Public Scholarship in an Age of Terror and Empire
CMCL C705 Research Seminar in Rhetoric and Public Culture
Joint-listed with CULS C701 & AMST G751
Professors: Robert Ivie and John Louis Lucaites, Department of Communication
and Culture, Indiana University
Meeting Time & Place: Friday, 9:30 a.m. – 12:00 Noon; Education 1084
Office Hours: Ivie 4:00 – 5:00 p.m., MW; Lucaites 1:00 – 2:00 p.m., MW
Contact Information: Ivie 855-5467, rivie@indiana.edu
Lucaites 317-535-0719, lucaites@indiana.edu
The Aim of the Course
This course is structured as a research seminar focused on the question of how to enhance
and enact the relevance of scholarship to public deliberation. Toward this end, it adopts
an interdisciplinary perspective and operates through rhetorical heuristics to explore the
role of publicly connected scholarship in a liberal democracy.
The development of a healthy liberal democratic culture, as John Dewey insisted,
depends on the artful communication of intellectual insights and innovations in order to
resist debilitating orthodoxies and augment public deliberation. In this context, we join
John Michael in arguing that democratic politics are impossible without the free and full
participation of intellectuals. Indeed, this was the very premise on which Dewey based
his defense of academic freedom.
Publicly engaged scholarship is important but hazardous work in a prevailing context of
crisis, culture wars, globalization, terrorism, and empire. Artful intellectual intervention
under these circumstances requires rhetorical savvy. Thus, we wish to examine how the
public scholar can address a culturally and politically diverse, mass-mediated (and
increasingly globalized) liberal democratic polity more productively.
Assigned Books
John McGowan, Democracy’s Children: Intellectuals and the Rise of Cultural Politics
(Cornell University Press, 2002)
John Michael, Anxious Intellects: Academic Professionals, Public Intellectuals, and
Enlightenment Values (Duke University Press, 2000)
Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, Civility and Subversion: The Intellectual in Democratic Society
(Cambridge University Press, 1998).
Louis Menand, ed., The Future of Academic Freedom (University of Chicago Press,
1996).
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Schedule of Classes
I. Conceptualizing Public Scholarship
1/13
Read: McGowan, Democracy’s Children, pp. vi-138
Browse McGowan’s blog, “Public Intelligence”
(http://www.mcgowans3.com)
Recommended:
Raymond Williams, “Intellectuals,” in Keywords, 169-71. New York:
Oxford UP, 1976.
Tony Bennett, et al., “Intellectual,” in New Keywords: A Revised
Vocabulary of Culture and Society, 189-91. Malden, MA: Blackwell,
2005.
Tzvetan Todorov, “The Genealogy of the Intellectual Since the French
Enlightenment,” PMLA 112 (1997): 1121-28.
1/20
Read: McGowan, Democracy’s Children, pp. 139-229
Michael Bérubé Online: A Case of Adaptation for Public Scholarship
Michael Bérubé, “Cultural Criticism and the Politics of Selling Out”
Electronic Book Review, 2 (Spring 1996): 188-204, available at
http://www.michaelberube.com/index.php/weblog/essays/.
Michael Bérubé "Public Academy." The New Yorker, 9 January 1995, pp.
73-80, available at:
http://www.michaelberube.com/index.php/weblog/essays/.
Recommended:
Richard Hofstadter, Anti-intellectualism in American Life. New
York: Random House, 1962.3-54, 197-232.
Thomas Bender, “The Historian and Public Life: Charles A. Beard and
the City” and “Lionel Trilling and American Culture,” 91-126 in Intellect
and Public Life: Essays on the Social History of Academic Intellectuals in
the United States. Baltimore: MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1993.
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1/27
Read: Michael, Anxious Intellects, pp. 1-107
Recommended:
C. Wright Mills, “The Social Role of the Intellectual,” in Power, Politics
& People: The Collected Essays of C. Wright Mills, 292-304. New York:
Oxford, 1967.
C. Wright Mills, “On Intellectual Craftsmanship,” in C. Wright Mills, The
Sociological Imagination (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), 195226.
Noam Chomsky, “The Responsibility of Intellectuals,” New York
Review of Books 8, no. 3 (1967), available at:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/12172/.
Edward Said, “The Public Role of Writers and Intellectuals,” in The
Public Intellectual, ed. Helen Small, 19-39. Malden, MA: Blackwell,
2002.
Edward W. Said, Representations of the Intellectual (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1994), 65-102.
2/3
Read: Michael, Anxious Intellects, pp. 111-175; and readings TBA by
Group I.
Recommended:
Pierre Bourdieu, “The Corporation of the Universal: The Role of
Intellectuals in the Modern World,” Telos 81 (1989): 99-110.
Pierre Bourdieu, “The Scholastic Point of View,” in Practical Reason:
On the Theory of Action, 127-140. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998.
Franck Poupeau and Phierry Biscelpoll, “Scholarship with Commitment,”
in Bourdieu and Democratic Politics, ed. Loic Wacquant, 64-90.
Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2005.
Henry A. Giroux, “Betraying the Intellectual Tradition: Public
Intellectuals and the Crisis of Youth,” Language and Intercultural
Communication 3 (2003): 172-186.
Presentation: Rhetorical Biography: Group I
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2/10
Read: Goldfarb, Civility and Subversion, pp. ix-102; and readings TBA
by Group II.
Recommended:
Antonio Gramsci, “The Intellectuals” in Selections of the Prison
Notebooks, 3-23. Trans. Q. Hoare and G. N. Smith New York:
International Pub., 1971. Online at:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/gramsci/editions/spn/problems/
intellectuals.htm
Gustavo E. Fischman and Peter McLaren, “Rethinking Critical Pedagogy
and the Gramscian and Freirean Legacies: From Organic to Committed
Intellectuals or Critical Pedagogy, Commitment, and Praxis,” Cultural
Studies <-> Critical Methodologies 5 (2005): 425-47. Available at
http://csc.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/5/4/425?etoc
Cornel West, “Prophetic Pragmatism: Cultural Criticism and Political
Engagement,” in Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A
Genealogy of Pragmatism (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press,
1989), 211-39.
Michael Walzer, “Preface to the Second Edition,” and “Introduction: The
Practice of Social Criticism,” in Michael Walzer, The Company of Critics:
Social Criticism and Political Commitment in the Twentieth Century, 2nd
ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2002), xi-xviii, 3-28.
Presentation: Rhetorical Biography: Group II
2/17
Read: Goldfarb, Civility and Subversion, pp. 103-221; and readings TBA
by Group III.
Recommended:
Alvin W. Gouldner, The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New
Class. New York: Continuum, 1979.
Russell Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in The Age of
Academe. New York: Basic Books, 1987, 3-54
Richard Posner, “The Market for Public Intellectuals,” in Public
Intellectuals: A Study of Decline. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2003.
41-82.
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Presentation: Rhetorical Biography: Group III
II. 2/24
Class Discussion of Scholarship-Adaptation Prospectuses
Read: Prospectuses will be distributed electronically to
all members of the class by noon, 2/20. Please study these
before class.
III. Academic Freedom and Democratic Dissent
3/3
Menand, ed., The Future of Academic Freedom, pp. vii-90;
The case of David Horowitz and Ward Churchill:
Ward Churchill, “‘Some People Push Back’: On the Justice of Roosting
Chickens,” http://www.kersplebedeb.com/mystuff/s11/churchill.html. 11
September 2001.
David Horowitz, “Ward Churchill is Just the Beginning,” Rocky Mountain
News, 8 February 2005; available at
http://www.studentsforacademicfreedom.org/
Robert L. Ivie, “Academic Freedom and Antiwar Dissent in a Democratic
Idiom,” College Literature, forthcoming.
Recommended:
John Dewey, “Academic Freedom,” Educational Review, 23 (1902),
1-14.
John Dewey, “Introductory address to the American Association of
University Professors,” In John Dewey: The Middle Works,1899-1924:
Volume 8: 1915, ed. Jo Ann Boydston, 99-107. Carbondale, IL: Southern
Illinois University Press, 1915.
AAUP Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure
online at: www.drake.edu/president/charter_pdf/appendix_a.pdf
AAUP, Academic Freedom and Homeland Security Archive
http://www.aaup.org/Issues/Homeland%20Security/index.htm
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3/10
Read: Menand, ed., The Future of Academic Freedom, pp. 93-228
Recommended:
Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals, pp. 112-190.
David Horowitz, “Why an Academic Bill of Rights is Necessary,”
Frontpage.com, 15 March 2005, available at
http://www.studentsforacademicfreedom.org/
Campus Watch Homepage http://www.campus-watch.org/
Robert L. Ivie, “A Presumption of Academic Freedom,” Review of
Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies 27:1 (2005): 53-85.
3/17
Spring Break
IV. Guest Scholars
3/24
Professor John McGowan, Dept. of English and
Cultural Studies, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Read: TBA
Note: Professor McGowan will meet with the class sometime on
Thursday, March 23. In all likelihood we will not hold class on
3/24 as Professor Wendy Brown, the 2006 Auer Lecturer will be
in town and will probably be participating in a roundtable discussion
of some sort. THE SCHEDULE HERE IS TENTATIVE AND WE WILL
MAKE FINAL PLANS ASAP.
3/31
Professor Jeffrey C. Isaac, Dept. of Political Science, Indiana
University
Read: TBA
V. 4/7
Midwest Peace & Justice Conference: IUPUI
Note: Class will not meet today. Instead, seminar participants
will be asked to attend the MPJC being held at IUPUI. The
conference runs from 4/7 to 4/9 and you will be asked to attend
sessions on one of the three days. Details to be discussed in class.
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Information will be posted by the conference organizers at
http://www.iupui.edu/~sage4/
VI. Presentation and Discussion of Scholarship-Adaptation Projects
4/14
Group I
4/21
Group II
4/28
Group III
Assignments
In addition to discussing the weekly readings listed above, students are asked to work
in groups to produce a critical rhetorical biography of a public scholars and to work
individually on a term project in which they adapt their research for publication in
scholarly venues and for intervention in public deliberations.
1. Critical Rhetorical Biography of a Public Scholar (15%)
The class will be divided into three groups based roughly on a congruence of
scholarly interests. Each group will choose a public scholar of common interest to
their members as the subject of their rhetorical biography. No two groups should
choose the same public scholar for the purpose of this assignment. The goal of the
assignment is to analyze the rhetoric of the selected public scholar consistent with the
basic purpose of the course, i.e., to determine how to enhance the relevance of
scholarship to public deliberation. Each group is responsible for developing a
judicious division of labor and organizing a coherent 50-minute panel presentation,
followed by a 30-minute class discussion. One week prior to their presentations,
groups should make available to class members one or two relevant essays or book
chapters written by the designated public scholar.
2. Scholarship-Adaptation Prospectus (15%)
Each student prepares a 1,500 word description of a term project that will have two
different but related dimensions: (a) revise a research paper aimed at engaged
criticism for scholarly publication, and (b) adapt the scholarship so that it implicates
public deliberation in a more public (i.e., non-academic) context. We are assuming
that each student will be working with an already completed, or nearly completed,
research paper that has yet to be revised into a manuscript suitable for submission to a
scholarly journal or press and that the research paper addresses a subject with
potential relevance to an issue of public deliberation. The prospectus should identify
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the most significant rhetorical challenges anticipated for this project, including
matters of audience, form, forum, key issues, timing, access, etc. These papers
should be distributed electronically to all members of the class by noon on Monday,
February 20. Students should read the prospectuses as a whole to identify key
questions and important issues of common interest for a subsequent class discussion
of the challenge of adapting scholarship for converging professional and public
purposes.
3. Adaptation of Scholarship to Public Deliberation (45%)
This assignment consists of four parts: (a) the student revises a previously written
research paper for submission to a specified scholarly journal or other academic
outlet; (b) the student adapts his or her revised manuscript (or part thereof) into a
form suitable for intervention in a specified public forum on a specific issue under
deliberation; (c) the student produces a 1,500-2,000 word essay, reflecting on the key
rhetorical relationships and differences between writing for scholarly publication and
adapting scholarship for intervention in public deliberation; (d) the student makes a
15-minute class presentation to explain his or her project, including the most difficult
hurdles encountered and the key insights derived for adapting academic work to
public deliberation. Two copies of the first three parts of the assignment (scholarly
paper, public intervention, and reflection essay) are due in class on the day of the
student’s 15-minute class presentation. For scheduling purposes only, students will
be assigned to the same groups in which they participated for the rhetorical biography
project.
4. Class Discussion of Course Reading (25%)
Readings have been selected to facilitate vibrant discussions throughout the semester.
This course is a shared enterprise—a research seminar for exploring together the
convergence of scholarship and public culture and probing collectively the rhetorical
dynamic of academic freedom, which is unfettered inquiry communicated artfully
enough to enrich public deliberation and enhance democratic culture. We call upon
all members of the class to participate liberally in this conversation.
Note: Although students in this class are enrolled in different sections, we will meet
together throughout the semester and Professors Ivie and Lucaites will share equally
in the evaluation of student work.