A while ago, I had lunch with a colleague and we talked about the recent department meeting. Like me, my colleague is a civilian, and like me, my colleague’s politics are progressive, with a strong explicit commitment to social justice that might work against conventional perceptions of the types of academics who teach at military academies. I was feeling embarrassed, having (once again) publicly put my foot in my mouth at the meeting by declaring some strongly felt opinions about the necessary and primary place of revision in writing instruction and the importance of rhetorical sophistication in creating writing assignments that ask students to go beyond reductive and simplistic yes/no up/down good/bad binaries. Not necessarily embarrassed that I’d made the assertions — for those in composition, I think such preferences are mostly self-evident — but embarrassed that I’d managed to seem so “impassioned” and “adamant,” as another colleague described me, and later my boss. Politically speaking, it likely wasn’t the best way for a new professor to position himself in relation to a department that still has some considerable historical misgivings about bringing all this process stuff into the teaching of writing. On the other hand, though, it’s been made clear to me that part of the reason I was hired here was to help contribute to re-orienting the perspective on writing instruction, and so I’m protesting a bit too much: I knew in coming here that I’d be saying things about pedagogy many of my more senior colleagues might not agree with, and I knew as well that my politics would be radically different from the politics of many of my colleagues, and radically different as well from the politics of a majority of my students. No surprise there, right?
I’m not so sure. After the ideological certainties that go along with being a graduate student and teaching assistant at Research 1 schools, and even after my four years as an enlisted soldier, I’m having to learn a radically different teacherly rhetoric with which to engage the cadets in my classes; a rhetoric that’s in many ways far more ideologically attuned to political nuance than what I’ve been used to. After lunch, I met with a cadet in my office, and we talked about the mid-process draft of his most recent essay, where he argued about the relationship between a soldier’s private service ethic and the public perception of why soldiers serve. He invoked David Rozelle, the Captain who had his foot blown off by an anti-tank mine in Iraq and later requested and received a return to a command in Iraq. I asked the cadet if it was possible for people to support such soldiers without supporting the war in Iraq. The cadet was impassioned and adamant: absolutely not. One cannot adequately respect Captain Rozelle without understanding and respecting his beliefs and values.
At the institutions where I taught as a graduate student, I’d have found it easy to dismiss such rhetoric from students as something spoken rather than wholly inhabited; as an idly mouthed rhetorical commonplace rather than a deeply felt credo. Here, though, every single one of my students knows that they incur a five-year service obligation, and that upon graduation their first stop is likely either Iraq or Afghanistan. And as I’ve noted before, they bear that prospect — as they do all things — with complete equanimity. With students whose attitudes and demeanor seem so different from those I’ve encountered elsewhere, then, I’ve had cause to question my own ideology, my own pedagogical practice, my own rhetorical commonplaces and political positions, all in ways that I might not have elsewhere. And yet some of the commonplaces seem so much the same, as well, even as they come from different ideological positions. My lunchtime colleague mentioned his longtime association with certain left-radical coalitions within academia, and the way that they’d closed off communication with him when he came to teach here. As if he were, in a way, a Benedict Arnold to their cause.
I teach at a military academy, and my personal politics are far left, and I see no necessary contradiction there. Certainly, I share the ideals of the peace movement: people should not wage war upon one another. But those are easy ideals to hold. I wonder whether folks in organizations like Rhetoricians for Peace would see someone who works as an educator for the military as a puppet, a stooge, an ignoramus. I wonder, in fact, what they might see as the relationship between peace and the military. Because I think they and my cadets might stand to learn something about commitment and idealism from one another; about rhetorics easy and hard.
Great post, Mike. I experienced something similar when I left my PhD program to take a job at a community college. I’d been deeply schooled in the Barthomae/Petrosky Ways of Reading thang and the cultural studies thang, and suddenly I was confronted with largely working class, largely religious, largely right-leaning students. I, too, was ready to dismiss their views as the empty commonplaces I’d tried to move my university students beyond, but I came to find out that their beliefs about God and family and country were often pretty deeply held, especially amongst those students for whom the military, firefighting, and policing were in their futures. And I did start to think who am I to challenge the beliefs of students who are ready to put themselves in real danger for those things that my fellow grad students and I used to pooh pooh? I’m not saying I’ve moved any further to the right myself, or that I don’t want to challenge all my students to look beyond the commonplace, but I’m not so fast to dismiss these things anymore.
You? Adament? Ye Gods, what were they thinking? OK, I’ll go read the rest now.
I have a question about this:
At the institutions where I taught as a graduate student, I’d have found it easy to dismiss such rhetoric from students as something spoken rather than wholly inhabited; as an idly mouthed rhetorical commonplace rather than a deeply felt credo.
and your ability to dismiss. I would fall on the side of dismissing to an extent.
Although you go on to say that they have committed to this, they don’t have the history or the experience behind them yet, so even though they are in a military environment and will have the experience of Iraq in their future (should it still be unfortunately available), I don’t see how their writing can have the same sort of experience that a soldier in a death-threatening situation can have.
It’s good that your aware of and welcome this shaking up of your ideas and rhetorics–that’s what will take you far as a classroom instructor because, as Pi notes with her example, sometimes the theories we learn and the people we teach don’t jibe as we’d assumed. Also, I think that as teachers, we have to respect the students’ ideas and ideals, though I agree with Michelle’s observation that in your case, the students’ don’t have the battle and career experience of soldiers yet. And I’m not suggesting that these ideas be left alone–if a soldier can’t use the tools of rhetoric and the time that being in college affords to think through a lot of assumptions, then when will she ever have that time? At WP, you’re training future officers who will be in charge of groups of people and strategic operations. While they obviously need to be trained in the quick here-and-now kind of thinking that one would need on the battlefield, they also need to be reminded of/enriched by/confounded by the questions raised in the humanities.
We all do.
Glad to see that you’ve posted, Mike. I’ve wondered if, like poor Charlie, you were trapped on the Metro and would never return, your “fate still unlearned.”
Good point about the location from which cadets might feel or inhabit perspectives. There is, though, a sense of community here that feels much more tight than anywhere else I’ve taught, coming partly from the fraction of cadets who are prior service, partly from the strong family service traditions, partly from the whole immersion thing that goes on here, and partly from just the way the military is: in terms of camaraderie, my time in the military was the best job I’ve every had. While what I’m doing now is far more intellectually fulfilling, I won’t forget the sense of shared commitment that was so immensely and uniquely rewarding when I was a soldier. And yet that tension between intellectual fulfillment and shared commitment that Joanna brings up is something that sometimes confounds and frustrates me here: cadets are soldiers first, and I know and respect that, but that means that they’re not intellectuals, scholars, or students first — and that frequently comes out in the attitudes about the place of academics.
I’m not sure how this fits with the discussion, but our local paper in Spokane ran an article a few days ago about voting patterns, showing which parts of the county voted at the county average, and which precincts voted either 5 or 10 percent above or below the county average. The lowest turnout in the county, about 30 percent with the county average near 70 percent, was in the precinct that encompasses Fairchild Air Force Base. Sure, lots of them are somewhat transient, but with the new air tankers a big deal in the local elections (what with Boeing across the Cascades and Fairchild being a refueling base of KC-135s I think it is) and this being a fairly Republican region, one would expect them to vote, one way or the other. It would be interesting to look at voting rates at other military bases across the country to see how this level of engagement plays out and what it might mean. What are the beliefs and values at play here?