identity crisis

[Beth Kalikoff <kalikoff@u.washington.edu>]

Hi. I'm the Director of the new Writing Center at the University of 
Washington's Tacoma Campus.  I'm professional staff, rather than 
tenure-line faculty, and I report directly to the Librarian. I also have 
adjunct faculty status, so that I can teach 2 courses a year for credit, 
including a course on pedagogy for future Writing Center peer assistants. 

I like the way this Writing Center is independent of a particular 
department or program. This structural decision allows me to be 
interdependent and autonomous at the same time--although, as previous 
messages today suggest, there's more than one way to accomplish that.  
Reporting to the Librarian is rather unusual, I take it, but I like that, 
too: it underlines the writing-across-the-curriculum and interdisciplinary 
focus of this particular campus. I suppose that 
reporting to the Dean would give me higher status, but I don't know what 
other advantages it would bring. So far, so good.   

Beth Kalikoff, Univ. of Washington, Tacoma