The Washington Post has an excellent story by Mary Ilyushina today about the Ukraine war’s ideological effects on Russian universities. I doubt themanyopinioneersattacking recent American campus activism will acknowledge any parallels. This snippet struck me as particularly relevant:
Programs specializing in the liberal arts and sciences are primary targets because they are viewed as breeding grounds for dissent. Major universities have cut the hours spent studying Western governments, human rights and international law, and even the English language. “We were destroyed,” said Denis Skopin, a philosophy professor at Smolny College who was fired for criticizing the war. “Because the last thing people who run universities need are unreliable actors who do the ‘wrong’ thing, think in a different way, and teach their students to do the same.”
As a military veteran who sometimes comments on the relative effectiveness of anti-imperial rhetorical forms, I’ve had my politics occasionally and unfortunately mistaken for those of the commentators above. Yet it’s quite clear to many of us working in higher ed that Ilyushina’s description in the Post, stripped of the Ukraine war context, applies equally well to what’s happening in American higher education through different processes, as Clausewitz famously suggested: “War is a mere continuation of policy by other means.”
In the advanced rhetoric courses I teach, students with left-leaning politics often most want to connect with stories of principled resistance to imperial power: Cicero’s Philippics against Mark Antony are more enjoyable than the nuanced rhetorical compromises of the Pro Roscio Amerino. Such nuanced rhetorical compromises, however, can offer more relevant insights into the actual workings of imperial power. But nuance tends to be the first casualty in debates over higher education: consider, for example, the well-deserved mockery received by the NYPD for holding up textbooks on terrorism as evidence of “outside agitators” at Columbia, when Columbia publishes one of the most well-respected series of scholarly books on terrorism. One is reminded of Raymond Williams being stopped by the police and questioned about the dangerously subversive copy of Matthew Arnold’s 1869 Culture and Anarchy he was carrying.
Charles Homans recently published an excellent New York Times Magazine article on campaign rhetoric. I’m thinking of sharing it with my History of Global Rhetorics seminar in the fall, to connect with the Dialogus de Oratoribus from Tacitus and the questions it raises about writing under imperial power. This passage is what caught my eye:
How do you think about a politician who openly veers into fascist tropes but, in four years in office, did not generally govern like one? On one level, the answer hinged on how the people — his people — heard what he said. His long pattern of self-contradiction and denial, of jokes that might or might not be jokes, meant that “he can talk in different layers to different people,” [New School Professor of History and author of The Wannabe Fascists Federico] Finchelstein said. “There are people who take what he says literally. There are people who don’t take it literally. And people who ignore it as rhetoric. He’s talking to all these people.” The question was what they heard.
Those “different layers” are what University of Chicago Helen A. Regenstein ProfessorShadi Bartsch characterizes as Roman imperial “doublespeak” and also the competing “esoteric” and “exoteric” readings that far-right philosopher Leo Strauss ascribed to the rhetoric of Plato and Maimonides. With the alarming turns that American public political rhetoric has recently taken, I want to look again at one of the philosophers idolized by the neoconservatives who paved (razed?) the foundation for our contemporary political situation.
So reading the other team’s playbook means assigning excerpts from On Tyranny and Persecution and the Art of Writing. I was lucky to talk some with NicholasXenos when I was a graduate student at UMass in the early 2000s, and his argument that “Strauss was somebody who wanted to go back to a previous, pre-liberal, pre-bourgeois era of blood and guts, of imperial domination, of authoritarian rule, of pure fascism” in that political moment — one much milder than today’s — hit hard.
I put out the flag and read some poetry this morning: Rowan Ricardo Phillips, Dean Young, Claudia Rankine, Terrance Hayes. As battered and damaged as we are, I have to think there’s some slight hope for democratic ideals.
And I let Malcolm stay up late last night to watch the neighborhood’s homemade fireworks displays. Literal squeals of delight.
Here’s some Tony Hoagland that maybe captures a bit of the feeling.
That one night in the middle of the summer when people move their chairs outside and put their TVs on the porch so the dark is full of murmuring blue lights.
We were drinking beer with the sound off, watching the figures on the screen— the bony blondes, the lean-jawed guys who decorate the perfume and the cars—
the pretty ones the merchandise is wearing this year.
The poem then takes a swerve into gun violence—and there’s more than enough of that today to not reduplicate it in verse. Happy 4th.
Nearly 20 years ago, I presented at my first national academic conference in New York City. The first day of the 2003 Conference on College Composition and Communication coincided with the first day of the United States government’s bombing of Iraq. I’d finished my 4-year active-duty Army hitch a few years before. On the first day of the conference and on throughout, attendees and presenters and leadership talked about the war and made plans as individuals and as a professional organization to protest. The monitors on the elevators cycled explosions.
A little over 10 years ago, I was in Afghanistan. I’d taken my first full-time Assistant Professor position at the United States Military Academy at West Point, and volunteered to deploy as a faculty mentor for the NATO-led National Training Mission in Afghanistan, working on the academic side of helping rebuild Afghan institutions of higher education after 30 years of war. I felt like it was the least I could do after how badly the US, uh, fouled up their country. I blogged some about it, but there was a lot I couldn’t or wouldn’t or didn’t talk much about.
For one, I made the decision to deploy without a sidearm, which annoyed some of my military and civilian colleagues, all of whom did carry guns.1 I didn’t think I would be a very helpful mentor to the Afghan writing professors carrying a gun: trust; rhetorical ethos. (Weird brag. Sorry.)
For another, it was scary to get shot at and shelled and rocketed. That went without saying (weird brag again; sorry), and I didn’t want to alarm folks back home, and I was grateful that the Taliban’s reputation for terrible aim was well-earned. (OK, let’s try one more time to get away from the rhetorical swagger, Mike.🙄) I had been elected incoming junior chair of the CCCC Intellectual Property Caucus and was required to participate in the conference in some way, and I gave a very windy videorecorded talk in my desert camo ACUs. The ad hoc online component of the conference (such as it was, improvised by the organization’s bloggers: checking out links to presentation materials, following Twitter feeds, reading blogged accounts) was enjoyable and, yes, exciting.
The biggest thing I had a hard time acknowledging even elliptically was the March 1, 2011 killing of nine Afghan boys gathering firewood in Mano Gai by United States attack helicopters soldiers. I felt heartsick, helpless, furious, disgusted. I didn’t know what to say to H—–, or F—–, or Muhammad, or Freshta, or Shams, or any of my other Afghan colleagues at the time, some of whom would become my friends.2 I wish I’d had the courage and humanity to say more than “I’m so sorry.”
This year, the 2022 Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) began on March 9, thirteen days after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The Conference was online, and the organizers made the decision that all presentation materials had to be uploaded by February 28—still four days after the invasion. I videorecorded my presentation wearing blue and yellow, which felt like—literally—the least I could do. I wondered, hopefully, how much CCCC conferees and leadership would have to say about the war.
It turns out I needn’t have.
CCCC leadership has been silent on the war. I went to a lot of the on-demand panels and a few live ones, and I was pretty frustrated to hear no mention—notafudgypeep—in any of the presentations or materials or discussion I saw, with the sole exception of an advertisement from Norton in the program, which I happily reproduce here without permission from NCTE or CCCC. (Yes, Mike, grump grump.)
Thank you for that, Norton, seriously—no sarcasm. I’ll be buying and assigning more of your books.
And, well, CCCC leadership—I guess I’m not sure what I hope you’ll do. I saw the phrase “life-and-death issue” used freely in public statements by the conference leadership. I saw Asao Inoue’s phrase “so that people stop killing each other” quoted more than any other line at the conference. I saw the conference CFP pose the question: “How do we remain relevant?”
So what’s the protocol for relevance when a missile intentionally aimed at a train station for fleeing refugees kills more than 50 civilians? Does one argue over the nuances of the dative case in the phrase “за детей” after seeing the flop of that dead boy’s little body?
I feel like organizations that find themselves operating on ethical principles demonstrably distinct from the ones they have privileged might ought watch that video again.
And again.
1 I discovered in the violentaftermath of the Terry Jones Q’uran-burning incident that my organization had an emergency safe with long guns, as I’d somewhat expected. The most sphincter-clenching phrase I’ve ever heard is still “insurgents in ANA uniforms inside the perimeter.”
2 The folks named successfully emigrated to the US. I no longer hear from H—–, and F—–‘s P-2 visa application has remained in State Department limbo since August.
I put this together more as a provocation and thinking-tool than as an actual working syllabus, since it’d be, uh, laborious to squeeze—even tightly—into a 15-week semester. I’ve also been inspired by seeing the insightful work of some of my amazingcurrent and former WSU colleagues, work from which these ideas derive and depart in ways that make the flaws and faults in what follows mine alone. Call it old-school and somewhat arbitrary at alphabetized 10 shorter and 10 longer, but I guess part of what I’m posing here is: if I’ve shamefully and myopically overlooked a certain essential text that more perfectly fits into the framework implied below, what would you cut first in order to replace with your candidate, and why? And what kinds of sequencings might you imagine?
The politics herein may prompt eye-rolling.If that’s the case, I can only offer a mea culpa and suggest putting it under a Straussian reading, if you’re into that sort of thing😉.
. . . Is for you to get vaccinated. Hey, GOP friends and former West Point colleagues: do you support the military? I know you’re aware that National Guard soldiers are spending their holidays away from their families in Indiana, Maine, Nevada, New York, Ohio, and elsewhere. And they’re doing that because the ICUs there are overwhelmed with people infected, the majority of whom are unvaccinated, and who got it from people who were unvaccinated. And I know you might believe that it’s your body and therefore your decision, but in this holiday season when we remind ourselves to think of others, I hope you might consider the effects of your decision. Because, honestly, I do want you to live—and even if you despise people with politics like mine, what better way to own the libs than to have more living GOP voters?
I’m really enjoying teaching English 419: The Twentieth-Century Novel as a sort of break from what feel to me like the more pedagogically and rhetorically challenging classes in digital technologies and composition and rhetoric that I usually teach. Teaching has its persuasive components, as any good teacher knows—students who are invested in the material learn better and more easily, so part of my mission is to engage students and persuade them that the material is worth investing in—and novels, for undergraduates in particular, I think offer a more direct rout into engagement through the simple pleasure of reading. And in my teaching evaluations from students, my most commented-upon characteristic for the past 20 years or so of my teaching has been my enthusiasm, and sometimes enthusiasm for the pleasures of the text (even when coupled to the difficulty of the text) can provide a more direct route into that engagement. In the courses I usually teach—rhetoric, composition, digital technologies—my enthusiasm often translates into arguments along the lines of “Look, this is important!” whereas this semester, my arguments have been more like, “Look, this is cool!” That’s an oversimplification, of course, but I guess a way of me saying, I’ve really enjoyed the opportunity to have said, over and over again this semester, “Look, this is cool!” as we’ve made our way through
Like most of us, I’ve been adjusting to the pedagogical, administrative, and interpersonal exigencies of COVID-19. Like most of us, I’ve found some of those adjustments challenging, particularly as they relate to making workload allowances for students and myself — for me, being a single dad for three to four weeks at a stretch without available daycare has required some re-thinking of priorities. In the fall semester of 2020, I found myself teaching our graduate seminar in classical rhetoric (which we’re in the process of re-thinking, especially in light of the recent conversations in classics among folks like Shelley Haley, Shadi Bartsch, Dan-el Padilla Peralta, Mary Beard, and others about the problems of whiteness) and our Digital Technology and Culture courses on information structures and the history of digital technologies as a one-course overload, which led me to do some of that re-thinking of priorities. And our enrollments for this coming fall are still in flux, so I wound up with the opportunity to teach a couple of courses that I haven’t taught before, which is kind of nice — I’ve been feeling the need for a bit of a pedagogical reset.
I’ll leave discussing the first new prep for last, because it’s for me the most interesting and challenging. But for the second new prep, there were only a few classes in the schedule that were needing to be taught and that I felt like I had the expertise and desire to teach. The first possibility was an open upper-division literature elective that only fulfilled elective requirements, and I wrote up a proposal for an elective in postmodern and experimental fiction, since that’s where a lot of my MFA coursework was. And because we’re trying to increase or at least maintain our enrollments, we’ve been encouraged to advertise the courses we’re offering, and I decided to take the opportunity to fool around with Photoshop and try to teach myself more about using layer masks and such. Not a great first effort, but I’m happy with what I learned from doing it:
And yeah, you can see my protanopia, I think, in addition to the other dubious design choices—I had to ask for help re which colors went with which. Beyond that, though, in putting together the syllabus I took a look around the web at other college courses teaching postmodern and experimental fiction—and it was saddening to see how white and how male the reading lists were. I mean, I know all the problems with authenticity arguments and such, but still, beyond the inevitable and to-be-expected sexism and racism still visible in much of American academia, there are even female scholars who publish on feminism without a single female author in their postmodern/experimental reading lists. My own reading list is only somewhat less homogenous, I’ll acknowledge.
Long story short, 492 is harder to fill than some of our other upper-division courses, and then the grad student who was scheduled to teach our course on the 20th-century novel while the usual faculty member to teach is on sabbatical decided not to, so I was asked if I’d be interested in doing that instead, and I said yes, with part of my thinking being that it would be a relatively easy adjustment to make in terms of content. Part of the question for me, beyond how to adequately represent the twentieth-century novel in English in a single semester’s readings, was then: how to represent those twentieth-century readings visually? I figure it’s not too controversial to select 9/11 as the marker of the cultural end of the 20th century, so then I found myself seeking visuals from around the beginning of the 20th century with similar themes, and a picture from mother of American modernism Georgia O’Keeffe seemed to mostly fit the bill, although with the actual painting dated 1926, I admit it’s stretching the bounds of contemporaneity. Certainly looks better than the first flyer to my amateur’s eye.
And you know what the biggest stumbling block was? Thinking I had to start with A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. For whatever reasons—the zombie of the canon still rotting at the back of my unconscious, not being able to get past my own undergraduate experience, or whatever—that idea just would not get out of my head. Until finally, looking at that previous syllabus on Experimental and Postmodern Fiction and thinking about the problems with whiteness there made me stop and say: why do I keep thinking the twentieth-century novel needs to be defined by whiteness? How might it be otherwise? That line of thought helped me ask: what novel in English—American novel, I would say, because to my mind in many ways the twentieth century was the American century—would I want to define the beginning of the twentieth century? That was easy and immediate: Cane, and the metonymic way in which it embodies and anticipates so much of what comes after, culturally speaking. Once I recognized that, everything else fell easily into place, including the theming and the sequencing.
The cultural anxieties around race, truth, and trauma that I’ve been hinting at above and in the linked syllabi have been dominating my attention this past year, much as they have for many of us, and they coalesced in an alarming way around the 2020 election and its aftermath. The final course I’ll describe is one in rhetoric rather than literature, and it reflects and embodies those anxieties and the way I’ve been thinking about them since the events of January 6. Perhaps obviously, the tagline on the flyer—”We’re doomed. Now what?”—is shamelessly plagiarized from Roy Scranton’s book of the same name, but since I’m assigning Scranton in the course, I’m not going to worry about it too much. But yes, I’ve been trying to be mindful of the overdetermined nature of our continuing crisis, and examinations of that overdetermined nature seems to me to be part of what’s missing from many of the rhetorical analyses of and responses to that crisis.
Here’s my take, and a big part of the animating spirit behind the design for 460: to my mind, the discourses surrounding the 2020 United States Presidential Election and its aftermath, culminating in the United States Capitol events of January 6, indicate a massive complex of problems in our national rhetorics. Writing curricula and the study of rhetoric—and especially academic programs in rhetoric and composition— offer possibly unique and powerful ways to respond to that complex of problems, potentially in ways that extend recent academia-wide conversations re-envisioning the democratic possibilities of the public land-grant university. This complex of overdetermined problems includes
I grew up with Americana as a musical genre. My parents would regularly have bluegrass playing on the radio, and I didn’t find out until much later that the voice introducing the songs, Dick Spottswood, was not only a local DJ and a Takoma Park neighbor but also a prominent researcher of American roots music. Later, in my teens, I got into go–go and hardcore, indigenous American genres that also came out of the Washington DC area. And racial politics were always prominent in DC. That’s part of what comes to mind when I read this poem, which I first encountered a long time ago—in junior high, I think. It feels particularly relevant today.
Let America Be America Again
Langston Hughes
Let America be America again. Let it be the dream it used to be. Let it be the pioneer on the plain Seeking a home where he himself is free.
(America never was America to me.)
Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed— Let it be that great strong land of love Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme That any man be crushed by one above.
(It never was America to me.)
O, let my land be a land where Liberty Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath, But opportunity is real, and life is free, Equality is in the air we breathe.
(There’s never been equality for me, Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”)
Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark? And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?
I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart, I am the Negro bearing slavery’s scars. I am the red man driven from the land, I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek— And finding only the same old stupid plan Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.
I am the young man, full of strength and hope, Tangled in that ancient endless chain Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land! Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need! Of work the men! Of take the pay! Of owning everything for one’s own greed!
I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil. I am the worker sold to the machine. I am the Negro, servant to you all. I am the people, humble, hungry, mean— Hungry yet today despite the dream. Beaten yet today—O, Pioneers! I am the man who never got ahead, The poorest worker bartered through the years.
Yet I’m the one who dreamt our basic dream In the Old World while still a serf of kings, Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true, That even yet its mighty daring sings In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned That’s made America the land it has become. O, I’m the man who sailed those early seas In search of what I meant to be my home— For I’m the one who left dark Ireland’s shore, And Poland’s plain, and England’s grassy lea, And torn from Black Africa’s strand I came To build a “homeland of the free.”
The free?
Who said the free? Not me? Surely not me? The millions on relief today? The millions shot down when we strike? The millions who have nothing for our pay? For all the dreams we’ve dreamed And all the songs we’ve sung And all the hopes we’ve held And all the flags we’ve hung, The millions who have nothing for our pay— Except the dream that’s almost dead today.
O, let America be America again— The land that never has been yet— And yet must be—the land where every man is free. The land that’s mine—the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME— Who made America, Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain, Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain, Must bring back our mighty dream again.
Sure, call me any ugly name you choose— The steel of freedom does not stain. From those who live like leeches on the people’s lives, We must take back our land again, America!
O, yes, I say it plain, America never was America to me, And yet I swear this oath— America will be!
Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death, The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies, We, the people, must redeem The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers. The mountains and the endless plain— All, all the stretch of these great green states— And make America again!
I’m Mike Edwards. I write here about rhetoric, composition, economics, and technology. I like cats.
Contact
I work at Washington State University, where you can find my English Department page and email my mike.edwards address. For other communications, please see my contact page.
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