Centering Institutional Status and Scholarly Identity: An Analysis of Writing Center Administration Position Advertisements, 2004-2014

Labor issues long have presented critical challenges for many writing center administrators (WCAs), who interrogate their "marginal" status with questions about how position type, education, oversight, responsibilities, resources, and support impact individual WCAs and writing centers as well as their research practices and production. Prior interview and survey research (Peterson, 1987; Olson & Ashton-Jones, 1988; Healy, 1995; Balester & McDonald, 2001; Driscoll & Wynn Perdue, 2012, 2014; Geller & Denny, 2013; Wynn Perdue & Driscoll, 2017) has represented some WCAs' perceptions of their institutional responsibilities and scholarly identity—often in relationship to other composition professionals—but WCAs have not been studied adequately on their own terms. To gain a systematic, comprehensive overview of WCA positions, this research uses problem-based and method-driven content analysis (Krippendorf, 2004) as well as corpus-based analysis (Kutter & Kantner, 2012) to analyze 395 unique WCA job ads from 2004-2014, aggregated from the WPA-L listserv archives, the Modern Language Association (MLA) job information list, and the Wcenter listserv. While frequencies, cross tabulations, and AntConc analyses of the ads yielded some trends and relationships about who is hired and under what conditions as well as about what they do, findings are more notable for what ads cannot tell readers about the WCA. More specifically, the gaps and omissions identified in the ads have critical implications for the ads themselves, the WCA described within them, and the future of writing center studies.