In tight financial climates, emerging technologies loom as enticing options to administrators: efficient and cost-effective solutions to both operational and pedagogical problems. Disciplinary knowledge, frequently hailed as the pinnacle of cultural capital in the academy, does not hold absolute power in rhetorical situations in which the material conditions, competing research paradigms, conflicting needs, institutional history, and the promise of technology come into play. This article illustrates just such a conflicted rhetorical situation and shows how writing faculty used the promise of research, faculty development, and teacher education, all important currencies in academe, to cooperate with administrators' goals, and to derive benefits for the writing program and writing faculty. The project described tested two highly-promoted commercially-available writing technologies in local classroom settings via a small, manageable research project to give us systematically collected and interpreted evidence with which we could counterbalance anecdotal evidence about student performance, recitations from product literature about the promise of technology, and national distress about the most recent incarnation of a literacy crisis.