Submitted by Jim Aune on April 5, 2012 - 5:53pm
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. At that time, as compared to now, there was no "qualitative" or "ethnographic" work in the social sciences and "media studies" was, as Dan Drezner puts it, "piss-poor monocausal social science." Cultural studies didn't arrive in the US till roughly 1983. I found my first year of graduate school profoundly disappointing. History of rhetorical theory was moribund. Public address was worse. Interpersonal communication was the name of the game, and it was done at my institution as. . well. piss-poor monocausal social science. I thought of not finishing my thesis and going on to work in business, but I had funding for another year. Then Tom Farrell came along, and reading both Habermas's Legitimation Crisis and Horkheimer/Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment in fall 1976 made me think I might actually learn something new. But at the time it was clear that there were hopes on both sides of the rhetoric/comm divide that I would decide to jump one way or the other. The accusations were quite open in class: the comm people had open contempt for the refusal of the rhetoricians to, like, test hypotheses. The rhetoricians condemned the comm people for their firm grasp of the trivial, usually citing Richard Weaver in the process.
As I matured, and as comm matured, I developed a greater understanding of what I still think of as "real" social sciences like economics and sociology. And, as I look back, I think I might have been a pretty good ethnographer. But I digress. The little tiff (interesting for a tiff) between our own jb and syntaxfactory about literature made me think of this, as well as a colloquium in my department today that. . well. . . seemed to display the same firm grasp of the trivial that is the usual accusation social scientists face. What is different now, I think, is that we just mutter amongst ourselves in our subdisciplinary silos about what wankers the "other" folks in the department are. Open conflict is more rare, as compared to the 1970's.
Is this a good or a bad thing?
I'm not sure what's meant above by "open conflict," but it's been my experience - in both comm and comp studies - that what often goes on are very unproductive forms of provincialism and identity politics.
Admittedly Cynicial,
DS
...I would stay home with my own company. Tension is productive, so long as there is respect at a deeper level. [As for my beef with Brown, there is fundamental respect for Brown's position -- but not for his position if it yields a defense of Bauerlein.]
When I dream of reasons to leave Minnesota, it is not warmth, nor the amenities of "real city life" that draws my imagination elsewhere: it is the utter insistence of my Minnesota "Nice" colleagues to prefer a polite smile as wallpaper over a decent argument. Conflict makes maieutics possible. Social science vs. humanities, rhetoric vs. literature, research vs. teaching...
If I ever gave up being a professor of rhetoric, it would only be in hopes of being a professor of maieutics (where the goal is not the midwifery of truth, but the midwifery of one's convictions, commitments, and personal biases, bringing them to light for purposes of engagement).
--db
I find the disagreement between me and DB to be productive and respectful. No problems there.
However, there is not always "open conflict" between literature and composition professors (which is the subject of our disagreement). We might publish blog posts and articles (in composition journals) about various misguided approaches, but do we actually engage people in productive debates and arguments about what is wrong with teaching "interpretation" or "summary" as the primary work of composition classes? My sense is that this does not happen. Instead, we seek out opportunities to dismiss one another. Lit people dismisses comp as not "real work." Comp people dismiss lit people as elitists who don't teach writing but instead just teach literary interpretation. I should say that I have experienced the dismissals of my colleagues at various institutions. But I have tried to look past those dismissals in the interest of moving the conversation forward.
I would like to say that we might see a generational shift at some point, one that allowed us to actually converse about such topics...one that would allow the ugliness of previous decades to fall away in in the interest of working together. But I have seen little evidence of this. Institutions are very good at communicating historical beefs, keeping those beefs around, and using them to enculturate new scholars and teachers. I am becoming less and less optimistic that these sorts of conversations can happen in productive ways.
...and I believe that the universal comp requirement is the problem that sets all these issues afire.
1. If lit PhDs could only be funded by Lit TAships, the size of Lit PhD programs would shrink to "about as many Lit PhDs as can get jobs."
2. If Rhet/Comp PhDs could only be funded by TAships in elective or major writing courses , Rhet Comp PhDs would become rarer, true... but they would look less like junior managers and more like traditional faculty.
3. If Lit PhDs hired into state schools and SLACs (schools with 3/3 loads or higher, basically), Lit PhDs would not come to teach first-year writing with resentment and anger because they would not come to teach first-year writing.
The longer I do this, the more I dream of WAC and of writing programs that serve writing majors and minors and perhaps select majors who seek some kind of writing certificate for their students. Let everyone be part of the teaching of writing.
As someone who earned a PhD in comm studies after the turn of the millenium, I remember a couple of my graduate school professors narrating this increasingly rare "open conflict" you describe, Jim, as evidence of the "end of the paradigm wars". I remember one prof then going on to share his war stories--what he described as "blood in the hallways" when he was in grad school.
I have since felt that their descriptions of these wars now being over were probably overly optimistic and probably sheltered, maybe intentionally sheltered. I think open conflict in the academy, not war, can be healthy, but in some ways the fragmentation, collaborations, and interdisciplinary trends that have occurred are also healthy.
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