Hey all.  I went through my book order today and now can tell you that we will be reading Susan Kates, Activist Rhetorics and American Higher Education, 1885-1937.  That’s in addition to the book list I posted last week.

I got a little bit concerned looking at amazon.com because it looks like the book might be out of print.  However, on the Southern Illinois University Press site, it shows the book in-print.  Very cool!

So, any KU students who are last minute register-ers and might dig this class…REGISTER SOON!  I want to make sure this class runs.  It looks pretty good now, but I stress over this kind of stuff.

Here’s a preliminary list of books for my spring course, ENG 316 Rhetoric, Democracy, Advocacy.

• Emergent Publics: An Essay on Social Movements and Democracy (Semaphore Series)
• The Rhetoric of Agitation and Control
• Rhetoric for Radicals: A Handbook for 21st Century Activists
• Rhetorical Democracy: Discursive Practices of Civic Engagement
• Rules for Radicals

I think I’ve got another book on order, but for the life of me I can’t think of what it is at the moment and the file is at work.  I also have some articles and on-line material that we’ll bring into the mix.  If anyone has any “must read” books and/or articles for a class like this, please pass them along.

Not surprisingly, my friend Seth Kahn down at West Chester is teaching a class similar to this one…another parallel made to order.  Just too cool.  A little plug for Seth…he’s co-edited with JongHwa Lee an awesome book, Rhetoric and Activism: Theory and Contexts for Political Engagement due out early 2010.  The next time I teach ENG 316, I’ve gotta put this one on the reading list.

I am very excited that I will be offering ENG 316 Rhetoric, Democracy, Advocacy for the first time.  I designed this course about a year and a half ago and now it’s finally on the books and in the schedule.  Interested?  Well, here’s the official course description:

I. Course Description: ENG 316: Rhetoric, Democracy, Advocacy

The connection between rhetoric and democracy is an old one dating back to the origins of both concepts in Western traditions. Simply put rhetoric—the skilled use of argument and persuasive discourse—and democracy were seen as ways to replace violence as the primary means of governing and resolving conflict. This course argues that the intimate connections between rhetoric and democracy are critical to retain and reclaim for the health of democratic society and culture. American democracy has been defined not only by its institutions and Constitutional frameworks, but also by vibrant traditions of citizenship advocacy that have relentlessly stretched the boundaries of democratic freedoms, identities, and protections. A healthy democracy requires citizen advocates who are skilled in the analysis of public discourse and the rhetoric of advocacy. This course will be a sustained study of the theory and practice of advocacy rhetoric, primarily in the American context. In addition, this course will raise practical questions about what citizenship advocacy means in a context of increasing globalization and new media. 3 s.h. 3 c.h.

II. Course Rationale

Despite the historic connection between the rise of democracy and the rise of rhetoric in Western traditions, rarely do we study rhetoric as a “citizen discipline.” That is, while it is common to find courses training students in the “expert rhetorics” of corporations (public relations) and political campaigns, there is a general lack of courses that focus on the role of citizen advocacy as integral to the health of democratic cultures. As one of the missions of higher education is to train critical citizens capable of meeting the challenges and responsibilities of an ever changing world, this course seeks to make such training an explicit part of the English department’s curriculum.

I’ll post the book  list for the class in a little  bit.  If you have any questions about the class, drop me a line.

Hey all, I just got this email from the National Coalition for Adjunct and Contingent Faculty:

On April 30th, contingent faculty from all over the country will be teaching their classes outside and holding rallies and press conferences to educate the public and their students about the current working conditions at American universities and colleges. One reason why these faculty members will be holding their classes outside is to draw attention to the fact that most of the people teaching in higher education do not have tenure and have limited academic freedom and job security.  By bringing their classes outdoors, contingent faculty will not only make their labor more visible, but they will also gain a stronger sense of shared working conditions.

Another important motivation for this event is the threat that higher ed administrators will use the current economic downturn to justify the letting go of many non-tenured faculty, and once these teachers are released, we will witness a cutting of courses and an expansion of class size coupled with an increase in tuition and fees.  In other words, parents and students will be paying more and getting less.

While it is clear that some cost cutting will have to be implemented, we have to question why the loss of funds will be taken out on the most vulnerable faculty members and students. Why can’t universities fire administrators or freeze their salaries? Why can’t the wealthy institutions borrow from their billion dollar endowments to weather the storm?

If faculty, students, and staff come out and make their presence known, they may be able to stop the easy administrative solution of just not rehiring the teachers who work outside of the tenure system.  By claiming our status as the new majority in higher education, we can protect the quality of education in American universities and colleges.   Please come out and support faculty, students, and higher education on April 30th.

For more info and a flyer, go to: http://thenewfacultymajority.blogspot.com/

OK…this is an experiment in podcasting. Ideally there will be an audio link to my CCCCs 2009 paper in this post. PodPress and I have been having…shall we say…differences of opinion as to whether or not my files are accessible. We’ll see if I’ve got the kinks worked out.

CCCC’s 2009 Paper: “Rhetoric of Advocacy: Curricular Labor and Democratic Futures.”

CCCCs is in San Francisco this week!

Yup, in just a few days I’ll be joining my agitating (in a good way!) composition pals in San Francisco for CCCCs.  I can’t wait to get there!  Not only am I totally excited about my panel, I am looking forward to helping reignite the CCCCs Labor Caucus!  And, how convenient is this, the Labor Caucus meeting is immediately following our panel…hmmmm, how did that happen?

Here’s the full description of our panel…come out if you can!

Labor Rhetoric and Academic Organizing: Possibilities and Predicaments

Session: D.22 on Mar 12, 2009 from 3:15 PM to 4:30 PM

As a field, Composition/Rhetoric attends carefully to academic labor issues, primarily regarding contingent faculty. This session highlights the limits of this focus and advocates for further action towards labor equity/justice in academia. Speakers articulate an array of labor problems, ranging from the importance of composition theory in staffing writing courses, to the abuse of immigrant labor on college campuses, and call for more aggressive, multi-layered (curricular, departmental, university-wide) labor organizing in response.

Amy Lynch-Biniek:

“When Teaching Is Generic: Connecting Composition Theory to Staffing Practices”

Administrators devalue Composition theory in order to justify staffing practices. If knowledge of Composition theory is unnecessary, if teaching becomes a generic skill, then courses may be cheaply staffed with graduate students and temporary employees who may have little knowledge of Composition. Consequently, pedagogy is less likely grounded in strong theoretical rationale. I argue that one tactic in a larger strategy for altering labor practices and improving Composition teaching is reasserting the essential role of Composition theory to composition teaching.

Seth Kahn:

“‘If I Don’t Do It, Nobody Will’”: Writing Program Faculty Fulfilling Management Responsibilities”

Growing numbers of management and shrinking numbers of full-time faculty positions significantly impact Writing Program faculty and administrators in two ways: (1) the well-documented deflection of resources away from faculty; and despite growing numbers of managers, (2) Writing Program faculty/administrators doing more management work. This presentation analyzes the second point, contending that writing instruction and program administration suffer when faculty take on management responsibilities, and that academic unions need to take a stronger stand on enabling faculty to concentrate on faculty work.

Rachel Riedner

“Immigrant Labor and Universities”

While university communities are an imagined community of students and faculty engaged in the project of education, these communities increasingly include immigrant workers. Immigrant workers are constructed to be both inside and outside the university: inside insofar as they reproduce the conditions of education for the university community, and outside insofar as they are not imagined as part of the community. This paper argues that with contracting immigrant labor comes a contracting out of community responsibility, resigning service and immigrant employees to invisibility in educational communities.

Kevin Mahoney

“Rhetoric of Advocacy: Curricular Labor and Democratic Futures”

In the 1990s, labor conditions and labor organizing in higher education took center stage in rhetoric and composition. However, the field has not sought to deepen that project significantly through explicit rhetorical instruction in labor organizing and advocacy. Focusing on higher education labor organizing, this paper argues for a curricular project connecting explicit instruction in rhetorics of advocacy, new undergraduate majors in comp/rhet, and the field’s investment in critical citizenship.

Mary Boland

“Contracting Competing Interests: Unionizing and the Preservation of Academic Freedom.”

More and more academic workers are looking to unions to preserve their professional integrity. Unionizing can pose problems because the guild ideology that justifies academic freedom runs counter to the egalitarianism that underwrites unionization. The risk is that we may unintentionally redefine the terms of work in a manner that undercuts academic freedom. I illustrate how unionizing can generate competing rights among classes of laborers and jeopardize faculty freedoms and suggest that compositionists are uniquely situated to help anticipate these pitfalls.

Respondent: Eileen Schell

That’s right folks, like a phoenix here comes the CCCCs Labor Caucus once again.  If you are at CCCCs (or in SF) and want to attend, check out the event listing on facebook:

Some years ago, Janet Atwill, Don Lazere and others began organizing a Labor Caucus within CCCC. In the meantime, there’s been lots of great work on labor issues in our field—temporary/adjunct faculty, gender/race/harassment, valuing administrative work, tenure and promotion, and so on.

However, the current economic climate and aggressively anti-labor strategies/tactics so pervasive both within and beyond the academy have prompted a group of us to believe that it’s time to resurrect the Labor Caucus. Many of us are unionized already, and can benefit from increased networking and collaboration across the country. Others want and need to be unionized, and can benefit from the support and expertise of current unions/union-organizers. And finally, we believe that the CCCC can and must do more to emphasize the labor aspects of our work to faculty, administrators, managers, and broader public interest groups—work that the Labor Caucus would most certainly participate in.

As a first step towards (re)forming the Labor Caucus, we are hosting an Interest Meeting at the CCCC for any and all interested folks. The essentials—

Date: Thurs, March 12
Time: 5-7 pm
Location: Serrano Hotel, Golden Gate Room
405 Taylor St.

Hope to see you there.

Seth Kahn, on behalf of the CCCC Labor Caucus Resurrection Interest Group

Just came across this video thanks to Northland Poster Collective.  I know all you union nerds like me know exactly what’s going on with the Employee Free Choice Act…but, let’s face it, the world is not filled with union nerds (nor are they filled with comp/rhet nerds).  So, I love it when we see these kind of campaigns.