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This dissertation argues that administrative records, often treated as bureaucratic residue, are in fact active sites where institutional memory is composed, preserved, and made rhetorically usable across time. The Intensive English Language Program (IELP) at North Dakota State University provides the case for this study, illustrating how such records emerge from and respond to shifting institutional demands, demographic changes, budgetary constraints, global recruitment initiatives, refugee resettlement, and recurring administrative reorganizations. As IELP contracted and eventually closed in the 2020s, its records offered a distinctive site for investigating how institutional memory is built and fragmented across time and through precarity.
Chapters 1 through 3 establish this study’s foundation: Chapter 1 explains the project’s motivation and warrant, Chapter 2 reviews scholarship across Writing Program Administration, archival theory, and related frameworks in rhetoric and composition, and Chapter 3 details the grounded theory methods that structure the analysis. The theory chapters that follow develop distinct but related dimensions of future-oriented archival practice. Rhetorical dimensions, in Chapter 4, show how documents gain resilience when composed with modularity, contextual explanation, and awareness of multiple time horizons. Ethical dimensions, in Chapter 5, emphasize how decisions about authorship, anonymity, and labor visibility must balance recognition with protection and invite humility toward future interpretation. Administrative pragmatics, in Chapter 6, demonstrate how archival practices serve as anticipatory infrastructures that enable continuity, support professional development, and equip future administrators with usable institutional memory. The final chapter synthesizes these rhetorical, ethical, and administrative theories, advancing a model of distributed authorship and proposing future directions for archival practice in writing program administration.
The dissertation contributes to writing studies and Writing Program Administration by reframing archives as generative practices rather than static repositories. It demonstrates that administrative records can be composed for future reuse and reinterpretation, making them durable resources for institutional argument, ethical accountability, and programmatic continuity. In doing so, it advances a theory of future-oriented archival practice in which the everyday labor of program administration is recognized as scholarly work and as a means of equipping future scholars, administrators, and stakeholders with the rhetorical and ethical tools to act with foresight.
