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Articles Conference Reviews |
Session F30Empty Rhetoric and Academic Bullshit: Strategies for Composition’s Self-Representation in National Arenas This panel was made up of four speakers interested in the public representations of Composition Studies with very different takes on the possibility for addressing the negative public stereotypes ascribed to the profession. The first speaker, Mark Bauerlein, a literature professor at Emory University, argued that there is a communication gap between what compositionists say—specifically reports produced by the “leaders of the field” couched in language of race, class, and gender issues—and what the “man on the street” understands. According to Bauerlein, the general public doesn’t understand how research addressing things like identity, ideology, and politics are related to learning to write. The lay person thinks differently than the humanities academic, and the links between politics and writing that many compositionists take for granted are anathema to people who just want students to learn how to write for business and industry. Bauerlein argued that the confusion is in part related to the “publish or perish” mentality that drives what he labeled a “productivity issue. Academics have to produce to get tenure, get promotions, etc.; and in order to keep producing original research, they have to look at increasingly specialized subject matter. Specialized expertise is therefore forced upon academics by virtue of the research requirement. The more specialized the subjects, the more specialized the language needed to represent those subjects, and the more isolated from the people Composition Studies becomes. The increasing distance from the public and administrators and the increasing inability to represent writing research to those audiences is a direct result of the specialization of writing researchers. Therefore, if Composition Studies means to contradict the negative public perception of the field, the leaders in the field need to do a better job of showing the public and administrators how increasingly abstruse research agendas can exist without interfering with the real job of compositionists: to make students better writers for business, industry, and their other courses. The second speaker, Mike Edwards, from the U.S. Military Academy, followed Bauerlein’s didacticism with his paper, “Accounting and Economy: How Theory Commodifies Writings’ Work and a Possible Solution in Seven Paragraphs.” Edwards’ first started by problematizing the ownership of writing. He claimed that ownership comprises control and responsibility, but he demonstrated that lots of people, in the academy and out, feel they own writing. A major problem, as he sees it, is that writing is often conceived in very different terms by different “owners.” Writing specialists conceive of writing in terms of theory, pedagogy, and ideology. Conversely, other “owners” equate it with economic success: “writing is an essential skill for student success.” Edwards believes that a major issue arises when non-writing specialists are confronted with the specialized knowledge of academic writing specialists. What academics produce is “bullshit,” “empty bullshit,” or “academic bullshit.” If writing is a “valuable skill,” then theorizing writing becomes problematic because it unnecessarily complicates what students should be learning. Edwards believes that academics need to argue for writing as more than an economic skill, showing how writing is used for capitalist and non-capitalist endeavors. Of course, he acknowledges that such a distinction is a “Marxist” notion, so he suggests providing interested publics with “careful, specific, concrete, complete” accounts of writing research without theorizing. Although Edwards differs significantly from Bauerlein in terms of the value of writing scholarship, he comes to a similar conclusion. Edwards values the theoretical and ideological contributions of writing scholars, arguing that they allow academics to narrow complex concepts in order to put them into play with one another, but he ultimately agrees that academics need to do a better job of boiling down what they do to demonstrate its value to other would-be owners of writing. Margaret Price from Spellman College followed Edwards with her paper: “Smelling Better than Bullshit: A Call for Broader Communication By and Among Members of CCCC.” Whereas the first two speakers argued that academics need to better address the publics they’re meant to serve, Price complicated their suggestions by arguing that even when Composition Studies professionals explicitly attempts to talk to non-specialists, they do a poor job of it. Price turns to Disability Studies to demonstrate how such communication could be undertaken. I will follow her lead, and announce her thesis up front: “While both Rhet/Comp and Disability Studies desire to improve students’ knowledge, Disability Studies does a better job of engaging in public discourses which aim both to reach and articulate that goal. In other words, Disability Studies spends less time—in my estimation—talking to itself, and more time working on fostering public understanding of our achievements and also our hopes.” Price goes on to demonstrate how compositionists seem to communicate only amongst themselves. In one example, she details a critique of CCCC by Mel Livatino in Writing on the Edge (WoE) in which Livatino characterizes the field as pretentious and obsessed with victimization. Price was proud that Writing on the Edge engaged Livatino, soliciting responses from George Hillocks, Jr., Jenny Spinner, and Doug Hesse which helped situate and complicate Livatino’s critique. WoE also printed a response from Livatino which is significantly changed from his initial position. But, Price is ultimately disappointed that the whole exchange played out in a Rhet/Comp journal where most of the readers were already disposed to disagree with Livatino. As a result, no one’s mind was changed but Livatino’s. Price details another example of compositionists speaking to themselves by citing the 4Cs Blogspot, which Price thinks is too neat and predictable to be a “blog,” especially one committed to diversity. Price contrasts the CCCC blogspot with the website, thetroublewithjerry.com. Using “The Trouble with Jerry” as an exemplar, Price shows how Disability Studies in general, and protests against Jerry Lewis’s designation as the recipient of the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award in particular, enact messy and inclusive activism. Price argued that the accessibility of protest sites, the international audience, and the varying levels of debate demonstrated the kind of diversity and inclusion that she thinks would be valuable to composition studies. Price encourages and welcomes messier, more contentious, more public debate about writing—the refusal to do so, she believes, will continue to contribute to academics smelling of bullshit. The final panelist was Lauren Rosenberg from Eastern Connecticut State University. Rosenberg believes that composition studies is both marginalized and self-marginalized, but that one cannot dig into writing without investigating the writers; and investigating writers means investigating socio-cultural issues. She argues that once you look at the writer, you can’t “just teach writing” because “just teaching writing” is built on a concept of student writers as flawed and in need of fixing. In contrast, Rosenberg offered research she conducted in which she examined a group of adult men and women acquiring new literacies who, though coming to writing late in life, learned to use writing to position themselves. In the context of the panel, Rosenberg argued that composition studies can better reach public audiences by working outside of the walls of academia, by seeing how writing enables lived experiences. I will end by admitting that I attended this panel to see what Mark Bauerlein had to say to an audience filled with compositionists after his scathing critique of CCCC a couple years ago in which he suggested composition studies needed to focus more on basic writing than feminism or cultural studies. My anger was stoked by his talk, which I thought was paternalistic and insulting, based as it was on the notion that writing specialists need to scale back their unnecessarily complex research agendas. Bauerlein’s message, to my mind, is that research agendas should be reserved for fields predicated on intellectual inquiry (he did not need to announce that Literature is such a field for the implication to be well understood). Writing specialists, on the other hand, are being diverted from their task of making better writers by the all-consuming, and wholly unjustifiable, research agendas that were never designed for them in the first place. If compositionists would just simplify their research, they could simplify their teaching, which would make better writers for business and industry, which would take the onus of defending composition’s place in the academy off the shoulders of compositionists and their organizations. Bauerlein’s is just one more in a long line of communiqués from the “real academic disciplines” to Composition Studies: composition is pre-intellectual and compositionists need to remember their place. Nevertheless, in light of my reason for attending, I was as troubled by the response of a two-year college teacher in the audience as I was by Bauerlein’s talk. The instructor thanked Bauerlein for his presentation and announced that she was happy to hear people confronting academic bullshit because she feels unspoken to by journal article authors and other Composition Studies professionals. As a teacher, she wants less academic bullshit and more help with her teaching. I’ll admit it’s not a position I find myself comfortable with, but her presence and her experience testifies to the importance especially of Lauren Rosenberg’s paper—the importance of acknowledging and engaging marginal positions as necessary for our work. In addition, this instructor’s message is a testament to the complex situation within Composition Studies that fosters the kind of conflicting messages that make Bauerlein’s position palatable to many members of the field even as it evokes fury from others. Perhaps the message of this panel is that the issue of composition studies in public is more complicated than Composition Studies is prepared to acknowledge, especially when the marginalized groups Rosenberg sees as valuable are indeed us. For more on this panel, see Scott Jaschik’s review, “Critiquing, Defending Academic BS,” in Inside Higher Ed. (http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/03/17/bs). |