In 2017, we joined Kathi in co-editing a book, Composition, Rhetoric, and Disciplinarity, about whether Writing Studies was not, in fact, a field but rather a discipline, a discipline being more concerned with the rigor of producing certain kinds of knowledge. The collection was a response to conversations within Writing Studies about disciplinary formation and progress, as well as to the perceptions of people in other disciplines who didn't think it necessary to pay attention to the knowledge we had, in fact, been producing (see, for instance, Adler-Kassner and Wardle’s Naming What We Know). The collection argued for our disciplinarity and, thus, was primarily responding to an inward-facing exigence. In particular, we as editors were writing back to colleagues, some of whom were not convinced that being a discipline was desirable and/or consequential. We felt strongly that there were consequences of not naming and claiming our expertise as a discipline.
We still believe the collection did significant work. Its contributors argued for a capacious understanding of what disciplines are or can be (Reid and Miller), and for an understanding of our discipline as one that aligns with our aspirational values (“inclusion, access, respecting difference, facilitating interaction, emphasizing localism, valuing diverse voices, and empowering writers to engage in textual production,” Wardle and Downs p. 130). But they also pushed back to demonstrate that our discipline has not always been as welcoming as its stated values suggest it should be (Mejia). They demonstrated ways to teach and design programs from our discipline’s research (Robertson and Taczak; Douglas et al; Jamieson). Most of the book was, thus, inward-focused, considering what we are and know and do in our daily disciplinary work. The final two contributor chapters asked us to also look outward. There, Doug Hesse warned that if we cannot clarify our core disciplinary identity, we risk being powerless to change structures of education, and Linda Adler-Kassner argued that we must look outward and forge new collaborations in order to impact policy.
Since the publication of the collection, we recognize how prescient those last two chapters were. In the past five years especially, political, financial, and intellectual exigencies have revealed an urgency to engage in outward-facing applications of our discipline’s knowledge. Of course, the main argument of the collection remains: we are a discipline and our disciplinary knowledge matters. What the current state of higher education demonstrates is the relevance of our disciplinary knowledge--not only to creating courses and programs or even policy, but also to intervene outside the academy and even outside of education. Our conclusion to the collection argued that disciplinarity comes with responsibility not only to our internal debates about what to teach and research but to external challenges. Though this last argument was a very minor part of the collection, it is now a major part of our thinking. Our own roles and perspectives have broadened and shifted along with the political and educational climate. We feel a renewed sense of urgency to ask what disciplines–particularly ours–are for, if not to make a difference in the larger world through the knowledge they produce. To answer this question, we turn to story and offer three vignettes that illustrate both what our disciplinary knowledge has to offer and the urgency of finding ways to bring that knowledge to bear.
I teach in Connecticut. In spring of 2023 the state legislature proposed to dramatically reduce funding to the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities (CSCU), a system comprised of four regional comprehensive universities--Eastern, Western, Central, and Southern--as well as the state's 12 community colleges. (The University of Connecticut is separate from the system.) The legislature and the governor accused CSCU administrators of bad fiscal management and of being responsible for declining enrollments across the system. As a faculty member at Eastern, it's difficult to tell whether or not these claims are true. But what I do know for certain is that the state universities and the community colleges being cut are the institutions who have historically educated Connecticut’s first-generation students and those who can’t afford UConn. Budget cuts would imperil this mission.
Despite the threat to equity and the loud protests of a (rare) united CSCU faculty and administration, the budget cuts will go into effect in 2024-25, leaving us all unsure how we will serve our students and whether our programs and jobs will continue to exist. The CSCU System Office plans to conduct a "data-driven analysis" of all programs and majors in the system, with an eye to whether or not they're profitable.
Most alarming is that situations like this are not unique to Connecticut (see the recent slashing of programs and faculty lines at West Virginia University, Clarkson University’s renewed focus on STEM likely leading to deep cuts in humanities and social sciences, or the recent directive by the Mississippi state auditor to focus more on engineering and business and less on liberal arts majors). All of these cuts make me wonder what all of our professional arguments about field-ness vs. disciplinarity were for. Whether or not we are a discipline, the programs I direct --Writing Across the Curriculum and the Writing Center--are quite possibly on the chopping block. WAC at Eastern relies on reduced class sizes for writing sections, so it is expensive. Rumors are flying that Eastern will eliminate the first-year writing program and move it into academic departments. While we've been talking to each other about whether or not Writing Studies is a discipline, then, the money folks have come calling for all sorts of “unprofitable” disciplines. They are using profitability as the criteria, not learning or disciplinary expertise.
What my experience illustrates is one way in which the landscape of higher education is changing: less attention is being paid to faculty expertise, student need, and the function of the university in society, and more to efficiency of delivery. One might argue that at least some universities--especially those who serve the poorest students--are in danger of becoming simply credential-producing factories. I want to believe that our rhetorical training prepares us to intervene in this moment--helps us be able to reach out and speak effectively and persuasively across fields–if we pay attention to what is happening outside of our discipline. For example, our University Senate is joining together with the Senates at the other CSUs to make arguments about the kinds of data really needed to evaluate programs. And such cross-institutional collaboration can be beneficial for a range of reasons, as Susan’s story illustrates.
Since we worked on the edited collection with Kathi, my role at the University of Arizona has changed considerably. I moved from directing our Writing Program to becoming the inaugural Executive Director of General Education, a position that was created in response to a call from the Arizona Board of Regents (the governor-appointed governing body for the three state universities) to revise General Education at all three universities in significant ways. Ironically, I have found that I draw on my rhetorical training even more in my General Education role than I did when I was directing a writing program (or perhaps I just find that I draw on that training in more visible and intentional ways).
Revising General Education at a large public university is no small task, and I first had to determine how to start the process. I found that the success of my efforts to move General Education revision forward was often directly related to the effectiveness of my communication: with other faculty at the university, with department heads, with deans, with senior administrators, with the Faculty Senate, with staff and advisors, with admissions and prospective students, with our community college transfer partners, with colleagues at the other two universities, and with the Regents themselves. Others participating in those General Education discussions didn’t necessarily have the same tools, so I was often asked to take a leadership role in conversations with the Regents and in writing documents that reported the work we were doing–both at the University of Arizona and across the three state universities.
In March 2023, I was able to participate with a senior staff member from the Arizona Board of Regents in a forum on civic learning at the University of Maryland with representatives from around the country. In those conversations, I was further convinced that rhetorical training is extraordinarily effective in finding common ground in challenging discussions. At one point in the discussion, I described to the assembled representatives how we have shifted our focus in General Education to perspective-taking and understanding how we think (rather than just what we know), and this shift has opened all kinds of opportunities for engaging with differing views and understanding the contributions of a range of disciplines. This approach is directly related to some of the key threshold concepts of writing studies, and it was drawing on the rhetorical traditions that provide a foundation for much of what we do.
There is an urgent need, then, for training in rhetorical principles to shape education policy, curricular changes, and funding discussions, and many of us with that training know how impactful it can be. But there can be a vast difference between what we know and what we do. It can be easy to forget that the basic rhetorical principles we teach in composition classes are not always common knowledge. And even if they are known, they’re not necessarily put into practice in contexts outside of first-year composition. I discovered the value of my rhetorical training through the process of working on the revision of the General Education curriculum and collaborating with colleagues in the state system and the Arizona Board of Regents. And that training is also useful, of course, outside of higher education, as Liz’s story illustrates.
In Ohio, our legislature has recently veered from a moderate, middle-of-the-road stance on politics to an all-out war on democracy, voting rights, and education. That is the reason that I found myself walking around the hot streets of Oxford, Ohio’s annual Freedom Fest on a July day in 2023, trying to explain to people why they should vote No on Issue 1. Issue 1 was an effort to take away the right of everyday Ohioans to get a constitutional amendment on the ballot (it failed, just in case you were wondering). That afternoon I spoke to several beefy men in Harley jackets, a couple of farmers who asked if voting no would help impeach Joe Biden, a woman still in her Wendy’s uniform who told me about why it was so important for her to have access to safe and legal abortions, a man who told me that voting machines could not be trusted, and a small group of well-armed policemen. I was there as a member and officer in the local League of Women Voters chapter, which I had joined because it was non-partisan. Thus, throughout all of these conversations, I had to maintain a neutral stance on candidates (no arguing about Joe Biden), while encouraging people to think about the core issues of democracy and having their votes and voices heard. I found myself asking what I had in common with each of these people and how to engage in a dialogue rather than a sermon or an argument.
What we agreed on, it turned out, is that we want to be heard, we want our votes counted, and we don’t trust politicians. I ended the day without having a single argument with anyone. The voting machine doubter said he was going to consider voting. The Harley riders agreed that they did not want to give up power to politicians in Columbus. At least one of the police officers took an information card for his family. Rhetoric at work, in the best sense. I was inspired to say yes, then, when a couple weeks later a local political group asked me to talk about Issue 1. I agreed, but only if I could give a lesson in how language and rhetoric work as evidenced in the ads about the issue.
Several months later, I found myself in front of a small group of strangers at a tv studio in Columbus. I had been encouraged by a mentor to try out a mini-TED talk, so I walked out on stage into the bright lights and explained some common misconceptions about writing. I encouraged the audience to think about better, healthier, more accurate ideas about writing (threshold concepts) and to consider how they might do things differently if they embraced these ideas. I was the only academic in the room; there were businesspeople, nurses, church members, students. Afterward, these people came up to tell me how meaningful these ideas were to them and how helpful it was to know that all writers struggle and fail, and that it’s okay not to be good at formal writing on the first try.
It’s easy to imagine that what we teach in first-year writing is so basic as to not be worth discussing; it’s also easy to fall deep into internal arguments about what first-year writing should be. But if we step back, we can recognize that even the most basic things we know about writing and rhetoric are still news to most people outside of higher ed. And on top of that, writing and rhetoric are not just things we know about, they constitute knowledge that we should also be able to put into action in various contexts. I’ve recently been asking myself a lot about what it would mean to think bigger about what we know as a field and how we can put that knowledge to work beyond classrooms. Although my vignette is about my individual experience, we know from the research that deep change (Kezar) requires groups of people working for culture change. What does that look like for us as a discipline? How can we draw on our field’s knowledge and return to some of the outward-facing impact work at the level of our field’s organizations, including the now-defunct Network for Media Action or the disbanded CCCC Public Policy Committee? And if we don’t do that work now, will our institutions and organizations exist to make such change in ten or twenty years? This isn’t just about disciplinary survival, but about the survival of the institution of higher education.
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In Composition, Rhetoric, and Disciplinarity, we and our contributors explored the status of Writing Studies as a discipline. What strikes us now is that disciplinarity, while important, isn't enough. It may be time to look outward and assume that we (as writing and rhetoric scholars) have agreed upon knowledge--both declarative and procedural--that can be essential in this critical moment. Perhaps doing so might be “identity challenging and…troublesome” (Adler-Kassner 326). Or perhaps what we are asking for is not new at all, but a return the the many and ancient rhetorical traditions that not only understand rhetoric as key to a functioning democracy (as the Greeks did) but also to a just society where rhetors are “co-agents” with interlocutors, collectively creating and sustaining a just society through rhetoric (as African rhetoric does, see Karenga, “Nommo, Kawaida, and Communicative Practice: Bringing Good into the World”). “Our rhetorical training and diverse strands of research about writing provide us with tools to unite with our colleagues in many disciplines to fight back against forces that seek to end higher education as we know it and devalue expertise in all its forms.