How to Dismantle an Academic Department

This week one of the optional readings for my seminar was Tom Benson's "The Cornell School of Rhetoric: Idiom and Institution" (Comm Quarterly, 2003). Rereading it over the weekend, I realized that I should have made it required. Benson offers a detailed history of one of the most influential graduate programs of the field's early decades (the other being this one, of course); in doing so, he contextualizes in a very material way a lot of the issues we're discussing during the first few weeks of the course. The appendix he includes is itself worth the price of admission; it reproduces Cornell's graduate reading list in rhetoric and public address, circa 1958 (can you say British public address?).

What really made me wish I'd required it, though, is that Benson examines at length the institutional events surrounding the closure of Cornell's program in rhetoric and public address in the mid-sixties. His discussion serves as a powerful object lesson for communication/rhetoric folks who still find ourselves having to justify not only what we do but where we do it. In the essay Benson reproduces substantial portions of a document called the "Elledge memo," produced by the ad hoc committee appointed at Cornell to decide the fate of its speech program. Benson writes, "To step into the thirteen-page Elledge memo even after all these years induces, for a rhetorician from the speech tradition, an experience of vertigo, impotence, shame, and resentment." Indeed, pretty much every argument that can be made against the study of rhetoric and public address in speech communication departments is made in this memo. One in particular is quite striking. After admitting that rhetoric has "always been near the center of education," the committee concluded, "It can be argued that modern rhetoric is either too large or too small to be considered by itself as a subject for courses or research."

Whoa. Gives the field's recent interests in "sizing up rhetoric" a decidedly material twist, doesn't it? Apparently it doesn't matter whether you like your rhetoric big or small, cuz we'll never be just right.

Benson suggests in the article that an analysis of the memo might make for a good doctoral exam question or, even better, an "interesting item" for "a department chair search." Indeed -- a great inoculation exercise in preparation for doing battle with institutional efforts to write off/write out rhetoric.

Comments

[Joshie Juice]

Wow. That sounds like a must read! I am out to get it this weekend!

What seminar are you using this essay for?

I'm thinking of developing a seminar on the object of speech for 08/09 year--and the first half of the class will be on our discipline's history. Other that Cohen's book and Benson's arrrticle, do you have other good suggestions for historical insights?

PS: I'm thrilled to learn you'll be visiting with us this fall. Yay!

[caraf]

Joshie, that class sounds great! These readings were for the first few weeks of my critical/historical methods seminar, but I won't be doing a full-blown history of the field thing there. However, my new colleague Scott Jacobs is teaching a history of the field grad seminar this coming spring, so you might want to get in touch with him for ideas. The debate circa 1915 between Everett Lee Hunt and Charles Woolbert (another Illinois guy) re: speech as humanistic versus "scientific" would be fun to have students read. I've only read Cohen's summary, not the texts themselves.

I can't wait to see everyone in Austin in December! What a treat to have been invited.