“Opportunity/Exploitation”
by Tom Polk, Alisa Russell, and Allie Sockwell Johnston, Writing Across the Curriculum Graduate Organization (WAC-GO) | Xchanges 15.1, Spring 2020
Embracing Opportunities, Managing Exploitations
To illustrate some of these tensions between opportunity and exploitation that we’ve explored thus far, and to imagine what creative solutions to these tensions might look like, we would like to offer an anecdote: When Alisa was asked to evaluate a book proposal for a major publisher, she was flattered and rather excited to add this significant line to her CV. She could deduce from the proposal that the publishers specifically wanted a graduate student’s opinion and was impressed that they were valuing graduate student voices in this decision. As Alisa and her faculty mentor began to discuss how she might approach her response to this book proposal, her excitement quickly turned to anxiety: Like many graduate students, she had never seen a response to a book proposal, much less knew how to write one. Apparently this response had to end in either an acceptance or rejection of the proposal—talk about power that felt unearned or undeserved! And this response would also take a great deal of time to write—thus pulling resources and focus away from Alisa’s research projects.
We share this anecdote to demonstrate the rub that we, and no doubt many other graduate students across Rhet-Comp, consistently face: While we are grateful when our voices and opinions are valued or sought out, sometimes that “valuing” equates to dumping complex work on our plates that we don’t know how to navigate or handle. And with the almighty CV breathing down our necks, it’s very difficult to say no to any opportunity that crosses our paths. Additionally, graduate students are often sought out to provide fresh and diverse perspectives, but we are in a rather precarious position, especially if we plan to go on the academic job market: It costs something to be the “fresh” (re: non-mainstream) perspective.
Is the solution, then, to stop granting opportunities or seeking out the voices of graduate students? Please, no! Instead, these opportunities should be couched in formalized support and mentorship practices. What might it have looked like if Alisa’s recruiter had sent some sample book proposal responses, explained what was expected of her as a graduate student, and prepared her for the amount of time this kind of project takes? Going one step further, what if the recruiter had also described the benefits and drawbacks of taking on this project so Alisa could evaluate its usefulness in terms of her own goals? These moves in making the implicit explicit, and in offering structural support and mentorship, could help graduate students parse out the difference between a beneficial or exploitative opportunity for them at that moment.
These are gaps, then, that WAC-GO has attempted to fill by creating a peer network that makes explicit the tacit practices of our field. As some examples, we offer annotated conference proposals so graduate students know what moves they should be making; we host a Post-Conference on College Composition and Communication webinar so graduate students can capitalize on the energy from the conference to start or complete their projects; we circulate a semester newsletter so graduate students feel connected to others in WAC; and we facilitate a cross-institutional mentoring program that pairs graduate students interested in WAC with faculty mentors at other institutions. While we believe this kind of structural support and mentorship are an important start, we also recognize that our organization works best as one form of graduate student support among a complex network, so graduate students can consistently and reliably examine the relationship between opportunity and exploitation as they move among their varied spheres. As nextGEN (2020) moderators Kumari, Baniya, and Larson (2020) recognize, having one disruptive space where graduate students are supported cannot “encompass the totality of a movement necessary for graduate students to achieve equity” (Introduction).