strategic reorganization

I've been working on our department's strategic plan. It's really difficult to be "strategic" in a department as divided as ours. It's not that we are hostile to one another. Nothing like that. It's more like the amicable divorce where exes get along for the kids' sake.

But you can't really plan a future together.

Being divided hasn't been great for professional writing, but it hasn't been terrible either. We've been free to pursue our interests, but with only three of us, we're ultimately limited in the scope of our activities. There are advantages to being small, but there are also obvious disadvantages. On the other hand, I think it has been hardest for our teacher education faculty who have to run the largest program in our department and deal with all the state bureaucracy.

If you took away all the personalities and the history and examined the situation with a cold eye, it wouldn't be hard to determine that we are inefficient. We are inefficient because are department runs according to conflicting sets of external disciplinary values (literary studies, rhetoric, teacher education) rather than through some internal logic that would seek to maximize the department's human resources.

Obviously the premise is that departments follow a shared disciplinary logic. While we all know the long-standing conflicted history of English a la Graff, I believe that in the past those shifts still worked within a disciplinary logic. We have something different. In the 16 years I've been a grad student and professor, I haven't seen anything that resembles a coherent discipline, and I don't see anything to suggest such a thing will ever come to pass. I don't even see it in rhet/comp, let alone in English Studies.

I mean are there any Phds in English under the age of 50 that believe rhet/comp and literary studies are part of the same discipline? what common objective would they share that would differentiate them from other disciplines (i.e. what do both r/c and lit. stud. do that philosophy or communications or history don't do)? what are their common methods or activities?

The upshot is that English departments can't be founded on a disciplinary logic unless they subdivide, which means they are no longer really departments. Instead they require a post-disciplinary arrangement. That means a local arrangement that is not based on what "should be" according to some external disciplinary vision but rather on whatever is.

Creating a strategic future based on whatever is not easy, as one is always tempted, attracted to the desires of disciplinary machines. It is especially difficult in terms of the most treacherous of departmental grounds: new hires. It is a strange battlefield in a way. We tend to fight for someone "like us," and yet hires are always risky. In some respects it's easier to let others take the risk.

The deepest challenge though is to create a future where the curricular/disciplinary goal is NOT to hire or educate people like us or to become like us. What happens when we give up that desire to reproduce our ideological, aesthetic, and disciplinary values? How do we even teach outside of that cybernetic, interpolative desire?

I'm not making recommendations mind you. Really I'm not. I don't believe such post-disciplinary spaces are reachable given where we are. Or, alternately, we will come upon them inevitably through ongoing fragmentation.