More Than a Feeling: Disappointment and WPA Work

n this essay, I address the climate of disappointment that characterizes English studies generally and composition studies-particularly writing program administration (WPA)-specifically. The context of disappointment, as I understand it, is shaped by number of overlapping factors, including but not limited to the following: the widely perceived job market collapse in the humanities (especially in the fields of literature, creative writing, and linguistics); the national abuse of adjunct teachers whose primary duty is the instruction of required first-year writing courses; and the general devaluation of the humanities as the academy develops into more and more of corporate entity, offering education for profit at schools such as the University of Phoenix. According to several recent critics, these conditions, especially the narrowing of the job market, have produced distinct lackluster familiarity in English studies scholarship. In his introduction to Day Late, Dollar Short: The Next Generation and the New Academy, editor and literary critic Peter Herman notes that the of scholars-by which he means critics at the beginning of their careers-are increasingly feeling pressure to write not what we feel, but what we think we ought to say (4). As result, a certain sameness starts to creep into scholarship, certain predictability about conclusions, certain reticence toward taking positions that might either lead to rejection at journals with considerable professional capital ... or alienating influential people and hiring committees (4). The context for his discussion is theoretical knowledge, particularly the lack of new theoretical paradigms that would differentiate next generation scholars from their predecessors in the 1960s and early 1970s, the makers of Big Theory. Noting the intimate connection between research agendas and