Emotional Intelligence at Work (at Work): Enacting Emotional Labor during the First Year of a University-Wide QEP Writing Initiative

Writing Program Administrators (WPAs) have not always had the support of their English-department colleagues, at least partly due to given faculty members’ tendency to set their own teaching and research apart as if it were implicitly superior to the work of rhetoric and composition experts (Costello and Navickas 99; Micciche 29–39, 74; Payne 280–281; Sicari 110). Yet, the growing corporatization of universities over the last twenty years has squeezed the resources of humanities dramatically, making these divisions, aside from other matters, budgetarily untenable (see discussions in Alemán 108; McCrary and Holmes; Payne 281). Often it is the case now that literature and creative-writing faculty teach general education writing courses alongside their peers in composition studies; consequently, the rhetoric and composition specialists’ once siloed accounts of invisible labor in the service of university assessment projects resonate—particularly in more financially constrained institutions where no WPA is in place—as departmentally shared experiences. In this constellation of tightening humanities budgets (Franke 13; Micciche 72), heightened oversight in the name of accountability (Colson et al. 93), and ever-expanding assessment metrics (Colson et al. 93), all members of the departmental unit bear the brunt of labor and costs involved in the execution of such mandates. To the degree that the labor exacted is emotionally and physically taxing, it raises the specter of burnout risk for already-stretched faculty members. These conditions help set the backdrop for my account of my efforts, as a Quality Enhancement Plan liaison, to exercise applied emotional intelligence and preventative interventions to reduce burnout risk for myself and my colleagues.