When Warner Rice was chair of the English department at the University of Michigan in the 1960s, he grew increasingly alarmed as he watched the English departments in the Big Ten competing against each other for the same job candidates. Salaries were low enough in those days that the increments in the bidding wars rarely exceeded $200. Professor Rice felt strongly that a new PhD should not choose Indiana over Illinois or Minnesota over Michigan on the basis of $200. As a result, he came up with the idea of an organization for college English department chairs, an organization through which chairs could share information about curricular and disciplinary matters and, as a side benefit, fix prices for each year's crop of new PhDs. The idea of an organization for English department chairs found broad professional support, and in 1965 John Hurt Fisher, who was then Executive Secretary of the Modern Language Association, invited Michael Shugrue to join the MLA staff as the administrator of a new organization named the Association of Departments of English. Nowadays membership in ADE, which exceeds 1,000, is expected of English department chairs at all the major research universities (of course the price fixing scheme never came to fruition).

In the late 1970s I worked at MLA as Director of ADE (Elizabeth Cowan-Neeld had intervened between Shugrue and me). During my tenure, Harvey Wiener, who was then still an obscure composition teacher at LaGuardia Community College on Long Island, approached MLA on behalf of a newly formed organization called the Council of Writing Program Administrators.