The responses have been poor, to understate it. I see little action plan and a lot of reaction to something that was apparently “hard to imagine” – most of the population voting against foreigners and for America first. I’m not sure who finds that hard to imagine, but it shouldn’t be rhetoricians. But here we are – everyone upset and calling for the most extreme responses in scholarship, teaching, or what have you. Some favorites: Argumentation can’t be taught anymore and that we should only work on the scholarship of fascism.
I have some other ideas that I think are pretty good responses to the election, and none are totalizing or extreme. I think that campaign discourse really locks us into a bad frame when it comes to post-election communication: “This is the most important election of our lifetimes!” (this was said to me when I first voted in Bush vs. Clinton vs. Perot). “Your vote your voice!” and now “the country is doomed!” – we did have a civil war where states turned against the Federal government, and somehow we survived. This crazy extreme response is a bit ungrounded. Here are some things I am thinking about:
Assign more Constitutional reading and assignments
I think that the obsession we have with fact-based assignments for argumentation and/or public speaking is a death sentence for invention. Creating arguments about possibility should be what we are teaching, not “how to look up a peer-reviewed article.” For Christ’s sake, they won’t have access to them in a few years because we continue to support ridiculous paywalls from greedy bastards like Taylor and Francis, who do nothing but count money. Instead, show them how to craft reasonable claims based on past claims, arguments, and moments of controversy. I think rooting that in the Constitution and controversies about rights or governmental powers is a great way to root them in research and evidence that is not paywalled, but free to access as well as showing them how speculative arguments are based on facts/data/information and attempt to move decisions/actions/attitudes based on that. I think this will be a helpful way to intervene in what I see from the national election – an inability to imagine otherwise (both students and faculty are struggling with this). The Constitution is an imperfect document written by imperfect people that has been misunderstood in many ways over its life, then corrected with newer, better misunderstandings. And it’s a discourse that holds power over our daily lives. It’s the perfect pitch upon which to teach some rhetorical practices, particularly ones that claim understanding, truth, or historical continuity about something.
Change Tenure Standards
We have a wealth of amazing research out there, buried in a journal that isn’t accessible unless someone pays over $50 to access it. Most Americans (and even more people globally) don’t have access to our journals. Let’s change our departmental tenure standards to encourage faculty to try to aim their work at public(s). We don’t want to be in another situation where scholars face a devastating election result and all they can do is post links to a limited number of offset copies of their 2017 essay discussing how failures in communication could lead to a fascist state. We need to be in that discussion, as it’s happening, in the publications that people are linking to, sharing, quoting, and texting their family about. We need to encourage graduate students to write in public-facing ways. This intervention can help those who can’t afford or don’t need college to get access to some of our insights and lessons. Furthermore, it can have the added benefit of offering something – anything – against the rising tide of discourse that says universities are just forced liberal education camps. Let’s show them what we are up to.
Create a campus culture of debate
One of the biggest benefits for the plutocrats of election discourse is how distasteful, painful, and horrifying it is to have to talk to a liberal/MAGA person. By not engaging one another as humans capable of changing our attitudes about things, we engage one another as problems, issues, or blights. Democracy, like driving a car, is a cooperative endeavor even though it appears to be an individual act. Encouraging debates, that is the tradition of switch-side debate, where people advocate for positions that are not their own hardcore commitments, allows people to experience debate not as the performance of passionate authenticity but instead the attempt to reach audiences and have them reconsider their attitude about something. The focus on the role of language and rhetoric in shaping what we feel and think is vital to democracy. Changing position is the only real politics available if you want to live in a democracy – you have to believe people can change their minds. We’re losing this idea if we haven’t already. Encouraging such activity as a normal part of the educated life is an important change that I hope to try to push for going forward.
Dialectical Thinking instead of Critical Thinking
Too often critical thinking becomes a crutch for a preference: “That’s not critical thinking” is really “You don’t agree with me so you can’t think.” We need a better way to teach critical thinking then just getting the correct position on an issue or the best position that we can think of. We must prepare students for future problems of which we can only imagine on our darkest days. One way of doing this is teaching a dialectical approach to thought. Teaching students, or demonstrating to them, that as they think and speak about something the relationship to it changes, therefore it changes in their mind to something else as they are speaking about it would be the way to go. Not sure how to do this one. I’m reading a lot about dialectical method and trying to imagine how this would go in the classroom. I’m starting to think that good debate pedagogy and practice winds up here eventually. But we don’t see good debate pedagogy these days. The focus here is the attention to the statement of thought – David Bohm style of freezing the articulation for examination of that itself – in the midst of the discussion/debate/dialogue about the larger issue at hand. This could be done with some more practice perhaps and will really help students see the university as a different place, something really impossible to predict from their high school experiences but all the more lovely for it.
These are my initial responses to the election. I will have more as I think more. Let’s try to avoid the reactions. Leave that to the journalists. Scholars should be better. Professors should profess something other than doom.
