As students and faculty perused the Course Counts website during course registration, the attentive browser might have noticed a change: the disappearance of the Writing and Rhetoric Department (WRD). If they looked further, they might have even seen the appearance of a new subject, titled “College Writing Program.”
These changes are no programming errors. Writing Program Director and American Studies department chair Julie Prebel said that last year, the Writing and Rhetoric Department was decommissioned by a faculty vote.
“Last year, led by the Dean of the College and Academic Planning Committee (APC), the Writing and Rhetoric Department, as a department, was decommissioned,” Prebel said.
However, Prebel said the now-decommissioned WRD has been replaced by the new College Writing Program (CWP). According to her, the CWP’s curriculum is the exact same as that of the old WRD.
“The curriculum that [lived] in the department is unchanged,” Prebel said. “There’s no change to the courses, there’s still the same courses being offered, the same number of courses being offered.”
Associate Dean for Curricular Affairs and computer science professor Kathryn Leonard said via email that the faculty vote count for decommissioning the WRD was not highly contested — more than 2/3 of the faculty voted to dissolve, according to Leonard.
Additionally, Leonard said that all faculty working in the WRD will retain their positions in the CWP.
“All the [Non-Tenure Track] NTT faculty who were part of WRD are now part of CWP,” Leonard said.
According to Leonard, the name change is part of an effort to standardize the titles of academic subjects at the college.
“The change brought what was actually happening on campus in line with the campus policies about what constitutes an academic department,” Leonard said.
Leonard said the difference between a department and a program is in their degree offerings and faculty size.
“A department has typically at least three tenure track faculty members and a major,” Leonard said. “A program is a smaller structure — it may not have any faculty members assigned full time to it, or it may not have a major.”
According to Leonard, it had been unusual to classify WRD as a department, as it lacked the characteristics of an academic department.
“WRD was a department with no major, no minor, and no tenure track faculty,” Leonard said. “In other words, none of the elements that typically make up an academic department.”
Prebel said the Dean and the APC were the authors of the new title, “College Writing Program.” According to her, the loss of the word “Rhetoric” in the title is only a surface-level change, reemphasizing that the CWP retains all WRD courses, including those focused on rhetoric.
“We’ve got these courses that we really designed to have more of a focus, also, on rhetoric and the study of rhetoric,” Prebel said. “Those courses are still in [the] CWP.”
Leonard said she hopes emphasizing the word “Writing” will also foreground writing education at the college.
“I hope the change will elevate the visibility of writing on campus,” Leonard said. “The name College Writing Program is an invitation to the campus community.”
Prebel said the change will largely not affect faculty, thanks to union protections.
“The faculty teaching in [the] CWP are presently all NTT faculty, and NTT faculty are unionized,” Prebel said. “So there cannot be workload changes.”
CWP Professor Anita Zachary teaches WRD 201, now CWP 201, which is required for sophomores who have yet to pass their First-Stage Writing Requirement. She said via email that the change will not affect the way she teaches the course.
Zachary said the only possible change the new designation could bring about to students is an expansion of writing opportunities later down the line.
“Students shouldn’t feel any impact,” Zachary said. “If anything, the designation as a program may expand opportunities for students such as maybe new offerings or perhaps engagements with the writing community here in Los Angeles.”
However, Leonard said that, for the time being, the change should not affect students in any way and that there are currently no plans to modify the size of the program.
Prebel said she is a bit sad to see the “WRD” acronym go, as the shorthand was a convenient phonetic spelling of “word.”
“I think a lot of us like WRD, which we shorthand as ‘word,’” Prebel said. “Which kind of works with the particular field of study.”
Still, she said the change remains mostly a nominal one.
“Again, the courses are still the same,” Prebel said. “And the descriptions of the courses are the same as they were before too. It’s just that there’s the new ‘CWP’ in front of them.”
Contact Noah Kim at nkim4@oxy.edu
