• freedom of speech
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Some heavies weigh in on the question of whether John Yoo should be dismissed from Boalt Hall, UC-Berkeley's Law School. As I've said before, following Brad DeLong (no bomb-throwing radical),a professor in a professional school such as law or medicine (or social work, for that matter) is bound by professional ethics and responsibility in ways that a professor of liberal arts is not.

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I'm not making much sense of this (yet another) bit of English department soul-searching. Perhaps I'm slow, or too attached to the "figure of speaking."

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thanks to keith for this. somehow it seems a gloss on....

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I have been absent from the Blogora, but it's with good reason! I just moved to Detroit to start a new position at Wayne State. After driving 1400+ miles in a car that was not quite big enough for two people, two dogs, a cat, and a turtle, we arrived in Detroit. It is not the thunderdome. In fact, it is quite nice. We even checked in on our plot at North Cass Community Garden and found a whole bunch of green tomatoes.

The transformation from grad student to professor is magical in that one moment you are "student" and the next you are "doctor." It is the magic of the performative utterance ("I dub thee...") par excellence. Part of that magical transformation is that I actually have an office now...with a window! And so I give you the view from my new office:

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I had been trying tonight to find out about rumors of a shakeup at the Sage journal Political Theory, and came across this blog In case you're not aware, political theorists (especially those with an historical rather than formal bent) are sort of treated in Political Science like rhetoric people in Communication departments.

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Michele Lamont (who helped create the field of cultural sociology in the US, and should be better known by people doing rhetoric and cultural studies) is guest-blogging over at Crooked Timber this month. Today she posted a chapter on her relationship with Pierre Bourdieu, forthcoming in a book on his work.

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Meme alert. The locus of inevitability has entered into current discussions of higher education, with frequent comparisons to other "industries" who failed to anticipate sudden change. Here's but one of recent examples. My own university remains in the hands (perhaps not for long) of someone who neither understands nor respects faculty. (But he has learned the Republican trick of quoting the Bible right after he lies about something.) Missing in this "debate" is the failure to point out the steady abdication by state legislatures of the concept of "public" education. Penn State is, what, down to under 10%, of state support? Also missing is the massive subsidy (even more now, as financial aid has dwindled) to the middle class of state-subsidized tuition, which still makes state universities a relative bargain. All these things are the result of political choices that started in the 1980's or earlier (much like financial deregulation under Reagan) and that were aided by the massive propaganda campaign against the liberal arts that started with Allan Bloom (and continues to this day). We are still failing as a profession to explain what we do and why. As I've said before, we rhetoricians, in English and in Comm, are in an unusually good position to move public opinion on the larger issue of higher education because it is pretty easy to "sell" what we do. We need something like Grover Norquist's weekly strategy meetings in which the Right plots out its talking points for the current news cycle. The "end of faculty governance" is another meme that is circulating rapidly, and I've yet to see a cogent defense by anyone, either locally or nationally.

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I recently served as the outside member on a PHD committee. The field was neither Comm nor English; all I'll say is that the field is not noted for scholarly rigor. The defense began with the candidate reading (in upspeak--all her declarative sentences became questions) 37 pages of powerpoint slides. We asked occasional questions along the way. Three members of the committee preface their questions with, "Now, this isn't a 'gotcha' question, so. . . ." So there was probably a grand total of 10 questions asked throughout the two hours. I found the dissertation badly researched (nothing in the bibliography about the creator of the central construct in the dissertation--all from secondary sources), poorly written (virtually every sentence was in passive voice), and, worst of all, proposed two fairly trivial research questions, one of which yielded statistically uninteresting results and the other was not answered at all. I realized early on that the advisor/committee wanted this student to be treated like a scared bunny rabbit, so I held my tongue and only asked two soft questions. In my considered judgment (and I know something about the topic of the dissertation), this work did not deserve a PHD. Yet I voted to pass (4-0 final vote). Did I make the right call? Any similar experiences?

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This looks like a terrific deal, and it helps support RSA!

June 16, 2009

ACLS Humanities E-Book (HEB) is pleased to make individual subscriptions available through standing membership in the Rhetoric Society of America as an added benefit of your membership.
Individual subscriptions are USD $35.00 for a twelve-month, renewable, subscription. $15 of your subscription will come back directly to the Rhetoric Society of America and the balance will help sustain HEB as a resource for the entire scholarly community.
The link below will bring you directly to the online purchase module at ACLS Humanities E-Book. You will need to choose the Rhetoric Society of America from the pull-down menu and provide your membership number (note: you may use your mobile phone number as a substitute. All information is confidential and will not be shared.)
To initiate a subscription, please visit:
https://www.humanitiesebook.org/subscription_purchase.html
Information and Terms
The subscription offers unlimited access to its collection of cross-searchable, full-text titles across the humanities and related social sciences (https://www.humanitiesebook.org/titlelist.html).
Titles have been selected and peer reviewed by ACLS constituent learned societies for their continued value in teaching and researching, and approximately 500 are being added each year.
The collection includes both in- and out-of-print titles ranging from the 1880s to the current year. Titles link to publishers' websites and to online reviews in JSTOR, Project MUSE, and other sites.
Individual subscriptions are ideal for those whose school might not yet have an institutional subscription to HEB or for individual members of a learned society who might not be affiliated with a subscribing institution.
For inquiries email: subscriptions@hebook.org

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Do we need something like this in Rhetoric/Communication?

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