• the profession

If you're a regular reader of the blog, you know that this past year I became Department Head, which accounts for my low level of posting for a long time. I had two incidents today which raised a continuing ethical question I have about my job, and, perhaps, about the Profession in general.

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• the profession

h/t Mike Hogan

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• the profession

This has been an interesting weekend on the administrative front. As all of you know, public universities and faculty have been under systematic attack by Koch-funded think thanks, especially in Texas.

• the profession

I have vowed for a long time that I will publish an article with statistical analysis in it. Here's a proposal and hypotheses:

1. Start with QJS, the "flagship" journal in rhetorical studies from, say, 1970. It would easy to do an content analysis based on titles/abstracts and plot trends over time.

2. What will we find:
a. The disappearance of British Public Address, even after the post-colonial turn, as well as studies of non-US rhetoric in general.
b. The gradual focus on post-1960 studies of public discourse to the exclusion of previous historical eras.

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• rhetoric of religion

There's an article or even book to be written on the rhetorical dimensions of the "problem of evil" or "theodicy" (justifying the ways of the Almighty to humans, as my least favorite great English poet puts it). Ron Rosenbaum, a very capable independent scholar, stepped into the conceptual and rhetorical morasse at Stanford and writes about it in the current Chronicle.

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• the profession

Add this to the list of things I didn't know even after becoming a Full Professor: some universities have Heads and some (perhaps most?) have Chairs. While both represent/advocate for faculty/departments to the Dean and those higher up the administrative food chain, when push comes to shove Heads in principle have more autonomy (especially over operating budgets) and can overrule even a consensus decision by a department if he or she thinks it's necessary.

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• theorizing

When even military strategists are poststructuralists, something deeply weird is going on:

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• the profession

A new edition of the "opening shot in the culture wars" comes out this week. An interesting (and oddly honest) look back here. As readers of this blog know, I have some moderate Straussian tendencies on odd Tuesdays, so I'm thinking of blogging a bit on the book. Anyone want to join in?

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• the profession

I entered graduate school in COMM in the fall of 1975. I had a vague sense that there was a split between the social science and humanities wings of the field formerly known as speech. The instant I entered grad school I discovered a battle was going on for my soul. I had (he said immodestly) astronomically high GRE's and a nearly 4.0 (3.93 to be precise) GPA from a then-good liberal arts college (don't get me started on what it's like now). At that time one had to take both rhetorical methods and social science methods as an MA student, and I did rather well at both.

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• the profession

A generalization: as syllabi have become more detailed, undergraduates pay no attention to them. As library searches have become easier, neither undergraduates nor graduate students know how to use the library. As emails from administrators like myself become more frequent, faculty pay no attention either. Discuss. You will get a Nobel Prize in Something if you solve the problem that email has created.

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