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CHAPTER 1
MIAMI UNIVERSITY MAJOR IN PROFESSIONAL WRITING
Heidi A. McKee
"I've always loved Miami, but one of the main reasons that I came here was because it offered a professional writing major; it was exactly what I'd been looking for in other colleges but couldn't find anywhere else."
— Kaitlyn Foye, 2015, professional writing major
"I am very happy to have found a first job doing what I want to do — writing."
— Amanda Harr, 2013, professional writing major and writer for Licking Memorial Health Systems in Ohio
Institution Type: Public Research University
Location: Oxford, Ohio
Enrollment: 15,400 undergraduates
Year program was founded: August 2011 (revision of degree in Technical and Scientific Communication founded originally in the 1980s)
Writing Program Administrator (WPA) reports to: English Department Chair
Program funded by: English Department General Budget
Description of undergraduate students: At Miami in general: 40.1 percent instate, 49.5 percent out-of-state, 6.6 percent international students (Miami University 2009)
PROGRAM SNAPSHOT
The professional writing major is a BA in professional writing (not English) housed within the Department of English in the College of Arts and Science on the Oxford campus. Starting with five majors in August 2011, the degree has grown (as of January 2016) to over 180 majors and is now the second largest major in the department.
WPA'S PROFILE
I came to WPA work eagerly — seeking to do good work in the world and wanting to create better teaching, learning, and research opportunities for writing, writers, and writing instructors. My WPA career began in graduate school. While earning an MA in 2000 from the University of Wyoming, I co-wrote an instructor's guide for first-year composition (FYC). I loved the experience of working closely with graduate student and faculty colleagues to develop resources for mentoring new instructors. During my doctoral studies at the University of Massachusetts in 2003, I served for a year as the assistant director of the Writing Center. In that position, I taught two semester courses for undergraduate peer consultants, supervised day-to-day operations of the center, and collaborated with consultants to build student workshop programming. Co-creating the workshop series was my first experience in program building, and it was exciting to see how the consultants and the students with whom they worked flourished. From both of these graduate school experiences, I came away with a clear and passionate understanding of how much WPAs matter, not just for shaping the day-to-day administration of a program but also for providing opportunities for others.
I took this passion with me to my tenure-track position at Miami University in 2005. At this time, no sections of first-year writing were taught in a computer classroom (desktop or laptop), thus limiting class activities and students' opportunities for exploring, engaging, and composing with a wide-range of genres and modalities. So working with teams of faculty and graduate student colleagues, I set out to change that. In 2006, I became the founding coordinator of the Digital Writing Collaborative, working to integrate digital writing technologies into first-year composition. As a pre-tenured faculty member, this was a WPA position I eagerly chose to create — with the support of the director of composition, the English Department chair, the senior director of information technology, the dean, and the provost. Thanks to the tremendous work of many people in those early years, including Jason Palmeri and James Porter, Miami's Oxford campus went from having no sections of FYC in digital classrooms (desktop or laptop) in 2005 to 100 percent by 2011. (For more information about this process of program transformation, please seeAdsanatham et al. 2013 and Ninacs 2009). I served as coordinator for the Digital Writing Collaborative for many years, but then in the fall of 2010 I moved to another area of administration: administering a writing major, for reasons I'll explain in the "Program Conception" section below.
From 2011 to 2014, I served as founding director of Miami's professional writing major. At the same time that I was directing the major, I was also serving for two years as the interim director of the Howe Writing Initiative in the Farmer School of Business, which is the writing center and WAC program for the division. In 2014, I was appointed to be the Roger and Joyce Howe Professor of Written Communication and the director of the Howe Writing Initiative, so I stepped down from directing professional writing, but I am still actively involved in helping to build the major.
PROGRAM CONCEPTION
The professional writing major (sometimes referred to as PW) was a revision of an existing degree. Since the mid-1980s, Miami has had a writing major — a BA in Technical and Scientific Communication (BATSC). Students in this degree took core courses such as "Editing for Technical and Scientific Communicators" and "Designing and Testing User Documents for Technical and Scientific Communicators," and they took eighteen hours of specialization courses in environmental science, biological science, or computer science. For two decades, BATSC had about forty to fifty majors per year. But since 2000 enrollments began to decline, perhaps because of changing demographics at Miami (fewer students interested in technical fields) and perhaps because the courses in BATSC, while individually strong, collectively did not seem to keep pace with a changing workplace. By fall 2010, BATSC had just sixteen majors.
Fall 2010 was right in the middle of the financial crisis, and Miami was in the midst of major belt-tightening and program cutting. The new provost was hired specifically with a charge to cut underperforming programs. Given BATSC's low enrollments, it was certainly heading for the chopping block. (Already the year before, the MA in Scientific and Technical Communication at Miami had been suspended.) Clearly something needed to be done to keep a rhetoric and writing major at Miami.
So in fall 2010, I collaborated with Jean Lutz, the director of BATSC, to revise the program. Our goal was to create a new major that would meet the needs of Miami students more fully and that would bring all rhetoric and writing faculty in the department together to teach in one major. To understand the significance of this joining of forces, it's necessary to have a bit more background.
At Miami, while faculty in writing were certainly collegial and worked together closely at the graduate level in the MA and PhD in composition and rhetoric, at the undergraduate level there was a clear division and separation of programs. BATSC faculty (as they were so designated) taught in BATSC. Composition and rhetoric faculty (and they were so designated) taught in the graduate program and first-year composition. There were no undergraduate programs for composition and rhetoric faculty to teach in until 2009 when we launched a new rhetoric and writing minor. But the minor was small at first and often we had to cancel classes, such as "Rhetorical Strategies for Writers," because of low enrollments.
What we had then was a new minor that was still seeking enrollments and a major that was going to be cut. What we needed was a major that all writing faculty could be part of and contribute to, one that reflected a rich range of options for students. In short, we needed to broaden BATSC's focus from solely scientific and technical communication, and we had to build from the minor to create a more robust curriculum to meet students' needs and interests.
Naming this new major, as I have mentioned elsewhere (seeJohnson, Zemliansky, and McKee 2014), was tricky. Some colleagues felt strongly that professional had to be in the title while others just as vigorously opposed it. Some colleagues felt they were not in professional writing and worried that such a title might commercialize/corporatize writing too much. Some people rallied around the idea of rhetoric and writing as the title, but others were opposed to that because it didn't bring in the professional as explicitly. Given how misunderstood rhetoric is, many of us also feared that rhetoric in the title would steer students away. We settled on professional writing because writing was a focus shared by us all and because professional encompassed technical and scientific communication as well as a broader range of writing. We also settled on professional writing because we thought, as has been proven, that it would resonate well with students and their potential employers.
In proposing the major, we revised the titles and, in many cases, the focus of BATSC classes. "Editing for Technical and Scientific Communicators" became "Print and Digital Editing"; "Writing Reports and Proposals" became "Grant Writing." Initially when we proposed the major, we tried, as much as possible, to work with the courses we already had on the books, recognizing that if the major called for a significant number of new courses, that could be a problem getting it approved in the department and the college. We purposefully designed the major to be flexible and adaptable so we would be able to continually change it to keep abreast of developments in the field and in the academic and professional needs of our students. (For further discussion of curriculum, see "Highlights" below).
Before closing this section, I want to address one more point about institutional location. Unlike the other writing majors profiled in this collection, Miami University's professional writing major is housed in the English Department. This creates some interesting circumstances. Initially when we proposed the revised major, colleagues in literature and creative writing were hesitant to approve it because they were concerned about BATSC courses having such low enrollments (often as few as five students in a class) and they did not want to be saddled with another low-enrollment major. It was an uphill struggle to convince them that professional writing could be successful. As described in "Populations Served" below, professional writing has proved successful and, in just four years, has become the second largest major in the department, just after creative writing.
In spite of this success — or perhaps because of it — there was a move afoot in the department for a while, but it has subsided now, to have the department merge its distinct majors (linguistics, literature, creative writing, professional writing) into one English major. This move to "one major" would be problematic for a number of reasons. First, our professional writing major is an independent degree. It is a BA in professional writing, not in English. Second, in our survey of majors, we asked them, as neutrally as we possibly could, if they would favor "one English major" where professional writing was a concentration; 100 percent of respondents said they were against the idea because they felt it would limit their options to tailor their studies and because they did not want to lose the rich interdisciplinary potential of the professional writing degree. If we had "one major" and had to require a certain number of literature and creative writing courses, students would not have as many options for taking rhetoric and writing courses and electives of their choosing within English Department programs and in other programs such as interactive media studies, marketing, and journalism. Given the rich diversity that is writing studies, students, in consultation with advisors and peers, should be able to craft their course of study to fit their academic and career aspirations. Because of the flexibility of Miami's professional writing major, we are able to provide those opportunities. And the most important aspect of the professional writing major is the opportunities it provides for students.
POPULATION SERVED
The professional writing major attracts a broad array of students. Some declare professional writing from their first days at Miami while others switch from another major. Students who have switched to professional writing or who have added it as a double major come from all areas of the university, including the College of Creative Arts, the College of Education, and the Farmer School of Business as well as from other arts and science majors such as journalism and strategic communications.
Because of the diverse opportunities professional writing provides and because of its explicit professional focus, the major is proving popular with students. In a recent survey of majors, some of their responses for why they chose the major included:
• I chose the Professional Writing major because I have always wanted to be an editor. This was an opportunity to do so, while also discovering other interests that I have within the program, such as the track of digital and technical communications.
• I want to go into non-profits and this major teaches a lot about grant writing and other types of writing that will be used in that setting so it seemed like a good fit.
• Professional Writing is a program that allows for me to learn useful skills and explore important topics while making it all apply to my own life and passions. I am trying to find a way to enjoy life while still living meaningfully. With a flexible and creative program like Professional Writing, I can do that.
• Writing is my life! I think this program will provide a great background in communicative skills that will be beneficial now and in years to come.
• I like that it allows me to take all sorts of writing courses and provides a better array of job opportunities than a degree in creative writing, literature, or poetry might.
• I enjoy the writing and editing, and the major really seemed to focus on the career path that I wanted to pursue. Plus "Professional Writing" is awesome to say as a major.
• I am trying to become a lawyer and wanted to expand my knowledge of writing.
• I always have loved English, but I definitely wanted to study business in college. When I found out that I had enough time to double major in business and another subject, I chose Professional Writing due to its flexibility and interesting curriculum. (Program Survey 2015)
From lawyers to editors, social media content developers to magazine writers, technical communicators to video editors, our graduates go on to a wide variety of careers within the broad range of writing studies. Perhaps because of our strong job placement too, professional writing is one of the only humanities majors in the university to be growing. From just five majors in August of 2011 (five of the sixteen BATSC students chose to switch majors, the rest finished their BATSC degree since they were one year or less from finishing), the professional writing major has grown to over 180 majors in December 2015.
FUNDING
As a major in the English Department in the College of Arts and Science, faculty lines (visiting and permanent) and TA lines are provided by the college. Classroom support such as ceiling-mounted LCD projectors, wall-mounted plasma screens, laptop-friendly furniture, and tech-support help for instructors is provided primarily by the University or the College, but we are fortunate to have one endowed classroom: the Walter Having-hurst Classroom. We are working with Development to create more endowed, named classrooms and, ideally someday, more named endowed professorships.
The program is currently provided a small budget ($5,000) from the English Department chair to bring in guest speakers, provide resources for student meetings/clubs, and to pay for such things as publicity materials, curricular development needs, and special student projects (such as field trips to community sites). Funding for more extensive projects may be sought from the department chair, the College of Arts and Science dean, or the Provost's Office, depending on the project. Key to any funding requests is to connect the funding project to the strategic goals of the department, college, and university, and to show that the return-on-investment, especially the benefit for student learning, will be worth it.
OPERATIONS
The professional writing major is a collaborative staffing endeavor among (as of this printing) eight tenure-line faculty, one full-time continuing contract lecturer faculty, six full-time visiting assistant professors, many doctoral students in Miami's PhD program in composition and rhetoric who teach six to eight sections of various courses per year, and administrative staff in the English Department.
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Excerpted from "Writing Program Architecture"
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