MLA Special Session 64: "Rhetoric and the New Academic Freedom"

Sunday, December 27th (2009)

7-8:15 p.m., Philadelphia Marriot

The central argument of this panel is that when academic freedom is viewed as a rhetorical construction, rather than as a neutral principle, it can be productively reconceptualized and resituated to contribute to ongoing discussions about whether or not academic freedom protections are any more at risk now than in the past. By using the phrase "a rhetorical construction," we are drawing upon a definition of rhetoric as a mode of persuasion whose conditions of possibility shift according to the specifics of time and place. Put simply, we seek to explore the relationship between rhetoric, as a mode of persuasion, and the specific articulations about academic freedom this mode represents.

In their June 2007 College Composition and Communication article, entitled "'Anti-American Studies' in the Deep South: Dissenting Rhetorics, the Practice of Democracy, and Academic Freedom in Wartime Universities,'" Karen Powers and Catherine Chaput argue that the parameters governing the production of academic knowledge are conditioned and constrained by historical factors reflecting the nation's foreign policy commitments. McCarthy's Red Scare, which was motivated by fears of the Soviet penetration of the Western hemisphere, and the War on Terrorism, which is directed at defeating "Islamofascism" in the wake of 9/11, have both left indelible marks on the ways in which academics conduct research. For example, scholars laboring in Middle East studies are facing increased scrutiny of their work due to political exigencies tied to U.S foreign policy needs. Given the specific pressures shaping public perceptions of scholars advancing views contrary to those advanced by government think tanks, and the importance of giving such scholars institutional protection to do their work, it is important to develop a richer theoretical and rhetorical understanding of the specific factors shaping current conceptions of academic freedom. This panel will encourage writing teachers to not give into the temptation of the "political unconscious"-literally the voice in our head that tells us that some topics should not enter a discipline's discourse because they are too controversial and bring with them certain professionally hazards. As we will argue, rhetoric and composition, as a field of study that seeks to understand the lines of argumentative force informing rhetorical situations, may hold the key to subverting the very "preestablished and unconscious parameters" Chaput and Powers identify as controlling what can be thought, articulated, and written about in the academy. To borrow from Mary Boland, now is the time to stake composition's claim in the fight over academic freedom.

Academic Freedom and the Humanities: Rethinking the Place of Pedagogy

Mary R. Boland

CSU San Bernardino

The relationship between the language of academic freedom and the humanities has always been awkward. Developing among the university reformers of the late 19th century and tied to the projects of “scientific” truth seeking, expertise, and disciplinarity, academic freedom presupposes a subject matter about which one pursues knowledge. The right to pedagogical freedom derives from the belief that researchers should be allowed to share the fair and full results of their research – the best truth available – to their students and the wider culture. The teaching function, thus, was imagined as the means of knowledge delivery, a treatment that has rhetorically separated the functions of scholarship and teaching and which treats subject matter as an object. This approach to the “humane letters,” has costs. For one, it leads us to treat texts as static artifacts instead of living conversations that genuinely matter (the pernicious results of this can be seen in high school classrooms across the country). For another, it leaves us vulnerable to charges of bias (in various ways) or to “neutralizing” and “objectifying” our treatment of our subject matter.

Mary R. Boland is an Assistant Professor at California State University, San Bernardino, where she teaches various undergraduate writing classes, and graduate classes in composition theory and praxis, and the relationship between discourse and culture. She has published in College English, JAC, and in two book collections.

Academic Freedom, Professional Neutrality, and the Rhetoric of Disciplinary Conservativism

Catherine Chaput

University of Nevada, Reno

In his recent book, Save the World On Your Own Time, Stanley Fish makes an argument familiar to anyone who reads his New York Times columns or his blog on academia. He argues that the university ought to be reserved for the study and teaching of academic knowledge, whose parameters are set by professional organizations. The corollary to this thesis is, of course, that the university and its classrooms ought not to be the place for political moralizing. On the surface, this claim appears relatively indisputable; indeed, who would advocate that anyone except professional organizations set the agenda for university work or that professors should replace academic inquiry with political stump speeches? Yet, the terrain of academic freedom unfolds along a much more complicated landscape than claims about political neutrality would indicate. The work of academic inquiry requires innovations that necessarily transgress disciplinary boundaries as new knowledge supersedes older, often well-established, professional truisms. Professional knowledge, that is, is neither stagnant nor is it best pursued by disciplining supposedly neutral professional content. Fish exemplifies a disciplinary conservatism premised on strict content boundaries, clear truths, and a number of false binaries such as form versus content and analysis versus advocacy. This conservatism comes along with an entire set of arguments about university professionalism that undermine new knowledge production and reserve higher education for two contrary pursuits—vocationalism and erudition—neither of which serve the needs of our increasingly complicated global environment. This paper explores the rhetoric of this disciplinary conservatism and its relationship to academic freedom, arguing that professions be formed around points of contention and the inquiry into such dissonance.

Catherine Chaput is an assistant professor at the University of Nevada at Reo, where she teaches courses in the history and theory of rhetoric, rhetorical criticism, rhetoric and cultural studies, and discourse studies. Her research focuses on the relationship between rhetoric and political economy as it manifests within particular social, cultural, and political texts. She has published in journals such as JAC, College English, College Composition and Communication, Radical Pedagogy, and Writing Program Administrators. Her monograph, Inside the Teaching Machine, was published with the University of Alabama Press’s series in Rhetoric, Culture, and Social Critique.

The Rhetoric of David Horowitz: Responding to New Conceptualizations of Academic Freedom

Matthew Abraham

DePaul University, Chicago

David Horowitz and the Center for Popular Culture have been successful in transferring the debate about academic freedom from the university into the wider public sphere. The success of this transfer has been undertheorized. By “popularizing” academic freedom as a public good that college parents and public constituents should be concerned about, Horowitz and the Center have changed the terms of the academic freedom debate, demanding that the academy should respond and conform to majoritarian views around cultural politics. Horowitz’s “Academic Bill of Rights” suggests that “balance” is the proper criterion through which to assess a university instructor’s commitment to upholding the academic freedom of her students, i.e. an instructor who presents a “balance” of perspectives is giving her students the opportunity to learn multiple viewpoints on an issue. Similarly, Horowitz has argued that far more Democrats than Republicans comprise humanities faculties at major public universities, suggesting that this “imbalance” denies students their academic freedom and the proper presentation of multiple perspectives. This demand for balance is at once brilliant and sinister in that the call for a diversity of viewpoints is really a call for a single viewpoint. The purpose of this paper is to rhetorically analyze Horowitz’s indictment of supposed Leftist professors in his new book, One-Party Classroom: How Radical Professors at America’s Top Colleges Indoctrinate Students and Undermine Democracy and other publications.

Matthew Abraham is an Assistant Professor of Writing, Rhetoric, and Discourse at DePaul University in Chicago. His work has appeared in Cultural Critique, the Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, the Journal of Advanced Composition, College Composition and Communication, Logos: A Journal of Modern Society and Culture, and Postmodern Culture. He is currently completing a book entitled Out of Bounds: Academic Freedom and the Question of Palestine. Matthew won the 2005 Rachel Corrie Courage in the Teaching of Writing Award.