Summary: Phelps has two components in this piece: a tenth-anniversary speech to the Syracuse writing program, which she excerpts here, and a reflection/contextualization in which she "examines the role of such rhetoric in writing program administration" (168). The speech has several key points--it tells some of the history of the program, but also asks how the program can continue to be inventive and vibrant, how it can continue to remake itself now that the initial flush of creation is over and it has become successful. Phelps draws parallels between the program's genesis and the functioning of "Great Groups" such as the ones responsible for Apple, the Manhattan Project, and Disney. She points to a key challenge for the program, which "quixotically attempted to inspire the whole teaching community to form itself into a Great Group" (171), in contrast to the (much) more selective formation of other Great Groups. Challenges were how to be inclusive, to operate on the edge of chaos, to keep the general trend forward. It worked; now, though, "we now risk the possibility of too much order" (175)--as a successful program, it is daunting to continue to experiment, to risk making wrong choices. However, Phelps argues that the changing landscape of the university and the environment outside it (demographics, technology, economics, etc.) requires constant change and reinvention.
In the reflection, Phelps changes tack, not only reflecting on the speech itself, but on crafting and giving speeches, especially as a woman. She discusses how "women WPAs are often ambivalent about the power of their office and conflicted about their own ethos as strong central leaders" (178), sometimes softening their position and silencing their voices. Phelps discusses her own struggles with claiming and exercising her voice, her determination to write and speak in public despite how risky it often felt. She also examines the rhetorical situation of the speech and her roll as a former WPA who also wanted to touch on the future. Finally, she writes that "in publicly playing the storytelling role to the hilt [in this article...] and interpreting it here in the context of leadership as intellectual and rhetorical work, I am arguing, especially to women inclined to deny or renounce authority in or for themselves, that it can be ethical to aspire to and wield such powers" (181-82).
Response: I commented in a previous post something along the lines that we may be post-feminist, that feminist management practices have integrated themselves in mainstream management enough so that we may not need an explicitly "feminist" lens anymore (at least in regards to management). I think I was incorrect. Phelps's piece has helped me understand more of the challenges still faced by women who choose to be in positions of institutional power. She describes a colleague who stated that she "always talked too much and wrote too much" (178). Wow. I am a particularly talkative male, granted, but I have not felt the challenges to exerting power or speaking my mind in public forums that she describes and I doubt many other males have, either. (I remember one of my mentors in my undergraduate career, a brilliant scholar and writing center director, telling me she would have probably majored in math except that she had to endure such humiliations as "girls' day" in her math classes, in which she and other female students would have to get up and do problems on the board in front of the male professor and male students.) I think things are changing--at my school, for instance, the president, two out of three deans, and two out of three associate deans are women, as is much of the other administration. But I bet others grapple with the same issues Phelps describes.
Uses: Inventiveness, continual renovation, women's experiences as administrators.
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