Independent Writing Programs Post Recession: Complexities and Discontents in an Achieved Utopia

The period following the Great Recession of 2008 has been a particularly complex time in American higher education as public institutions have wrestled with declining state support and as private institutions have seen reductions in funds generated from endowments. Many independent writing programs have faced (re)consolidation or mergers with English literature departments or other humanities units on campus. Happily the story about the writing program at the University of California, Davis is not one of a forced merger with English literature, and yet after ten years of being a stand-alone writing program-with national recognition for our innovation and support for Writing in the Disciplines-there are still challenges that we face as writing faculty and as program administrators. These have primarily dealt with changing pedagogical and institutional practices to best accommodate the needs of our increasing numbers of students from multilingual backgrounds and the impacts of emerging information technologies on teaching environments. As an independent writing program, we have had the flexibility to meet these challenges. In fact, the institutional independence of writing from English at UC Davis has been advantageous because it has allowed writing specialists greater control of the curriculum, hiring, and promotion processes and the establishment of new degree programs focused on writing. The ability of the University Writing Program at UC Davis to meet these challenges emerges from the local history of our program. A description and analysis of our ten years of independence reveals much that is laudatory but also highlights the complex and sometimes contradictory impulses that shape an independent writing program.To understand our stance about liberation and the development of independent writing programs, we need to begin with our local history. At UC Davis, the University Writing Program became an independent unit in 2004, when it was officially separated from the English department after a four-year process, in which the Academic Senate and faculty from across the disciplines were instrumental. The curriculum of the UWP in 2004, especially its division of the courses between the lower division and the upper division, had been developed over more than twenty years (Thaiss et al.). This arrangement of courses between the lower division and the upper division reflected UC Davis's instantiation of both lower- and upper-division English composition requirements for all students.Since 2004, growth ofthe UWP has been both steady and dramatic. We have roughly doubled the number of courses we offer to undergraduates, particularly upper-division courses in Writing in the Disciplines (WID) and Writing in the Professions (WIP). Enrollment growth has sparked roughly double the number of sections we offer. Moreover, independence has enabled new programs-a minor in professional writing; a PhD emphasis in writing, rhetoric, and composition studies; and (since 2013) direction of writing curriculum for multilingual writers-that could not have happened under the English department, for which these developments were not priorities. Independence, specifically the ability of the Writing Program to hire its own tenure-track faculty with academic and administrative backgrounds and research agendas in writing studies, made this growth and creativity possible.We offer about thirty courses that meet the lower- and upper-division writing requirements, plus other courses that meet GE requirements in "writing experience" and "arts and humanities," plus graduate courses in pedagogy, second language learning, writing and technology, assessment, and WPA work. We have a successful minor in professional writing and a PhD "designated emphasis" in writing, rhetoric, and composition studies that is taken by students in six PhD programs as a concentration (http:// wracs.ucdavis.edu). The minor has had more than 250 graduates since 2009 and has spurred the development of a proposal for a major in professional writing. …