Barry Maid Past Interviews

VOICES ON: Creating an Independent Writing Program Barry Maid is Professor and Head of Faculty of Technical Communication at Arizona State University East where he recently helped to develop their new program in Multimedia Writing and Technical Communication. Until January 2000, he taught writing at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, where he had been WPA of the first-year composition program as well as English department chair over the course of nearly twenty years at the university. Traditionally trained in literature, he witnessed the evolution of the department's writing program as it has responded to external forces and community needs. This interview refers to his experiences in Little Rock. What was the program like when you first arrived? I was the first writing hire here in 1981. It was a department of English then. In 1982 we hired a tech writer, and by the mid-1980s we made some other writing hires and developed an MA in technical and expository writing. The state approved it and it grew. It was in 1982 that I became WPA. I did that for 5 years. How did you end up leading the entire department? When I ran the program, I didn't get in the way of the faculty, which is what they like, so I became chair. I did that for six years. It was after that we split into rhetoric and writing. What was the catalyst for that split? Clearly there were things in place that had something to do with the split. In 1991, they made eleven adjunct [writing] positions into full-time faculty. All full-time faculty members have full voting rights. I told this to the faculty, which upset the tenured literature people. The lit people were saying they were sick of "carrying" the writing folks, saying that secretaries could do the work of writing instructors. They did not get it. We had over a hundred people on the payroll, five thousand students, a two million dollar budget. How did the focus of the department change? We had spent the past year [in 1992] trying to restructure the department, because it was clear that our way of doing business was not working. In 1993 we had 40 full-time faculty plus others, 200 majors, and 80 graduate students. The MA program was the second largest in the college. Things had changed. We weren't just a nice little English department anymore. People were using writing as a means to get jobs: law school for traditional majors, other corporations for tech writers, etcetera. There was so much interest in writing that literature majors were coming in all the time. How did the split affect governance? I wanted to create an institute for applied writing, not dissimilar to the tech/comm institute at James Madison. I thought if we created an institute we could work grants and contracts, which would support research, and have MA candidates do more traditional work. I thought this kind of work was more important than doing the schedule. The dean also thought the department should be more democratic, and that we should start talking about it. How did people in literature take this? Four years before [1989] when we needed to elect a new coordinator for the graduate [writing] program, they elected a T. S. Eliot specialist. I was called to the provost's office. He said, "I understand that so-and-so is coordinating the tech writing program. . . . I really wonder about the stewardship of a program when you don't put someone in tech writing in charge." He had already spun out two other applied disciplines from political science (criminal justice and public administration). It seemed the natural thing for him to do. The provost put it in the dean's hands. The dean appointed faculty committees, which could not include people who had administrative experience, put the associate dean in charge, and the associate dean asked me for information that I provided to the committee. Did it come together smoothly in the end? Not really. The associate dean left, and it was in flux, so the faculty chose which department they went to. I was acting chair of rhetoric and writing, and I told the people who were lit people to go to lit or transform themselves. One did, and one returned to English after a year. There were also two tech writing people who wanted to stay in lit. We had no budget for the start of the academic year. The dean split the budgets, which did not work. The problem was a large part of the budget was from the state and was specifically designated for writing, but it stayed in English. The literature chair and I decided on all but four courses over a cup of coffee. And I got deposed as chair in a palace revolution. So what does that say about the future of applied writing programs? How will the academy deal with the external forces it is facing? Many say we'll respond to community needs because of funding issues. Some want to become more elitist, to have higher education become more elitist, and if this happens we're only going to see more traditional writing programs. Do you think that means traditional English departments as well? Having been out of English for six years, I think that English studies is a socially constructed myth in English departments to justify their existence. This is a big secret to the outside world that there's no cohesive whole. It would be interesting to see what happens to English departments if the "low status" programs which draw the greatest numbers of students (composition, technical communication, and English ed) were removed. When we first split [English and Writing], I hated the marriage/divorce metaphor. Now I think that composition studies suffers from abused spouse syndrome. We would rather be hit than be on our own. Where do you think your program is headed? We have significantly reduced the sections of composition that we're offering. If I could fill a section, I used to find the dollars. The institution has changed so that the current chair has a more difficult time in fighting the provost than I did. We have ten thousand students, but we have been losing them. That might be our own fault with scheduling. And the teaching of composition? The composition sections used to have an approved list [of books]. Things have gotten out of hand. They are all teaching what they want right now. We updated the program in the mid-1980s, but haven't done much after that. We may do that soon. What do you like for textbooks? I think we need some new books pushing things a little. First-year comp books historically have been cutting edge. Those books need to be out there. Electronic environments compound these issues even more. You are dealing with global issues. Once you are online, local means Earth. That changes the nature of the discourses that we need to look at.

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