moved to a more cross-discipline position?

We’re still in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. At the same time that we’re becoming a department, the communication department, which split off from English in 1987, is now becoming a college in its own right. So not only is the English department breaking, but communication is moving into a school of its own. So I think that also creates some interesting opportunities for us—also some challenges—because we lose some of our closest non-English colleagues. They’ll be separated from us by college boundaries, so we maybe won’t see as much of them. In the same way that we’re expecting to work better with English, the new program could create some different kind of channels that allow us to link with folks in communication, as well.

How is the new department related to things like your first-year writing program, your writing center, and your graduate-level offerings?

First-year writing moves entirely with the new unit as well. Over the past couple of years or so, we made an effort to split first-year writing from the English department with the idea that it might function better, both for students and for the larger institution, if it were cut loose and linked with the liberal studies program, of which it is a part. When we got the opportunity to form as a new department, we of course sensed the value of keeping first-year writing connected to the larger disciplinary interests of rhetoric and composition.

We also wanted to make sure that the director of first-year writing was in control of the hiring, evaluation, and general supervision of the first-year writing faculty. In the past, that task had fallen to the English chair, and it was difficult for the first-year writing director and the English chair to coordinate on staffing and other kinds of issues. It was likely that people would be hired into lines created by first-year writing, but then served the interests of the English department. So, we’d have people on full-time contracts based on their ability to teach upper-level English courses when faculty went on leave and so forth, and that was not serving first-year writing. We think that now we’ll have a really good relationship between first-year writing and the new department, because the director of first-year writing will have a great deal of autonomy in running that program.

The Center for Writing, which was actually just approved last August, is disconnected from any department. As the director, I report to an associate vice-president in Academic Affairs. The budget and everything is separate from any of the colleges, so it really serves the wider university and has this role of assisting faculty or integrating writing into their courses. It also includes our former university writing centers (our two locations at Lincoln Park and the Loop). We have a staff of 40-50 peer tutors, both undergraduates and graduates, who work for the center.

The one connection to the new department is an agreement that we have between Academic Affairs and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences: that the director of the Center for Writing will always come from among the tenured writing faculty. We’re essentially connected in that way, and we think that rhetoric and composition will continue to influence the way the university approaches writing in its largest manifestation.

The former English department had a program called Master of Arts in Writing with three concentrations: technical and professional writing, writing theory and pedagogy, and literary writing (what we were calling creative writing at DePaul). Writing, Rhetoric, and Discourse will take half of the rhetorical theory core and two of those concentrations, Writing Theory and Pedagogy and Professional and Technical Writing. So we’ll be constructing a new master’s program that will be comprised of that former core and those new concentrations.

The Master of Arts in New Media Studies is an interdisciplinary program that’s situated in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. The program draws on the faculty in English (now Writing, Rhetoric, and Discourse), communication, and art and art history (art and art history are splitting into two departments at DePaul).

So New Media Studies (NMS) is really kind of up in the air right now. The thing we know for sure is that as I take over chairing the new department of Writing, Rhetoric, and Discourse, Sean Slattery will be assuming the NMS directorship.

Since the program’s inception three years ago, more than 75% of the courses offered with NMS designations in the program have been taught by faculty members who are going to be in the new unit. That’s not in any way to disparage the contributions of faculty in communication, or art and art history, but we really feel like the primary impetus for that program has come out of the writing faculty, and it really represents a great opportunity for us, and we’re very much interested in the way that we can continue to shape and develop NMS at DePaul. We see opportunities for lots and lots of cross-listing there with our professional and technical offerings in the new M.A., and also in the kinds of things that we want to do with teaching writing at the graduate level.

Have you written anything about the creation of the Master of Arts in New Media Studies? Has anything been documented in terms of how that program was put together?

Beyond the proposal documents, I don’t think anybody has written anything scholarly on the development of the program. Roger Graves, who was a faculty member at DePaul for eleven years, was the initial director of the program. He was one of the people that was primarily involved in developing the proposal and the program’s initial execution. (He just left two years ago to take a position directing the writing program at the University of Western Ontario.)

I know that folks at campuses all around the country are interested in doing these kind of collaborative ventures, and I’m curious how you all went about it. Was this something that just emerged as a brainchild out of the folks in English, or was it something that stemmed from mutual interests in different disciplines?

I think people in different fields were starting to talk about this—different fields and different departments. Art and art history, of course, had been using computers in pursuit of their graphic design courses, and they were teaching video art and that sort of thing. Communication was offering some courses in journalism, and they were becoming interested in things that were developing under the rubric of convergence journalism. And those of us in writing were feeling just kind of generally constrained by the way we’d been positioned in the English department, preparing students—particularly at the undergraduate level—to produce academic discourse. At the graduate level we were kind of bundled together with creative writing and so it was really constraining to think about how writing is being re-thought and re-mediated in digital environments. And so Roger Graves, Heather Graves, and I were involved in the initial meeting that eventually formed that committee that eventually formed the program. Our motivation came from trying to find an outlet for work that we wanted to do, the pedagogical work that we wanted to do outside of English. I think that was something like the case for everybody that got involved from all the different departments.

DePaul has a real strong interest in interdisciplinary programs, and because it offers relatively few Ph.D. programs, it relies on income generated by master’s programs. So, if you have a good idea, and you can make a case for bringing in students, it’s not really a big hurdle to get programs approved at DePaul. So we had a ready-made kind of audience there on the part of the dean and the college curriculum committee. We ran into our biggest problem at the university-level curriculum committee, and ultimately they were very helpful to us—they just wanted to make sure that the program was well thought out. They had questions about the appropriateness of the degree to the jobs that the students would take on.

You know, the field has developed so rapidly that if you go back even three or four years, the term “new media” signifies in strange ways for people. The most common question we got was, “Five years down the road, won’t you be wishing that you had not called it New Media Studies?” And we convinced folks that we thought that was a pretty good term for it. But there was a lot of just basic opposition that came from a lack of understanding, I think, at the university level. So I wouldn’t say that we had a tough time getting things through.

What about the reception of folks from other disciplines, like art, journalism, and so on?

That’s interesting. I was recently leading a new media workshop at Texas Christian University, and we were talking about creating interdisciplinary connections and breaking down disciplinary silos, and I made a point that over the last four or five years, I think I’ve learned more—stretched further as a scholar—by looking at work that’s been developed in all these different disciplines. And I think whenever you say the term “new media” to someone else, you’re inevitably engaged in a kind of interdisciplinary project. No particular discipline has ownership of it.

Being brought into contact with a lot of different folks and a lot of different perspectives has led to a few difficulties. For example, folks in the art department felt that if you were going to offer a graduate-level course in graphic design, that students should be required to have undergraduate preparation in graphic design. It’s taken a couple of years, really, to bring some of those folks around to the idea that you can do introductory work in graphic design at the graduate level—and do that legitimately without having prerequisites. That’s going to streamline the program a fair amount.

We have students that come in from all sorts of different disciplines with different methodological orientations, so it’s very difficult to imagine that you must have students with one particular background. I think we’ve taught ourselves about interdisciplinarity in the process of getting this program up and running over these first couple of years.

Now that you’ve had a couple of years behind you, is there anything you would have done differently?

I don’t know. I don’t think so. I mean, maybe that’s a surprising answer, but I think things have worked pretty well. Had we tried to do this simply with writing faculty, we wouldn’t have had enough folks to get it off the ground that way in the beginning. But I think also had we done it that way, we would have missed the richness—you know, what we’ve learned from people in these other fields.

We have faculty in Communication, names that people in rhetoric and composition will recognize from Rhetoric Society of America (RSA), like Lucy Lu and Barbara Willard, who’s an officer in RSA right now. Those folks are right there on campus with us. In a way, we were disconnected from communication while we were in English, which prevented us from ever getting together. And really, we made New Media Studies to create outlets where we have conversations and input from those folks. I don’t think we would have gotten that another way.

I personally have learned a tremendous amount about design from the people in art and art history that contribute to the program. Of course, the students feed back a lot of that knowledge to the faculty. Students are taking courses from people in all three of the fields, and then they come into our classes, and we have rich discussions. We continue to learn from those different fields through the students. That’s been troubling at certain times, but absolutely essential to the quality of the program now, and what we’ve learned while doing it.

I’m sure you’ve seen some of these students graduate in the past year or so?

The first potential graduates emerged last June. We had eleven graduates from the program. This year we had our first NMS graduate go on to a very prestigious fellowship at Michigan State, so we’re excited about that. We think that student’s success is very definitely a product of his interdisciplinary training. He had taken some of these art classes as well as classes with me and other people in writing, and then a couple of people in the communication department took him under their wing. He had experience in exactly the kind of work that he wanted to do at the Ph.D. level. I think that the interdisciplinary preparation was maybe most valuable to him. He wrote a great personal statement that fully elaborated that interdisciplinary connection, and I know that our letters of recommendation did as well.

This past year we’ve had a great deal of success in getting students accepted into Ph.D. programs out of our M.A. in writing. For example, last year we had six M.A. graduates accepted with teaching assistantships or fellowships. One student was the first to have a digital portfolio, and she was accepted into Ohio State, and we were just overjoyed by that. She was accepted by at least six schools, and I think that had everything to do with her online portfolio. People at these various schools all mentioned her digital work. So, I think this has convinced us that we need to be getting more of our writing students’ work online and bringing them, really, into doing the same kind of work that the NMS students are doing. There’ll be great possibilities for connections there.

One of our significant challenges is to help students figure out how the program connects to particular kinds of jobs. Students who are approaching a professional M.A. want to imagine a clear trajectory into a particular kind of job in the same way that a nursing degree leads to a job in nursing. But we have to tell students with the M.A. in New Media Studies that what it really does is enhances any degree orientation that takes up New Media Studies as a part of its business. They feel like they have to explain the degree to potential employers. That makes them a little nervous, so we’re trying to figure out how to approach that aspect of it, but I think that’s just something that’s going to come in time.