The New York Sophist

A Lot is going on right now for me this September and it’s all rotating around the idea of the future of rhetoric.

Photo by Nikolai Lehmann on Unsplash

Got a very interesting call for papers for the journal Informal Logic about a special issue on this topic.

Got an email from the President of the University about downsizing and the future of the school. It’s not rosy! There will be some examination of some efficiency of programs it seems.

I’ve also put in for a position somewhere new, and thinking about how that will look next year and beyond. Will this be a good idea?

I also feel my teaching is quite stale and needs to be upgraded for the future. Had a great lunch yesterday with someone interested in graduate work, but not sure what discipline. In thinking about what I could have them read to see if speech communication derived rhetoric is a good fit, everything I was thinking of is 40 plus years old.

The NCA journals don’t help either – they are full of old ideas, or ideas that are somewhat adjacent to the study of how words mean such as the construction of race and gender. Fascinating things to study, but it’s not the field (although some wish it were as it sounds so much cooler to be a “scholar of race” than a rhetorician).

I’m definitely wondering about the future of the university and professors in general too. What’s the point of bringing up big questions and cool readings if the end result is to just be a sideshow on the way to a cubicle job somewhere? I feel like I work in the entertainment division of a job training platform that is shifting to be more online and work from home.

What is the future of all this? I am definitely not going to figure this out on a Tuesday morning in October. Today I am going to work on essays and class, and then maybe this evening do some reading around for fun.

Photo by Kajetan Sumila on Unsplash

I was asked by the people at Power of Public Speaking if I would like to be a guest host on their POPs Community podcast. In thinking about what to talk about for 45 minutes or so, I thought a great topic would be why we are obligated to allow students to speak about very real, very immediate controversies in the world.

Here’s the podcast. I think it went really well and I had a great time. Makes me think I should do some solo In the Bin episodes once in a while. Might be a good way to mix up the modality of shared ideas.

As always let me know your thoughts, questions, comments, and of course opposition to my ideas in the comments here or over in the POPs Community. Would love to hear what you have to say.

The biggest problem in teaching right now is students. Not the people in the classroom who have paid (or someone paid) for them to be there, but the idea or conception of student itself. The notion of “students” as distinct from “teacher” is obvious but there are deeper implications here, such as student as different than adult, worker, person, neighbor, etc.

Having a conception of “students” that is not different from nor in opposition to other modalities of being and identity is the biggest barrier to empowering higher education. Currently, the notion of “student” is shorthand for “proto-careerist” or something like that (not exactly pleased with this naming; took a bit to settle on this naming). It reminds me of being 23 in my first job as a teacher in high school chatting with another young teacher about how difficult it was to keep conversations going with women after you answer the question “what do you do?” We tried to come up with a good synonym for “teacher” – which for a lot of good reasons really turns people off as it’s identification with a type or a kind of person out there; a stereotype perhaps but with a powerful grip on the mind’s eye – so a stereotype then. We settled on “manufacturing semi-furbished replacement parts for American society.” At the time hilarious but now the standard motive as revealed in the way that universities talk about students, each other, and themselves as institutions.

Faculty aren’t much better, spending a lot of time chatting to one another about how their students cannot seem to do anything that they would like them to do. Ironically, most faculty wish themselves into irrelevance in these conversations, most notably when teachers of writing, critical thought, or reading are upset that their students cannot do the things that it seems they are in the class to learn how to do. The “students” are incapable of assumed basic abilities and tasks that somewhere someone has assumed they would be able to do when they arrive in class. Often this seems to spill over into the job of the professor-as-teacher, which these conversations reveal most professors would be happy not to do.

Faculty talk about students as a vulgar herd of frustration punctuated with little stories about some people in the class who are “the good ones,” often only because they were obedient, or had some power to determine what the professor really wanted by being able to interpret overwrought assignment instructions, often written in a style or manner that would not pass that professor’s own standards. The idea that faculty can and often do discuss the silver lining popping through the cloudy sky of teaching should give us hope, but too often these narratives are used to reinforce this idea that the vast majority of students are problems who interfere in their own education to a point where the faculty can’t do anything about it. In short: Students come predestined for failure or success.

Is there a way to think about your students, or students, or those who are the reason the University exists – hard to hear for most faculty but perhaps the truest thing you’ll read today – that is inclusive of other identities and motives rather than exclusive? We tend to think of the student as lacking capacity and ability. Could there be a way to think of the identity of student as containing capacities rather than being the marker of an empty space?

The re-conception of the classroom as a place that is not meant for correction but construction is my favorite approach: What can we build together from what we brought with us to this place? Another way would be to ask what we can do, as an assembled group, with the time and place given to us?

These questions move us away from the diminutive “student” identification and towards the shared identification of a community, where everyone has capacities and incapacitates, abilities and inabilities, and through the mix of these various things we develop something that all the members of the community can benefit from. Of course, the nature of this thing, it’s benefits and harms, and its longevity are always the subjects of deliberation and debate in healthy communities. Since they are not known capacities, not really measurable in a way that would immediately satisfy everyone (for these joys and deficits always come to us and others in mediation) so they must consistently be discussed when the exigence is identified and made known to everyone. In this way, the class is the “diorama” of larger community behavior and practice where most of what goes on is discussion about things done and things that need to be done.

Seems like learning to me.

Still struggling through the question of whether or not YouTube is a good place to host lecture videos for American students who often have to pay thousands of dollars anyway to take a course. I am sure I would resent having to watch advertisements before or during a video that provided important discussion of concepts for a course I had to take.

Vimeo is a much better option but Vimeo is expensive – at least the way I’d like to use it. I have the plan that I’m willing to pay for, which limits your uploads to about 5GB a week. I always run out of space right before I get the last video up for the week so that’s not really a problem. It’s just a really, really annoying thing that regularly happens.

Here are the new videos:

A discussion of Boudry, Paglieri, and Pigliucci, “The Fake, the Flimsy, and the Fallacious: Demarcating Arguments in Real Life” Argumentation 29, 4 (November 2015)

A discussion of Kenneth Burke, “The Virtues and Limitations of Debunking” from The Southern Review, v. 3, issue 4 (Spring 1938).

There are a few other ones on my YouTube channel. I’ll be posting more every week as I find and/or make ones that I think are more relevant to the general audience here.

I’ve been doing some reading into the long tradition of the oral exam, something we’ve given up on in the United States. In many other countries the oral exam isn’t just normal, it’s expected. Some countries even require an oral exam to graduate from university.

The standard format is a series of questions that are predictable and that you can prepare for, with the occasional follow-up for clarification or depth from the student. Sometimes they can take an hour or perhaps a few hours if it’s for something as important as conferring a degree.

I’m not sure why we gave up this tradition in the U.S. It seems to be a good time to recover it due to the immense panic we have over interviews and the immense panic we have over assessment in higher education.

Not much needs to be said about interview panic. All you have to do to get a sense of the level of concern is google “interview tips” or something like that. You’ll be quickly overwhelmed with the desire of others to help you (for a small fee of course).

Assessment might be less familiar to readers. It’s the realization in higher education that grades do not correspond with student ability. That is, a student could make an A in a course and have no idea how do do any of the things that the course is supposed to teach them how to do. I don’t know why higher education is just now realizing this; this is the obivous result to me of a system that focuses on obedience, discipline, and following arbitrary directions (everything from how to turn something in to how many spaces must be between punctuation and the next letter) over anything else. The university experience is one that primarily consists of being belittled by instructors for not following 17 pages of formatting guidelines in a document archaically termed “the syllabus.” It’s anything but that, if you look into the history of the term.

Oral examinations are a chance to hear and see the student express knowledge and express familiarity with the course as a whole. It can be imagined as a presentation, but that’s not the best way to do it. Instead, imagine it as a conversation about the course. One that you and the student can have together privately, or you can have it with the class observing in order to help them learn and see how they could phrase or think about what they got out of the class.

My model for an oral exam is pretty simple:

There will be 2 major questions – both are about something that the course is expressly about. Up front in my courses I tell the students directly what the question is that the course is meant to explore.

The third will be something the student can choose from. I might give them 2 or 3 choices around an issue that came up in class, came up for them in previous work across the class (for example, in my current course on argumentation, all the students are clinging to structural concerns as the heart of any attempt to say what argumentation should or could be. That would become an issue later on to offer in an oral exam question).

The most interesting part of the oral exam is that I will write names, concepts, titles of readings, or theories on notecards. I come up with as many as I can, then I ask the student to choose 10 off the top. They have to speak about each one for about 3 minutes. They are permitted to discard 2 and draw again. This could be the entire exam, and might be a good way to do oral quizzes, or a way of checking up on student retention and understanding through the term.

Although there’s a lot of research out there on oral exams, it seems particularly embarrassing that in my field, speech communication or rhetoric, there is little to no discussion about this. We rely on objective fallacy quizzes, final seminar papers, and the like without any appreciation at all for the irony. Why do we not showcase the capacity and power of oral communication not only to assess what we teach, but across the university as the best way to get a glimpse of what sort of capacity our students have after taking our courses?