James Madison University Seeks Academic Unit Head of Writing, Rhetoric and Technical Communication

A colleague at a public university in the Southeast called last week with a worry she has raised in one form or another for years: how do you pull tenured senior faculty out of comfortable research lives and into a leadership job they suspect is mostly budgets, course schedules, complaint management and the slow work of curriculum approvals? While we talked, she forwarded the James Madison University posting for Academic Unit Head of the School of Writing, Rhetoric and Technical Communication, and the answer was sitting in the first block of text.

JMU is asking for “a faculty advocate with a strong and continuing record of research and teaching experience” consistent with appointment as an advanced associate or full professor at an R2 institution. The Academic Unit Head role is a 12-month tenured appointment with a 1-1 teaching load, beginning July 1, 2027. Review of completed applications begins November 9, 2026, which gives the committee nearly a full academic year to screen, interview, negotiate and plan a handover. That timeline tells candidates the search is not being run in panic mode.

The school behind the search is a stand-alone writing department of roughly 40 full- and part-time faculty. It offers B.A. and B.S. degrees, a minor and an M.A. in Writing, Rhetoric and Technical Communication, and it runs more than 150 sections of first-year writing each year through the university’s General Education Program.

A stand-alone writing school, not a corner of English

WRTC was formed on February 14, 2008, when the College of Arts and Letters merged two existing programs: Writing and Rhetoric Studies and the Institute for Technical and Scientific Communication. That Valentine’s Day founding is a small piece of school lore, but the merger itself matters more. It created one of a handful of independent writing departments in the United States with its own tenure lines, its own undergraduate concentrations and its own graduate program.

The undergraduate curriculum asks students to do applied work early. Every B.A. and B.S. major completes a required internship, supported by coursework in professional editing, document design, usability testing, legal writing, health and medical communication and content strategy. Students also run RhetTech, an online journal, and the school has a hand in The Bluestone, JMU’s award-winning yearbook, where WRTC students frequently take editorial roles.

The graduate side is deliberately small. The M.A. program admits around 10 to 12 students per year, and graduate assistantships cover tuition and provide a semimonthly stipend; second-year students can apply to teach sections of first-year writing. Current director Michael Smith, a professor who joined JMU in 2004, leads the school. Before him, Traci Zimmerman held the director role; she now serves as dean of the College of Arts and Letters, which means the posting is replacing a position whose most recent two occupants were promoted internally. That is a specific, readable signal about the school’s governance culture, and candidates should treat it as one.

Why the title “Academic Unit Head” is not cosmetic

JMU calls this an Academic Unit Head, not a chair, and the difference is structural. Under the university’s Academic Affairs Policy #2, academic unit heads serve at the pleasure of the dean. The normal term of appointment is one year, and after the initial term the appointment is normally renewed annually. Tenure attaches to the faculty role, not the administrative assignment, and when a unit head steps down or is removed, the salary is normally reduced to 83 percent of the 12-month figure unless the dean and provost approve another rate.

That is not an unusual design in Virginia public universities, but it shapes the job. The posting asks for someone who can advocate for the school’s needs, and at JMU that advocacy operates inside a dean-appointed, annually renewable structure. Faculty have raised the point in governance channels, including a 2022 Faculty Senate resolution that asked the university to study a shift toward an elected department chair model with term limits and clearer checks on appointment power. The successful candidate will need to earn trust upward with the dean and outward with the faculty at the same time.

What a candidate actually touches

Application materials reveal how seriously a committee treats the hire. JMU asks for a cover letter, a curriculum vitae, a one-page research statement describing scholarly trajectory, and a separate one-page statement of administrative policy and leadership. The balance is telling. A committee that wants a paper-pusher asks for a management memo; a committee that wants a scholar-administrator gives equal weight to both pages. Candidates uncertain about how to shape the CV should review this academic CV guide before uploading, because the document is doing more work here than in a standard faculty search.

The search chair is named and reachable: Dr. Peggy Plass at plassms@jmu.edu. That may sound like a small courtesy, but it changes the candidate’s experience. A named contact means questions get answers instead of vanishing into a portal. The pattern matches what this employer branding guide describes: searches that publish a contact person and a review date tend to read, to the applicant, like an institution that has thought about the person on the other side of the screen. The complete posting is on the JMU jobs site.

JMU also points relocating candidates to its Dual Career and Community Resources Program, a practical acknowledgment that a senior hire often involves a partner’s career and a family’s move. Harrisonburg sits in the Shenandoah Valley, about two hours from Washington, D.C., and the salary is listed only as commensurate with experience, so dual-career support and cost of living are part of any serious negotiation.

The market context that gives this search weight

JMU enrolled 23,157 students in Fall 2025 and has held its R2 designation since 2022, when the Carnegie Commission classified it as a Doctoral University with High Research Activity. The university has spent the years since balancing that research push with its long-standing teacher-scholar model. Writing programs sit at the center of that balance: every student passes through first-year writing, and the school’s applied majors feed industries that keep hiring even in flat labor markets.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects roughly 3,200 openings for technical writers each year through 2035, even as total employment grows slowly, with a 2025 median wage of $90,390. Most of those openings are replacements, which puts a premium on writing programs that teach adaptable, portfolio-shaped skills. The M.A. program’s redesign matters here: graduate program director Lori Beth De Hertogh has described a curriculum rebuilt around career readiness, generative artificial intelligence, global technical communication and user experience, with a thesis or internship capstone. The new AUH will inherit that redesign in motion.

Reading the job like a working chair

The preferred qualifications read like a curriculum for the actual work:

• Support faculty teaching, research and creative scholarship in the unit.
• Implement university and departmental policies with consistency.
• Collaborate with colleagues within and beyond the school.
• Identify emerging program needs and carry out strategic planning.
• Manage enrollment and foster growth in undergraduate and graduate programs.
• Advocate for departmental needs inside a changing institution.

There is no poetry in that list, and there should not be. The job is scheduling, budgets, evaluations, hiring requests, curriculum approvals and daily communication. The 1-1 teaching load is lighter than many research-active faculty carry, and it is designed to keep the AUH’s scholarly identity alive, not to make the role easy.

One structural reality worth naming: the school’s administrative staff do much of the work that makes a unit head look good or bad. Course scheduling, budget tracking, enrollment reports and student-facing paperwork all run through people whose names never appear in the posting. A candidate who frames the job as faculty advocacy alone will misjudge it; the effective Academic Unit Head builds trust with both the faculty and the staff who keep the operation moving.

For hiring teams watching this search, the practical step to borrow this month costs nothing. Name the search chair in the posting, publish a review date and ask candidates for one page on leadership alongside the research statement. JMU did all three, and the result is a search that reads, from a candidate’s screen, like a process designed by adults. Copy that.