10/11/2024

Announcing the 2024 CWPA Lifetime Achievement Award Winners Shirley K. Rose and Douglas D. Hesse

Shirley K. Rose and Douglass D. Hesse have been awarded CWPA’s Lifetime Achievement Award for significant and ongoing service to the organization across the span of a career. Rose and   will be honored at a celebratory event at the summer 2025 conference.

Dr. Shirley Rose has been a member of the Council of Writing Program Administrators since 1989, when she joined after attending the WPA Workshop in Portland, Oregon. She was elected to a three-year term on the Executive Board in 1999 and subsequently served as an ex-officio member of the board. As an Executive Board member she served on all CWPA committees at some point. She was elected President in 2005, serving through June 2007. As President, she organized annual summer conferences in Anchorage, Alaska and Chattanooga, Tennessee.  She co-led the WPA Summer Workshop for new and renewing WPAs in 2011 and 2012. In 2010, she was appointed as a member of the WPA Consultant-Evaluator Service, and in 2014 was appointed Director of the Service, a role she held until 2023. 

During her tenure as  C-E Director, Shirley led professional development workshops for more than two dozen members of the C-E Service who collectively conducted over 50 visits to college and university writing programs across the United States and internationally. As Director, she matched consultant-evaluator teams to particular institutions and advised writing program faculty and administrators who were preparing for WPA Consultant-Evaluator Service visits. She became a reserve member of the service in 2024. 

From 2002-2015, Shirley was a member of the WPA: Writing Program Administration editorial board. She conducted survey research on job descriptions, roles, and responsibilities of members of the Council of Writing Program Administrators, which was published in the WPA: Writing program Administration, and she gave dozens of CWPA summer conference presentations on a range of topics in writing program administration.

Regarding her service in CWPA, Rose notes: 

“I became a member of the Council of Writing Program Administrators early in my forty-year career as a university professor because the organization offered the help—resources, mentoring, and intellectual community--I needed for my work as a WPA. My involvement with the organization began when I participated in the WPA Summer Workshop and Conference in Portland and it has sustained me in multiple WPA positions I’ve held. Over the years I’ve been privileged to give back to the organization as an elected member of the Executive Board and CWPA President, as a member of the Editorial Board for and contributor to WPA: Writing Program Administration, as a leader of the WPA Summer Workshop, and as Director of the WPA Consultant-Evaluator Service. In each of these roles, I gained as much as I gave. 

We WPAs are fortunate to be engaged in intellectual work characterized by building and community that makes service truly rewarding. I am immensely grateful that my work has been recognized with this award and especially honored to be sharing it with Doug Hesse, a colleague who has been a role model for me in all that I have done in the organization.”

Countless female members and leaders of CWPA have noted Shirley’s enduring support of women in the discipline. Shirley has also received widespread praise for her efforts to diversify CWPA and the C-E Service and make space for new voices and perspectives. And many WPAs credit Shirley’s landmark WPA volumes (co-authored with Irvin Weiser) as the foundations of their WPA training. If there is anything you need to know about writing program administration or research, Shirley has probably written a book on it.

Dr. Douglas Hesse was elected to the CWPA Executive Board in 1992 and became editor of WPA: Writing Program Administration in 1994. Doug created the first CWPA website in 1997 and served five years as webmaster. He was elected President in 1999 and 2000, reviving the newsletter and arranging popular annual parties at  the Modern Language Association Convention A highlight of his presidency was the adoption of “The Intellectual Work of Writing Administration,” which remains widely cited today, particularly in promotion and tenure cases.

Doug was program chair for the Purdue and Charlotte summer conferences and twice co-facilitated  the WPA Summer Workshop (initially  with Sheryl Fontaine and then with Marty Townsend). In 2008, he was local arrangements chair for the Denver summer conference and workshop. He served twenty years on the Consultant Evaluator Service, including a stint as Assistant Director (with Chuck Schuster), visiting two dozen programs. Moreover, Doug served on the committees to develop the CWPA statement on Plagiarism: Best Practices and on the 2014 revision of the WPA Outcomes Statement.  He returned to the CWPA Executive Board in 2022 as Archivist and MLA Liaison, organizing the 2023 and 2024 CWPA panels at MLA. And he recently returned to WPA serving as guest editor when the journal was between permanent editors. 

When asked  how he got involved with the organization, Doug recounts,

 “I remember stumbling across CWPA in the announcements pages of PMLA after my first year directing the writing program at Illinois State. Two things struck me at my first encounter, at the summer conference. First was finding people whose perspectives on and responsibilities for writing at institutional scales overlapped mine. This was astonishing; I had national colleagues! Second was being heartily welcomed; I was a newish assistant professor being heard by people like Louise Phelps and David Bartholomae, later dancing on a Cincinnati river boat with people like Susan Jarratt and Bud Weiser. Belonging, in a double sense, has so long mattered.”

Apart from being an icon of WPA history and research, Doug is widely considered as the go-to person for WPA history and organizational memory. Like Shirley, Doug has established a reputation for tirelessly and selflessly assisting new WPAs and WPA leaders, reminding new generations of WPAs what true service entails. If you’re struggling to remember the particulars of a WPA event or publication, chances are Doug can help you fill in the gaps. He might even provide you with typewritten meeting minutes or conference programs. And if you are grappling with the challenges of WPA leadership, Doug will no doubt have sage advice to offer, drawn from his vast experience as CWPA President, CCCC Chair, AWAC Chair, and NCTE President, and peppered with a good dose of storytelling.

Please join the organization in congratulating Drs. Rose and Hesse on this achievement. If you’d like to participate in the July 2025 event to honor them, which will take place over zoom as part of our 2025 Conference, please reach out to Kelly Blewett at councilofwpa@gmail.com.