Panel: Common Ground in Politically Extreme Contexts

Presentation: Twenty-First Century Anti-Intellectualism: The Rhetoric of Anti-Academic Discourse

• Kristin Poirot, when discussing the types of competing feminisms, explains that “social movements themselves participate in modes of containment and/ or domestication” (267).
• What is an appropriate “feminism,” “revolutionary,” and even “academic”?

Anti-Academic Discourse

There are many examples, but I like Bradford Vivian’s introduction on the topic:

Pundits and politicians feign surprise at polls that show sharply declining support for higher education. The source of this decline, however, is not mysterious. Over the past decade, both hyper-partisan and mainstream media have inundated the American public with caustic rhetoric about universities. We are ceaselessly told a dystopian tale. Radical students run college campuses through mob justice. Professors no longer teach, but merely indoctrinate. Administrators have eliminated freedom of thought and conscience via so-called witch trials and political tribunals. The tendency to blame universities for numerous civic failings using these fallacious platitudes has become one of the defining features of political discourse in our era. It is well past time to recognize where such toxic rhetoric originated and whose interests it serves. Conservatives have long argued that colleges are too liberal, pro-diversity measures are reverse racism and public education is too expensive. But the new anti-university rhetoric to which I refer is, in large part, not a product of domestic politics. Rather, it is the language of an international pro-authoritarian movement opposed to centers of learning that model liberal-democratic values.

There are plenty more examples, and I could talk about the idea of the value of a college education and the debt students go into, but that’s beyond the scope of this presentation.

Problematic Academic Discourse

We can point to many instances of faculty getting suspended and outright fired for comments after Charlie Kirk’s murder. I’d like us to go back April 17, 2018, when Randa Jarrar tweeted her glee of the passing of Barbara Bush:

• “Barbara Bush was a generous and smart and amazing racist who, along with her husband, raised a war criminal”
• “witch”
• “She also said she couldn’t wait for the rest of the Bush family to ‘fall to their demise the way 1.5 million [I]raqis have'” (Rodriguez)

To make matters, she mentioned her 6-figure salary being safe because she was a tenured Fresno State English Professor. And that was the last we heard of her… This is not a good look. Claiming to be pro-free speech but disrupting a talk is akin to censorship.

Back to the Nuance of Anti-Intellectualism

• Echo chamber of intellectual elites ostracizes many outside the academy
• Claiming whiteness is inherent privilege, men=patriarchy (toxic masculinity), and America/Western culture as the root of all evil collapses all of the layers of discourse those assumptions are based on.
• When Robin DiAngelo claims all white people are complicit in racism, her rhetoric constitutes the subject of whiteness, and we ought to remember that such a narrative “fill[s] in coherent unified subjects out of temporally and spatially separate events” (Charland 139).
  • DiAngelo and others espousing the inherent racism of white people present a Kafka trap fallacy: agreeing you’re racist supports the claims; denying you’re racist, supports the claim because, of course, you’d defend yourself–that’s the essence of white fragility
  • In her “workshops,” she rails against “color-blindness” and white people who claim “my ancestors never owned slaves,” but she gives no coherent argument for why a person who was not descended from those who actually perpetrated and profited from America’s “original sin” are to be blamed.
  • Only a rhetoric the essentializes whiteness can create an absolute about “whiteness.”
• Hofstadter, although he thinks intellectuals deserve to be seen as experts, points out how the elitism of intellectuals is a privileged position, which complicates the oppression tenured academics claim:
  • “[The intellectual] is the object of resentment because of an improvement, not a decline, in his fortunes….Intellect is resented as a form of power or privilege” (34)
  • “The common strain that binds together the attitudes and ideas which I call anti-intellectual is a resentment and suspicion of the life of the mind and of those who are considered to represent it” (7).

Conclusion: Abandon Shame

• • The push to identify guilt (whether on purpose or without being conscious) of assumed privileged or so-called dominant attributes has to stop

• • Be open to debate on these topics

• • Do not prefigure the conversation’s conclusion to support circular and teleological narratives undergirded by containment of constitutive rhetorics.
    • • It is extremely difficult to defend an absolute.
      • If you have an answer ready-made, you might not be listening.
      • Also, I need an assistant debate coach, and that’s a great quality!

• • Yes. Barack Obama being elected president is significant.
    • • And so is the backlash against his election–deal with the ambiguity as opposed to foisting the ready-made argument that ALL white people make advancement for so-called minorities impossible.

• • If you’re in the academy, you probably aren’t rich, but you have privilege.

---

Works Cited

• “Americans’ Confidence in Higher Education Down Sharply.” Gallup, 11 July 2023. https://news.gallup.com/poll/508352/americans-confidence-higher-education-down-sharply.aspx
• Asimov, Isaac. “Cult of Ignorance.” Newsweek, vol. 21, Jan 1980, 19.
• Charland, Maurice. “Constitutive Rhetoric: The Case of the Peuple Québécois.” Quarterly Journal of Speech, vol. 73, no. 2, 133-150, DOI: 10.1080/00335638709383799
• Hofstadter, Richard. Anti-intellectualism in American Life. Knopf, 1963.
• LoMonte, Frank. “Don’t Expect Professors to Get Fired When They Say Something You Don’t Like.” The Conversation, 7 May 2018. https://theconversation.com/dont-expect-professors-to-get-fired-when-they-say-something-you-dont-like-95984
• McEwen, Bill. “Fresno State’s Randa Jarrar Dragged Out of Event Featuring Big Bang Theory‘s Mayim Bialik.” GV Wire, 1 May 2024. https://gvwire.com/2024/05/01/fresno-states-randa-jarrar-dragged-out-of-event-featuring-big-bang-theorys-mayim-bialik/
• Poirot, Kristan. Domesticating the Liberated Woman: Containment Rhetorics of Second Wave Radical/Lesbian Feminism.” Women’s Studies in Communication, vol. 32, no. 3, 2009, 263-292.
• Rodriguez, Jesus. “Professor’s Anti-Barbara Bush Twitter Tirade Draws Ire.” The Free Speech Project, 29 June 2019. (Originally posted 30 April 2018) https://freespeechproject.georgetown.edu/tracker-entries/professors-anti-barbara-bush-twitter-tirade-draws-ire/
• Vivian, Bradford. The Roots of Anti-University Rhetoric. Inside Higher Ed, 13 June 2024. https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/views/2024/06/13/tracing-roots-anti-university-rhetoric-opinion
• White, James Boyd. Heracles’ Bow: Essays on the Rhetoric and Poetics of Law. U of Wisconsin P, 1985.

Identity is discursively formed through narrative(s). Stories constitute groups to provide attributes, and I (Aaron) believe this attempts to establish essential features of an identity and, therefore, a subject.

“Narratives lead us to construct and fill in coherent unified subjects out of temporally and spatially separate events” (Charland 139).

“All narratives, as they create the illusion of merely revealing a unified and unproblematic subjectivity, are ideological, because they occult the importance of discourse, culture, and history in giving rise to subjectivity” (Charland 139).

Containment rhetorics: originally an “attempt to tame the threat of alternative views through discipline and confinement, clearly articulating the other as outside of the dominant values and structures of U.S. culture” (Poirot 266).

• Kristin Poirot, when discussing the types of competing feminisms, explains that “social movements themselves participate in modes of containment and/ or domestication” (267).
• What is an appropriate “feminism,” “revolutionary,” and even “academic”?

Anti-Academic Discourse

There are many examples, but I like Bradford Vivian’s introduction on the topic:

Pundits and politicians feign surprise at polls that show sharply declining support for higher education. The source of this decline, however, is not mysterious. Over the past decade, both hyper-partisan and mainstream media have inundated the American public with caustic rhetoric about universities. We are ceaselessly told a dystopian tale. Radical students run college campuses through mob justice. Professors no longer teach, but merely indoctrinate. Administrators have eliminated freedom of thought and conscience via so-called witch trials and political tribunals. The tendency to blame universities for numerous civic failings using these fallacious platitudes has become one of the defining features of political discourse in our era. It is well past time to recognize where such toxic rhetoric originated and whose interests it serves. Conservatives have long argued that colleges are too liberal, pro-diversity measures are reverse racism and public education is too expensive. But the new anti-university rhetoric to which I refer is, in large part, not a product of domestic politics. Rather, it is the language of an international pro-authoritarian movement opposed to centers of learning that model liberal-democratic values.

There are plenty more examples, and I could talk about the idea of the value of a college education and the debt students go into, but that’s beyond the scope of this presentation.

Problematic Academic Discourse

We can point to many instances of faculty getting suspended and outright fired for comments after Charlie Kirk’s murder. I’d like us to go back April 17, 2018, when Randa Jarrar tweeted her glee of the passing of Barbara Bush:

• “Barbara Bush was a generous and smart and amazing racist who, along with her husband, raised a war criminal”
• “witch”
• “She also said she couldn’t wait for the rest of the Bush family to ‘fall to their demise the way 1.5 million [I]raqis have'” (Rodriguez)

To make matters, she mentioned her 6-figure salary being safe because she was a tenured Fresno State English Professor. And that was the last we heard of her… This is not a good look. Claiming to be pro-free speech but disrupting a talk is akin to censorship.

Back to the Nuance of Anti-Intellectualism

• Echo chamber of intellectual elites ostracizes many outside the academy
• Claiming whiteness is inherent privilege, men=patriarchy (toxic masculinity), and America/Western culture as the root of all evil collapses all of the layers of discourse those assumptions are based on.
• When Robin DiAngelo claims all white people are complicit in racism, her rhetoric constitutes the subject of whiteness, and we ought to remember that such a narrative “fill[s] in coherent unified subjects out of temporally and spatially separate events” (Charland 139).
  • DiAngelo and others espousing the inherent racism of white people present a Kafka trap fallacy: agreeing you’re racist supports the claims; denying you’re racist, supports the claim because, of course, you’d defend yourself–that’s the essence of white fragility
  • In her “workshops,” she rails against “color-blindness” and white people who claim “my ancestors never owned slaves,” but she gives no coherent argument for why a person who was not descended from those who actually perpetrated and profited from America’s “original sin” are to be blamed.
  • Only a rhetoric the essentializes whiteness can create an absolute about “whiteness.”
• Hofstadter, although he thinks intellectuals deserve to be seen as experts, points out how the elitism of intellectuals is a privileged position, which complicates the oppression tenured academics claim:
  • “[The intellectual] is the object of resentment because of an improvement, not a decline, in his fortunes….Intellect is resented as a form of power or privilege” (34)
  • “The common strain that binds together the attitudes and ideas which I call anti-intellectual is a resentment and suspicion of the life of the mind and of those who are considered to represent it” (7).

Conclusion: Abandon Shame

• • The push to identify guilt (whether on purpose or without being conscious) of assumed privileged or so-called dominant attributes has to stop

• • Be open to debate on these topics

• • Do not prefigure the conversation’s conclusion to support circular and teleological narratives undergirded by containment of constitutive rhetorics.
    • • It is extremely difficult to defend an absolute.
      • If you have an answer ready-made, you might not be listening.
      • Also, I need an assistant debate coach, and that’s a great quality!

• • Yes. Barack Obama being elected president is significant.
    • • And so is the backlash against his election–deal with the ambiguity as opposed to foisting the ready-made argument that ALL white people make advancement for so-called minorities impossible.

• • If you’re in the academy, you probably aren’t rich, but you have privilege.

---

Works Cited

• “Americans’ Confidence in Higher Education Down Sharply.” Gallup, 11 July 2023. https://news.gallup.com/poll/508352/americans-confidence-higher-education-down-sharply.aspx
• Asimov, Isaac. “Cult of Ignorance.” Newsweek, vol. 21, Jan 1980, 19.
• Charland, Maurice. “Constitutive Rhetoric: The Case of the Peuple Québécois.” Quarterly Journal of Speech, vol. 73, no. 2, 133-150, DOI: 10.1080/00335638709383799
• Hofstadter, Richard. Anti-intellectualism in American Life. Knopf, 1963.
• LoMonte, Frank. “Don’t Expect Professors to Get Fired When They Say Something You Don’t Like.” The Conversation, 7 May 2018. https://theconversation.com/dont-expect-professors-to-get-fired-when-they-say-something-you-dont-like-95984
• McEwen, Bill. “Fresno State’s Randa Jarrar Dragged Out of Event Featuring Big Bang Theory‘s Mayim Bialik.” GV Wire, 1 May 2024. https://gvwire.com/2024/05/01/fresno-states-randa-jarrar-dragged-out-of-event-featuring-big-bang-theorys-mayim-bialik/
• Poirot, Kristan. Domesticating the Liberated Woman: Containment Rhetorics of Second Wave Radical/Lesbian Feminism.” Women’s Studies in Communication, vol. 32, no. 3, 2009, 263-292.
• Rodriguez, Jesus. “Professor’s Anti-Barbara Bush Twitter Tirade Draws Ire.” The Free Speech Project, 29 June 2019. (Originally posted 30 April 2018) https://freespeechproject.georgetown.edu/tracker-entries/professors-anti-barbara-bush-twitter-tirade-draws-ire/
• Vivian, Bradford. The Roots of Anti-University Rhetoric. Inside Higher Ed, 13 June 2024. https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/views/2024/06/13/tracing-roots-anti-university-rhetoric-opinion
• White, James Boyd. Heracles’ Bow: Essays on the Rhetoric and Poetics of Law. U of Wisconsin P, 1985.

• Identity is discursively formed through narrative(s). Stories constitute groups to provide attributes, and I (Aaron) believe this attempts to establish essential features of an identity and, therefore, a subject.
• “Narratives lead us to construct and fill in coherent unified subjects out of temporally and spatially separate events” (Charland 139).
• “All narratives, as they create the illusion of merely revealing a unified and unproblematic subjectivity, are ideological, because they occult the importance of discourse, culture, and history in giving rise to subjectivity” (Charland 139).

Containment rhetorics: originally an “attempt to tame the threat of alternative views through discipline and confinement, clearly articulating the other as outside of the dominant values and structures of U.S. culture” (Poirot 266).

• Kristin Poirot, when discussing the types of competing feminisms, explains that “social movements themselves participate in modes of containment and/ or domestication” (267).
• What is an appropriate “feminism,” “revolutionary,” and even “academic”?

Anti-Academic Discourse

There are many examples, but I like Bradford Vivian’s introduction on the topic:

Pundits and politicians feign surprise at polls that show sharply declining support for higher education. The source of this decline, however, is not mysterious. Over the past decade, both hyper-partisan and mainstream media have inundated the American public with caustic rhetoric about universities. We are ceaselessly told a dystopian tale. Radical students run college campuses through mob justice. Professors no longer teach, but merely indoctrinate. Administrators have eliminated freedom of thought and conscience via so-called witch trials and political tribunals. The tendency to blame universities for numerous civic failings using these fallacious platitudes has become one of the defining features of political discourse in our era. It is well past time to recognize where such toxic rhetoric originated and whose interests it serves. Conservatives have long argued that colleges are too liberal, pro-diversity measures are reverse racism and public education is too expensive. But the new anti-university rhetoric to which I refer is, in large part, not a product of domestic politics. Rather, it is the language of an international pro-authoritarian movement opposed to centers of learning that model liberal-democratic values.

There are plenty more examples, and I could talk about the idea of the value of a college education and the debt students go into, but that’s beyond the scope of this presentation.

Problematic Academic Discourse

We can point to many instances of faculty getting suspended and outright fired for comments after Charlie Kirk’s murder. I’d like us to go back April 17, 2018, when Randa Jarrar tweeted her glee of the passing of Barbara Bush:

• “Barbara Bush was a generous and smart and amazing racist who, along with her husband, raised a war criminal”
• “witch”
• “She also said she couldn’t wait for the rest of the Bush family to ‘fall to their demise the way 1.5 million [I]raqis have'” (Rodriguez)

To make matters, she mentioned her 6-figure salary being safe because she was a tenured Fresno State English Professor. And that was the last we heard of her… This is not a good look. Claiming to be pro-free speech but disrupting a talk is akin to censorship.

Back to the Nuance of Anti-Intellectualism

• Echo chamber of intellectual elites ostracizes many outside the academy
• Claiming whiteness is inherent privilege, men=patriarchy (toxic masculinity), and America/Western culture as the root of all evil collapses all of the layers of discourse those assumptions are based on.
• When Robin DiAngelo claims all white people are complicit in racism, her rhetoric constitutes the subject of whiteness, and we ought to remember that such a narrative “fill[s] in coherent unified subjects out of temporally and spatially separate events” (Charland 139).
  • DiAngelo and others espousing the inherent racism of white people present a Kafka trap fallacy: agreeing you’re racist supports the claims; denying you’re racist, supports the claim because, of course, you’d defend yourself–that’s the essence of white fragility
  • In her “workshops,” she rails against “color-blindness” and white people who claim “my ancestors never owned slaves,” but she gives no coherent argument for why a person who was not descended from those who actually perpetrated and profited from America’s “original sin” are to be blamed.
  • Only a rhetoric the essentializes whiteness can create an absolute about “whiteness.”
• Hofstadter, although he thinks intellectuals deserve to be seen as experts, points out how the elitism of intellectuals is a privileged position, which complicates the oppression tenured academics claim:
  • “[The intellectual] is the object of resentment because of an improvement, not a decline, in his fortunes….Intellect is resented as a form of power or privilege” (34)
  • “The common strain that binds together the attitudes and ideas which I call anti-intellectual is a resentment and suspicion of the life of the mind and of those who are considered to represent it” (7).

Conclusion: Abandon Shame

• • The push to identify guilt (whether on purpose or without being conscious) of assumed privileged or so-called dominant attributes has to stop

• • Be open to debate on these topics

• • Do not prefigure the conversation’s conclusion to support circular and teleological narratives undergirded by containment of constitutive rhetorics.
    • • It is extremely difficult to defend an absolute.
      • If you have an answer ready-made, you might not be listening.
      • Also, I need an assistant debate coach, and that’s a great quality!

• • Yes. Barack Obama being elected president is significant.
    • • And so is the backlash against his election–deal with the ambiguity as opposed to foisting the ready-made argument that ALL white people make advancement for so-called minorities impossible.

• • If you’re in the academy, you probably aren’t rich, but you have privilege.

---

Works Cited

• “Americans’ Confidence in Higher Education Down Sharply.” Gallup, 11 July 2023. https://news.gallup.com/poll/508352/americans-confidence-higher-education-down-sharply.aspx
• Asimov, Isaac. “Cult of Ignorance.” Newsweek, vol. 21, Jan 1980, 19.
• Charland, Maurice. “Constitutive Rhetoric: The Case of the Peuple Québécois.” Quarterly Journal of Speech, vol. 73, no. 2, 133-150, DOI: 10.1080/00335638709383799
• Hofstadter, Richard. Anti-intellectualism in American Life. Knopf, 1963.
• LoMonte, Frank. “Don’t Expect Professors to Get Fired When They Say Something You Don’t Like.” The Conversation, 7 May 2018. https://theconversation.com/dont-expect-professors-to-get-fired-when-they-say-something-you-dont-like-95984
• McEwen, Bill. “Fresno State’s Randa Jarrar Dragged Out of Event Featuring Big Bang Theory‘s Mayim Bialik.” GV Wire, 1 May 2024. https://gvwire.com/2024/05/01/fresno-states-randa-jarrar-dragged-out-of-event-featuring-big-bang-theorys-mayim-bialik/
• Poirot, Kristan. Domesticating the Liberated Woman: Containment Rhetorics of Second Wave Radical/Lesbian Feminism.” Women’s Studies in Communication, vol. 32, no. 3, 2009, 263-292.
• Rodriguez, Jesus. “Professor’s Anti-Barbara Bush Twitter Tirade Draws Ire.” The Free Speech Project, 29 June 2019. (Originally posted 30 April 2018) https://freespeechproject.georgetown.edu/tracker-entries/professors-anti-barbara-bush-twitter-tirade-draws-ire/
• Vivian, Bradford. The Roots of Anti-University Rhetoric. Inside Higher Ed, 13 June 2024. https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/views/2024/06/13/tracing-roots-anti-university-rhetoric-opinion
• White, James Boyd. Heracles’ Bow: Essays on the Rhetoric and Poetics of Law. U of Wisconsin P, 1985.

Good question: “entering the conversation” through citing the required scholars imposes a scope and/or appropriate area of focus.

If one has an alternative to the trajectory of the field, the editors* can reject the submission outright. *The type of rejection I’m discussing here isn’t post blind review but when the editor refuses to send out a submission for peer review because one isn’t reproducing the same argument.

Phrases like, “you must more effectively situate the piece with approved scholarship,” and “the article is rejected on the basis of its fit with the mission of the journal.”

Constitutive and Containment Rhetorics

• Constitutive rhetoric: “the art of constituting character, community, and culture in language” (White x).
  • Identity is discursively formed through narrative(s). Stories constitute groups to provide attributes, and I (Aaron) believe this attempts to establish essential features of an identity and, therefore, a subject.
  • “Narratives lead us to construct and fill in coherent unified subjects out of temporally and spatially separate events” (Charland 139).
  • “All narratives, as they create the illusion of merely revealing a unified and unproblematic subjectivity, are ideological, because they occult the importance of discourse, culture, and history in giving rise to subjectivity” (Charland 139).
• Containment rhetorics: originally an “attempt to tame the threat of alternative views through discipline and confinement, clearly articulating the other as outside of the dominant values and structures of U.S. culture” (Poirot 266).
  • Kristin Poirot, when discussing the types of competing feminisms, explains that “social movements themselves participate in modes of containment and/ or domestication” (267).
  • What is an appropriate “feminism,” “revolutionary,” and even “academic”?

Anti-Academic Discourse

There are many examples, but I like Bradford Vivian’s introduction on the topic:

Pundits and politicians feign surprise at polls that show sharply declining support for higher education. The source of this decline, however, is not mysterious. Over the past decade, both hyper-partisan and mainstream media have inundated the American public with caustic rhetoric about universities. We are ceaselessly told a dystopian tale. Radical students run college campuses through mob justice. Professors no longer teach, but merely indoctrinate. Administrators have eliminated freedom of thought and conscience via so-called witch trials and political tribunals. The tendency to blame universities for numerous civic failings using these fallacious platitudes has become one of the defining features of political discourse in our era. It is well past time to recognize where such toxic rhetoric originated and whose interests it serves. Conservatives have long argued that colleges are too liberal, pro-diversity measures are reverse racism and public education is too expensive. But the new anti-university rhetoric to which I refer is, in large part, not a product of domestic politics. Rather, it is the language of an international pro-authoritarian movement opposed to centers of learning that model liberal-democratic values.

There are plenty more examples, and I could talk about the idea of the value of a college education and the debt students go into, but that’s beyond the scope of this presentation.

Problematic Academic Discourse

We can point to many instances of faculty getting suspended and outright fired for comments after Charlie Kirk’s murder. I’d like us to go back April 17, 2018, when Randa Jarrar tweeted her glee of the passing of Barbara Bush:

• “Barbara Bush was a generous and smart and amazing racist who, along with her husband, raised a war criminal”
• “witch”
• “She also said she couldn’t wait for the rest of the Bush family to ‘fall to their demise the way 1.5 million [I]raqis have'” (Rodriguez)

To make matters, she mentioned her 6-figure salary being safe because she was a tenured Fresno State English Professor. And that was the last we heard of her… This is not a good look. Claiming to be pro-free speech but disrupting a talk is akin to censorship.

Back to the Nuance of Anti-Intellectualism

• Echo chamber of intellectual elites ostracizes many outside the academy
• Claiming whiteness is inherent privilege, men=patriarchy (toxic masculinity), and America/Western culture as the root of all evil collapses all of the layers of discourse those assumptions are based on.
• When Robin DiAngelo claims all white people are complicit in racism, her rhetoric constitutes the subject of whiteness, and we ought to remember that such a narrative “fill[s] in coherent unified subjects out of temporally and spatially separate events” (Charland 139).
  • DiAngelo and others espousing the inherent racism of white people present a Kafka trap fallacy: agreeing you’re racist supports the claims; denying you’re racist, supports the claim because, of course, you’d defend yourself–that’s the essence of white fragility
  • In her “workshops,” she rails against “color-blindness” and white people who claim “my ancestors never owned slaves,” but she gives no coherent argument for why a person who was not descended from those who actually perpetrated and profited from America’s “original sin” are to be blamed.
  • Only a rhetoric the essentializes whiteness can create an absolute about “whiteness.”
• Hofstadter, although he thinks intellectuals deserve to be seen as experts, points out how the elitism of intellectuals is a privileged position, which complicates the oppression tenured academics claim:
  • “[The intellectual] is the object of resentment because of an improvement, not a decline, in his fortunes….Intellect is resented as a form of power or privilege” (34)
  • “The common strain that binds together the attitudes and ideas which I call anti-intellectual is a resentment and suspicion of the life of the mind and of those who are considered to represent it” (7).

Conclusion: Abandon Shame

• • The push to identify guilt (whether on purpose or without being conscious) of assumed privileged or so-called dominant attributes has to stop

• • Be open to debate on these topics

• • Do not prefigure the conversation’s conclusion to support circular and teleological narratives undergirded by containment of constitutive rhetorics.
    • • It is extremely difficult to defend an absolute.
      • If you have an answer ready-made, you might not be listening.
      • Also, I need an assistant debate coach, and that’s a great quality!

• • Yes. Barack Obama being elected president is significant.
    • • And so is the backlash against his election–deal with the ambiguity as opposed to foisting the ready-made argument that ALL white people make advancement for so-called minorities impossible.

• • If you’re in the academy, you probably aren’t rich, but you have privilege.

---

Works Cited

• “Americans’ Confidence in Higher Education Down Sharply.” Gallup, 11 July 2023. https://news.gallup.com/poll/508352/americans-confidence-higher-education-down-sharply.aspx
• Asimov, Isaac. “Cult of Ignorance.” Newsweek, vol. 21, Jan 1980, 19.
• Charland, Maurice. “Constitutive Rhetoric: The Case of the Peuple Québécois.” Quarterly Journal of Speech, vol. 73, no. 2, 133-150, DOI: 10.1080/00335638709383799
• Hofstadter, Richard. Anti-intellectualism in American Life. Knopf, 1963.
• LoMonte, Frank. “Don’t Expect Professors to Get Fired When They Say Something You Don’t Like.” The Conversation, 7 May 2018. https://theconversation.com/dont-expect-professors-to-get-fired-when-they-say-something-you-dont-like-95984
• McEwen, Bill. “Fresno State’s Randa Jarrar Dragged Out of Event Featuring Big Bang Theory‘s Mayim Bialik.” GV Wire, 1 May 2024. https://gvwire.com/2024/05/01/fresno-states-randa-jarrar-dragged-out-of-event-featuring-big-bang-theorys-mayim-bialik/
• Poirot, Kristan. Domesticating the Liberated Woman: Containment Rhetorics of Second Wave Radical/Lesbian Feminism.” Women’s Studies in Communication, vol. 32, no. 3, 2009, 263-292.
• Rodriguez, Jesus. “Professor’s Anti-Barbara Bush Twitter Tirade Draws Ire.” The Free Speech Project, 29 June 2019. (Originally posted 30 April 2018) https://freespeechproject.georgetown.edu/tracker-entries/professors-anti-barbara-bush-twitter-tirade-draws-ire/
• Vivian, Bradford. The Roots of Anti-University Rhetoric. Inside Higher Ed, 13 June 2024. https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/views/2024/06/13/tracing-roots-anti-university-rhetoric-opinion
• White, James Boyd. Heracles’ Bow: Essays on the Rhetoric and Poetics of Law. U of Wisconsin P, 1985.

• Good question: “entering the conversation” through citing the required scholars imposes a scope and/or appropriate area of focus.
• If one has an alternative to the trajectory of the field, the editors* can reject the submission outright. *The type of rejection I’m discussing here isn’t post blind review but when the editor refuses to send out a submission for peer review because one isn’t reproducing the same argument.
• Phrases like, “you must more effectively situate the piece with approved scholarship,” and “the article is rejected on the basis of its fit with the mission of the journal.”

Constitutive and Containment Rhetorics

• Constitutive rhetoric: “the art of constituting character, community, and culture in language” (White x).
  • Identity is discursively formed through narrative(s). Stories constitute groups to provide attributes, and I (Aaron) believe this attempts to establish essential features of an identity and, therefore, a subject.
  • “Narratives lead us to construct and fill in coherent unified subjects out of temporally and spatially separate events” (Charland 139).
  • “All narratives, as they create the illusion of merely revealing a unified and unproblematic subjectivity, are ideological, because they occult the importance of discourse, culture, and history in giving rise to subjectivity” (Charland 139).
• Containment rhetorics: originally an “attempt to tame the threat of alternative views through discipline and confinement, clearly articulating the other as outside of the dominant values and structures of U.S. culture” (Poirot 266).
  • Kristin Poirot, when discussing the types of competing feminisms, explains that “social movements themselves participate in modes of containment and/ or domestication” (267).
  • What is an appropriate “feminism,” “revolutionary,” and even “academic”?

Anti-Academic Discourse

There are many examples, but I like Bradford Vivian’s introduction on the topic:

Pundits and politicians feign surprise at polls that show sharply declining support for higher education. The source of this decline, however, is not mysterious. Over the past decade, both hyper-partisan and mainstream media have inundated the American public with caustic rhetoric about universities. We are ceaselessly told a dystopian tale. Radical students run college campuses through mob justice. Professors no longer teach, but merely indoctrinate. Administrators have eliminated freedom of thought and conscience via so-called witch trials and political tribunals. The tendency to blame universities for numerous civic failings using these fallacious platitudes has become one of the defining features of political discourse in our era. It is well past time to recognize where such toxic rhetoric originated and whose interests it serves. Conservatives have long argued that colleges are too liberal, pro-diversity measures are reverse racism and public education is too expensive. But the new anti-university rhetoric to which I refer is, in large part, not a product of domestic politics. Rather, it is the language of an international pro-authoritarian movement opposed to centers of learning that model liberal-democratic values.

There are plenty more examples, and I could talk about the idea of the value of a college education and the debt students go into, but that’s beyond the scope of this presentation.

Problematic Academic Discourse

We can point to many instances of faculty getting suspended and outright fired for comments after Charlie Kirk’s murder. I’d like us to go back April 17, 2018, when Randa Jarrar tweeted her glee of the passing of Barbara Bush:

• “Barbara Bush was a generous and smart and amazing racist who, along with her husband, raised a war criminal”
• “witch”
• “She also said she couldn’t wait for the rest of the Bush family to ‘fall to their demise the way 1.5 million [I]raqis have'” (Rodriguez)

To make matters, she mentioned her 6-figure salary being safe because she was a tenured Fresno State English Professor. And that was the last we heard of her… This is not a good look. Claiming to be pro-free speech but disrupting a talk is akin to censorship.

Back to the Nuance of Anti-Intellectualism

• Echo chamber of intellectual elites ostracizes many outside the academy
• Claiming whiteness is inherent privilege, men=patriarchy (toxic masculinity), and America/Western culture as the root of all evil collapses all of the layers of discourse those assumptions are based on.
• When Robin DiAngelo claims all white people are complicit in racism, her rhetoric constitutes the subject of whiteness, and we ought to remember that such a narrative “fill[s] in coherent unified subjects out of temporally and spatially separate events” (Charland 139).
  • DiAngelo and others espousing the inherent racism of white people present a Kafka trap fallacy: agreeing you’re racist supports the claims; denying you’re racist, supports the claim because, of course, you’d defend yourself–that’s the essence of white fragility
  • In her “workshops,” she rails against “color-blindness” and white people who claim “my ancestors never owned slaves,” but she gives no coherent argument for why a person who was not descended from those who actually perpetrated and profited from America’s “original sin” are to be blamed.
  • Only a rhetoric the essentializes whiteness can create an absolute about “whiteness.”
• Hofstadter, although he thinks intellectuals deserve to be seen as experts, points out how the elitism of intellectuals is a privileged position, which complicates the oppression tenured academics claim:
  • “[The intellectual] is the object of resentment because of an improvement, not a decline, in his fortunes….Intellect is resented as a form of power or privilege” (34)
  • “The common strain that binds together the attitudes and ideas which I call anti-intellectual is a resentment and suspicion of the life of the mind and of those who are considered to represent it” (7).

Conclusion: Abandon Shame

• • The push to identify guilt (whether on purpose or without being conscious) of assumed privileged or so-called dominant attributes has to stop

• • Be open to debate on these topics

• • Do not prefigure the conversation’s conclusion to support circular and teleological narratives undergirded by containment of constitutive rhetorics.
    • • It is extremely difficult to defend an absolute.
      • If you have an answer ready-made, you might not be listening.
      • Also, I need an assistant debate coach, and that’s a great quality!

• • Yes. Barack Obama being elected president is significant.
    • • And so is the backlash against his election–deal with the ambiguity as opposed to foisting the ready-made argument that ALL white people make advancement for so-called minorities impossible.

• • If you’re in the academy, you probably aren’t rich, but you have privilege.

---

Works Cited

• “Americans’ Confidence in Higher Education Down Sharply.” Gallup, 11 July 2023. https://news.gallup.com/poll/508352/americans-confidence-higher-education-down-sharply.aspx
• Asimov, Isaac. “Cult of Ignorance.” Newsweek, vol. 21, Jan 1980, 19.
• Charland, Maurice. “Constitutive Rhetoric: The Case of the Peuple Québécois.” Quarterly Journal of Speech, vol. 73, no. 2, 133-150, DOI: 10.1080/00335638709383799
• Hofstadter, Richard. Anti-intellectualism in American Life. Knopf, 1963.
• LoMonte, Frank. “Don’t Expect Professors to Get Fired When They Say Something You Don’t Like.” The Conversation, 7 May 2018. https://theconversation.com/dont-expect-professors-to-get-fired-when-they-say-something-you-dont-like-95984
• McEwen, Bill. “Fresno State’s Randa Jarrar Dragged Out of Event Featuring Big Bang Theory‘s Mayim Bialik.” GV Wire, 1 May 2024. https://gvwire.com/2024/05/01/fresno-states-randa-jarrar-dragged-out-of-event-featuring-big-bang-theorys-mayim-bialik/
• Poirot, Kristan. Domesticating the Liberated Woman: Containment Rhetorics of Second Wave Radical/Lesbian Feminism.” Women’s Studies in Communication, vol. 32, no. 3, 2009, 263-292.
• Rodriguez, Jesus. “Professor’s Anti-Barbara Bush Twitter Tirade Draws Ire.” The Free Speech Project, 29 June 2019. (Originally posted 30 April 2018) https://freespeechproject.georgetown.edu/tracker-entries/professors-anti-barbara-bush-twitter-tirade-draws-ire/
• Vivian, Bradford. The Roots of Anti-University Rhetoric. Inside Higher Ed, 13 June 2024. https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/views/2024/06/13/tracing-roots-anti-university-rhetoric-opinion
• White, James Boyd. Heracles’ Bow: Essays on the Rhetoric and Poetics of Law. U of Wisconsin P, 1985.

One’s opinion (conviction) is as valid as an expert’s opinion

If one doesn’t read, one can’t be informed; therefore, democracy is imperiled by uninformed voters

Rhetorical Grounding of the Presentation

Argumentation is lacking in scholarly discourse on rhetoric. The apparent need for consensus building leads to what could amount to citation circles. Instead of a “you cite me, I cite you,” a submission that doesn’t cite the appropriate scholars gets rejected.

• Well, what about the time honored tradition of showing that you’ve done your homework and are entering the conversation?
  • Good question: “entering the conversation” through citing the required scholars imposes a scope and/or appropriate area of focus.
  • If one has an alternative to the trajectory of the field, the editors* can reject the submission outright. *The type of rejection I’m discussing here isn’t post blind review but when the editor refuses to send out a submission for peer review because one isn’t reproducing the same argument.
  • Phrases like, “you must more effectively situate the piece with approved scholarship,” and “the article is rejected on the basis of its fit with the mission of the journal.”

Constitutive and Containment Rhetorics

• Constitutive rhetoric: “the art of constituting character, community, and culture in language” (White x).
  • Identity is discursively formed through narrative(s). Stories constitute groups to provide attributes, and I (Aaron) believe this attempts to establish essential features of an identity and, therefore, a subject.
  • “Narratives lead us to construct and fill in coherent unified subjects out of temporally and spatially separate events” (Charland 139).
  • “All narratives, as they create the illusion of merely revealing a unified and unproblematic subjectivity, are ideological, because they occult the importance of discourse, culture, and history in giving rise to subjectivity” (Charland 139).
• Containment rhetorics: originally an “attempt to tame the threat of alternative views through discipline and confinement, clearly articulating the other as outside of the dominant values and structures of U.S. culture” (Poirot 266).
  • Kristin Poirot, when discussing the types of competing feminisms, explains that “social movements themselves participate in modes of containment and/ or domestication” (267).
  • What is an appropriate “feminism,” “revolutionary,” and even “academic”?

Anti-Academic Discourse

There are many examples, but I like Bradford Vivian’s introduction on the topic:

Pundits and politicians feign surprise at polls that show sharply declining support for higher education. The source of this decline, however, is not mysterious. Over the past decade, both hyper-partisan and mainstream media have inundated the American public with caustic rhetoric about universities. We are ceaselessly told a dystopian tale. Radical students run college campuses through mob justice. Professors no longer teach, but merely indoctrinate. Administrators have eliminated freedom of thought and conscience via so-called witch trials and political tribunals. The tendency to blame universities for numerous civic failings using these fallacious platitudes has become one of the defining features of political discourse in our era. It is well past time to recognize where such toxic rhetoric originated and whose interests it serves. Conservatives have long argued that colleges are too liberal, pro-diversity measures are reverse racism and public education is too expensive. But the new anti-university rhetoric to which I refer is, in large part, not a product of domestic politics. Rather, it is the language of an international pro-authoritarian movement opposed to centers of learning that model liberal-democratic values.

There are plenty more examples, and I could talk about the idea of the value of a college education and the debt students go into, but that’s beyond the scope of this presentation.

Problematic Academic Discourse

We can point to many instances of faculty getting suspended and outright fired for comments after Charlie Kirk’s murder. I’d like us to go back April 17, 2018, when Randa Jarrar tweeted her glee of the passing of Barbara Bush:

• “Barbara Bush was a generous and smart and amazing racist who, along with her husband, raised a war criminal”
• “witch”
• “She also said she couldn’t wait for the rest of the Bush family to ‘fall to their demise the way 1.5 million [I]raqis have'” (Rodriguez)

To make matters, she mentioned her 6-figure salary being safe because she was a tenured Fresno State English Professor. And that was the last we heard of her… This is not a good look. Claiming to be pro-free speech but disrupting a talk is akin to censorship.

Back to the Nuance of Anti-Intellectualism

• Echo chamber of intellectual elites ostracizes many outside the academy
• Claiming whiteness is inherent privilege, men=patriarchy (toxic masculinity), and America/Western culture as the root of all evil collapses all of the layers of discourse those assumptions are based on.
• When Robin DiAngelo claims all white people are complicit in racism, her rhetoric constitutes the subject of whiteness, and we ought to remember that such a narrative “fill[s] in coherent unified subjects out of temporally and spatially separate events” (Charland 139).
  • DiAngelo and others espousing the inherent racism of white people present a Kafka trap fallacy: agreeing you’re racist supports the claims; denying you’re racist, supports the claim because, of course, you’d defend yourself–that’s the essence of white fragility
  • In her “workshops,” she rails against “color-blindness” and white people who claim “my ancestors never owned slaves,” but she gives no coherent argument for why a person who was not descended from those who actually perpetrated and profited from America’s “original sin” are to be blamed.
  • Only a rhetoric the essentializes whiteness can create an absolute about “whiteness.”
• Hofstadter, although he thinks intellectuals deserve to be seen as experts, points out how the elitism of intellectuals is a privileged position, which complicates the oppression tenured academics claim:
  • “[The intellectual] is the object of resentment because of an improvement, not a decline, in his fortunes….Intellect is resented as a form of power or privilege” (34)
  • “The common strain that binds together the attitudes and ideas which I call anti-intellectual is a resentment and suspicion of the life of the mind and of those who are considered to represent it” (7).

Conclusion: Abandon Shame

• • The push to identify guilt (whether on purpose or without being conscious) of assumed privileged or so-called dominant attributes has to stop

• • Be open to debate on these topics

• • Do not prefigure the conversation’s conclusion to support circular and teleological narratives undergirded by containment of constitutive rhetorics.
    • • It is extremely difficult to defend an absolute.
      • If you have an answer ready-made, you might not be listening.
      • Also, I need an assistant debate coach, and that’s a great quality!

• • Yes. Barack Obama being elected president is significant.
    • • And so is the backlash against his election–deal with the ambiguity as opposed to foisting the ready-made argument that ALL white people make advancement for so-called minorities impossible.

• • If you’re in the academy, you probably aren’t rich, but you have privilege.

---

Works Cited

• “Americans’ Confidence in Higher Education Down Sharply.” Gallup, 11 July 2023. https://news.gallup.com/poll/508352/americans-confidence-higher-education-down-sharply.aspx
• Asimov, Isaac. “Cult of Ignorance.” Newsweek, vol. 21, Jan 1980, 19.
• Charland, Maurice. “Constitutive Rhetoric: The Case of the Peuple Québécois.” Quarterly Journal of Speech, vol. 73, no. 2, 133-150, DOI: 10.1080/00335638709383799
• Hofstadter, Richard. Anti-intellectualism in American Life. Knopf, 1963.
• LoMonte, Frank. “Don’t Expect Professors to Get Fired When They Say Something You Don’t Like.” The Conversation, 7 May 2018. https://theconversation.com/dont-expect-professors-to-get-fired-when-they-say-something-you-dont-like-95984
• McEwen, Bill. “Fresno State’s Randa Jarrar Dragged Out of Event Featuring Big Bang Theory‘s Mayim Bialik.” GV Wire, 1 May 2024. https://gvwire.com/2024/05/01/fresno-states-randa-jarrar-dragged-out-of-event-featuring-big-bang-theorys-mayim-bialik/
• Poirot, Kristan. Domesticating the Liberated Woman: Containment Rhetorics of Second Wave Radical/Lesbian Feminism.” Women’s Studies in Communication, vol. 32, no. 3, 2009, 263-292.
• Rodriguez, Jesus. “Professor’s Anti-Barbara Bush Twitter Tirade Draws Ire.” The Free Speech Project, 29 June 2019. (Originally posted 30 April 2018) https://freespeechproject.georgetown.edu/tracker-entries/professors-anti-barbara-bush-twitter-tirade-draws-ire/
• Vivian, Bradford. The Roots of Anti-University Rhetoric. Inside Higher Ed, 13 June 2024. https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/views/2024/06/13/tracing-roots-anti-university-rhetoric-opinion
• White, James Boyd. Heracles’ Bow: Essays on the Rhetoric and Poetics of Law. U of Wisconsin P, 1985.

• One’s opinion (conviction) is as valid as an expert’s opinion
• If one doesn’t read, one can’t be informed; therefore, democracy is imperiled by uninformed voters

Rhetorical Grounding of the Presentation

Argumentation is lacking in scholarly discourse on rhetoric. The apparent need for consensus building leads to what could amount to citation circles. Instead of a “you cite me, I cite you,” a submission that doesn’t cite the appropriate scholars gets rejected.

• Well, what about the time honored tradition of showing that you’ve done your homework and are entering the conversation?
  • Good question: “entering the conversation” through citing the required scholars imposes a scope and/or appropriate area of focus.
  • If one has an alternative to the trajectory of the field, the editors* can reject the submission outright. *The type of rejection I’m discussing here isn’t post blind review but when the editor refuses to send out a submission for peer review because one isn’t reproducing the same argument.
  • Phrases like, “you must more effectively situate the piece with approved scholarship,” and “the article is rejected on the basis of its fit with the mission of the journal.”

Constitutive and Containment Rhetorics

• Constitutive rhetoric: “the art of constituting character, community, and culture in language” (White x).
  • Identity is discursively formed through narrative(s). Stories constitute groups to provide attributes, and I (Aaron) believe this attempts to establish essential features of an identity and, therefore, a subject.
  • “Narratives lead us to construct and fill in coherent unified subjects out of temporally and spatially separate events” (Charland 139).
  • “All narratives, as they create the illusion of merely revealing a unified and unproblematic subjectivity, are ideological, because they occult the importance of discourse, culture, and history in giving rise to subjectivity” (Charland 139).
• Containment rhetorics: originally an “attempt to tame the threat of alternative views through discipline and confinement, clearly articulating the other as outside of the dominant values and structures of U.S. culture” (Poirot 266).
  • Kristin Poirot, when discussing the types of competing feminisms, explains that “social movements themselves participate in modes of containment and/ or domestication” (267).
  • What is an appropriate “feminism,” “revolutionary,” and even “academic”?

Anti-Academic Discourse

There are many examples, but I like Bradford Vivian’s introduction on the topic:

Pundits and politicians feign surprise at polls that show sharply declining support for higher education. The source of this decline, however, is not mysterious. Over the past decade, both hyper-partisan and mainstream media have inundated the American public with caustic rhetoric about universities. We are ceaselessly told a dystopian tale. Radical students run college campuses through mob justice. Professors no longer teach, but merely indoctrinate. Administrators have eliminated freedom of thought and conscience via so-called witch trials and political tribunals. The tendency to blame universities for numerous civic failings using these fallacious platitudes has become one of the defining features of political discourse in our era. It is well past time to recognize where such toxic rhetoric originated and whose interests it serves. Conservatives have long argued that colleges are too liberal, pro-diversity measures are reverse racism and public education is too expensive. But the new anti-university rhetoric to which I refer is, in large part, not a product of domestic politics. Rather, it is the language of an international pro-authoritarian movement opposed to centers of learning that model liberal-democratic values.

There are plenty more examples, and I could talk about the idea of the value of a college education and the debt students go into, but that’s beyond the scope of this presentation.

Problematic Academic Discourse

We can point to many instances of faculty getting suspended and outright fired for comments after Charlie Kirk’s murder. I’d like us to go back April 17, 2018, when Randa Jarrar tweeted her glee of the passing of Barbara Bush:

• “Barbara Bush was a generous and smart and amazing racist who, along with her husband, raised a war criminal”
• “witch”
• “She also said she couldn’t wait for the rest of the Bush family to ‘fall to their demise the way 1.5 million [I]raqis have'” (Rodriguez)

To make matters, she mentioned her 6-figure salary being safe because she was a tenured Fresno State English Professor. And that was the last we heard of her… This is not a good look. Claiming to be pro-free speech but disrupting a talk is akin to censorship.

Back to the Nuance of Anti-Intellectualism

• Echo chamber of intellectual elites ostracizes many outside the academy
• Claiming whiteness is inherent privilege, men=patriarchy (toxic masculinity), and America/Western culture as the root of all evil collapses all of the layers of discourse those assumptions are based on.
• When Robin DiAngelo claims all white people are complicit in racism, her rhetoric constitutes the subject of whiteness, and we ought to remember that such a narrative “fill[s] in coherent unified subjects out of temporally and spatially separate events” (Charland 139).
  • DiAngelo and others espousing the inherent racism of white people present a Kafka trap fallacy: agreeing you’re racist supports the claims; denying you’re racist, supports the claim because, of course, you’d defend yourself–that’s the essence of white fragility
  • In her “workshops,” she rails against “color-blindness” and white people who claim “my ancestors never owned slaves,” but she gives no coherent argument for why a person who was not descended from those who actually perpetrated and profited from America’s “original sin” are to be blamed.
  • Only a rhetoric the essentializes whiteness can create an absolute about “whiteness.”
• Hofstadter, although he thinks intellectuals deserve to be seen as experts, points out how the elitism of intellectuals is a privileged position, which complicates the oppression tenured academics claim:
  • “[The intellectual] is the object of resentment because of an improvement, not a decline, in his fortunes….Intellect is resented as a form of power or privilege” (34)
  • “The common strain that binds together the attitudes and ideas which I call anti-intellectual is a resentment and suspicion of the life of the mind and of those who are considered to represent it” (7).

Conclusion: Abandon Shame

• • The push to identify guilt (whether on purpose or without being conscious) of assumed privileged or so-called dominant attributes has to stop

• • Be open to debate on these topics

• • Do not prefigure the conversation’s conclusion to support circular and teleological narratives undergirded by containment of constitutive rhetorics.
    • • It is extremely difficult to defend an absolute.
      • If you have an answer ready-made, you might not be listening.
      • Also, I need an assistant debate coach, and that’s a great quality!

• • Yes. Barack Obama being elected president is significant.
    • • And so is the backlash against his election–deal with the ambiguity as opposed to foisting the ready-made argument that ALL white people make advancement for so-called minorities impossible.

• • If you’re in the academy, you probably aren’t rich, but you have privilege.

---

Works Cited

• “Americans’ Confidence in Higher Education Down Sharply.” Gallup, 11 July 2023. https://news.gallup.com/poll/508352/americans-confidence-higher-education-down-sharply.aspx
• Asimov, Isaac. “Cult of Ignorance.” Newsweek, vol. 21, Jan 1980, 19.
• Charland, Maurice. “Constitutive Rhetoric: The Case of the Peuple Québécois.” Quarterly Journal of Speech, vol. 73, no. 2, 133-150, DOI: 10.1080/00335638709383799
• Hofstadter, Richard. Anti-intellectualism in American Life. Knopf, 1963.
• LoMonte, Frank. “Don’t Expect Professors to Get Fired When They Say Something You Don’t Like.” The Conversation, 7 May 2018. https://theconversation.com/dont-expect-professors-to-get-fired-when-they-say-something-you-dont-like-95984
• McEwen, Bill. “Fresno State’s Randa Jarrar Dragged Out of Event Featuring Big Bang Theory‘s Mayim Bialik.” GV Wire, 1 May 2024. https://gvwire.com/2024/05/01/fresno-states-randa-jarrar-dragged-out-of-event-featuring-big-bang-theorys-mayim-bialik/
• Poirot, Kristan. Domesticating the Liberated Woman: Containment Rhetorics of Second Wave Radical/Lesbian Feminism.” Women’s Studies in Communication, vol. 32, no. 3, 2009, 263-292.
• Rodriguez, Jesus. “Professor’s Anti-Barbara Bush Twitter Tirade Draws Ire.” The Free Speech Project, 29 June 2019. (Originally posted 30 April 2018) https://freespeechproject.georgetown.edu/tracker-entries/professors-anti-barbara-bush-twitter-tirade-draws-ire/
• Vivian, Bradford. The Roots of Anti-University Rhetoric. Inside Higher Ed, 13 June 2024. https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/views/2024/06/13/tracing-roots-anti-university-rhetoric-opinion
• White, James Boyd. Heracles’ Bow: Essays on the Rhetoric and Poetics of Law. U of Wisconsin P, 1985.

Pulitzer Prize winner, 1964

Traces the roots of anti-intellectualism to America’s Protestant founding

Comes out at the height of the Cold War when there is societal dis-ease about “the persistent strength of the Soviet Union, capped by the Sputnik and other triumphs in space, has given a rude shock to this confidence [of American superiority]” (44).

“…intellect is always on the move against something: some oppression, fraud, illusion, dogma, or interest is constantly falling under the scrutiny of the intellectual class and becoming the object of exposure, indignation, or ridicule” (45).

“The case against intellect is founded upon a set of fictional and wholly abstract antagonisms….[Intellect] is pitted against character, because it is widely believed that intellect stands for mere cleverness, which transmutes easily into the sly or the diabolical” (45-46).

Therefore, “Who cares…to pay deference to a type of man who at best is deemed to be merely clever and at worst may even be dangerous?” (46).

Isaac Asimov “The Cult of Ignorance”…

• One’s opinion (conviction) is as valid as an expert’s opinion
• If one doesn’t read, one can’t be informed; therefore, democracy is imperiled by uninformed voters

Rhetorical Grounding of the Presentation

Argumentation is lacking in scholarly discourse on rhetoric. The apparent need for consensus building leads to what could amount to citation circles. Instead of a “you cite me, I cite you,” a submission that doesn’t cite the appropriate scholars gets rejected.

• Well, what about the time honored tradition of showing that you’ve done your homework and are entering the conversation?
  • Good question: “entering the conversation” through citing the required scholars imposes a scope and/or appropriate area of focus.
  • If one has an alternative to the trajectory of the field, the editors* can reject the submission outright. *The type of rejection I’m discussing here isn’t post blind review but when the editor refuses to send out a submission for peer review because one isn’t reproducing the same argument.
  • Phrases like, “you must more effectively situate the piece with approved scholarship,” and “the article is rejected on the basis of its fit with the mission of the journal.”

Constitutive and Containment Rhetorics

• Constitutive rhetoric: “the art of constituting character, community, and culture in language” (White x).
  • Identity is discursively formed through narrative(s). Stories constitute groups to provide attributes, and I (Aaron) believe this attempts to establish essential features of an identity and, therefore, a subject.
  • “Narratives lead us to construct and fill in coherent unified subjects out of temporally and spatially separate events” (Charland 139).
  • “All narratives, as they create the illusion of merely revealing a unified and unproblematic subjectivity, are ideological, because they occult the importance of discourse, culture, and history in giving rise to subjectivity” (Charland 139).
• Containment rhetorics: originally an “attempt to tame the threat of alternative views through discipline and confinement, clearly articulating the other as outside of the dominant values and structures of U.S. culture” (Poirot 266).
  • Kristin Poirot, when discussing the types of competing feminisms, explains that “social movements themselves participate in modes of containment and/ or domestication” (267).
  • What is an appropriate “feminism,” “revolutionary,” and even “academic”?

Anti-Academic Discourse

There are many examples, but I like Bradford Vivian’s introduction on the topic:

Pundits and politicians feign surprise at polls that show sharply declining support for higher education. The source of this decline, however, is not mysterious. Over the past decade, both hyper-partisan and mainstream media have inundated the American public with caustic rhetoric about universities. We are ceaselessly told a dystopian tale. Radical students run college campuses through mob justice. Professors no longer teach, but merely indoctrinate. Administrators have eliminated freedom of thought and conscience via so-called witch trials and political tribunals. The tendency to blame universities for numerous civic failings using these fallacious platitudes has become one of the defining features of political discourse in our era. It is well past time to recognize where such toxic rhetoric originated and whose interests it serves. Conservatives have long argued that colleges are too liberal, pro-diversity measures are reverse racism and public education is too expensive. But the new anti-university rhetoric to which I refer is, in large part, not a product of domestic politics. Rather, it is the language of an international pro-authoritarian movement opposed to centers of learning that model liberal-democratic values.

There are plenty more examples, and I could talk about the idea of the value of a college education and the debt students go into, but that’s beyond the scope of this presentation.

Problematic Academic Discourse

We can point to many instances of faculty getting suspended and outright fired for comments after Charlie Kirk’s murder. I’d like us to go back April 17, 2018, when Randa Jarrar tweeted her glee of the passing of Barbara Bush:

• “Barbara Bush was a generous and smart and amazing racist who, along with her husband, raised a war criminal”
• “witch”
• “She also said she couldn’t wait for the rest of the Bush family to ‘fall to their demise the way 1.5 million [I]raqis have'” (Rodriguez)

To make matters, she mentioned her 6-figure salary being safe because she was a tenured Fresno State English Professor. And that was the last we heard of her… This is not a good look. Claiming to be pro-free speech but disrupting a talk is akin to censorship.

Back to the Nuance of Anti-Intellectualism

• Echo chamber of intellectual elites ostracizes many outside the academy
• Claiming whiteness is inherent privilege, men=patriarchy (toxic masculinity), and America/Western culture as the root of all evil collapses all of the layers of discourse those assumptions are based on.
• When Robin DiAngelo claims all white people are complicit in racism, her rhetoric constitutes the subject of whiteness, and we ought to remember that such a narrative “fill[s] in coherent unified subjects out of temporally and spatially separate events” (Charland 139).
  • DiAngelo and others espousing the inherent racism of white people present a Kafka trap fallacy: agreeing you’re racist supports the claims; denying you’re racist, supports the claim because, of course, you’d defend yourself–that’s the essence of white fragility
  • In her “workshops,” she rails against “color-blindness” and white people who claim “my ancestors never owned slaves,” but she gives no coherent argument for why a person who was not descended from those who actually perpetrated and profited from America’s “original sin” are to be blamed.
  • Only a rhetoric the essentializes whiteness can create an absolute about “whiteness.”
• Hofstadter, although he thinks intellectuals deserve to be seen as experts, points out how the elitism of intellectuals is a privileged position, which complicates the oppression tenured academics claim:
  • “[The intellectual] is the object of resentment because of an improvement, not a decline, in his fortunes….Intellect is resented as a form of power or privilege” (34)
  • “The common strain that binds together the attitudes and ideas which I call anti-intellectual is a resentment and suspicion of the life of the mind and of those who are considered to represent it” (7).

Conclusion: Abandon Shame

• • The push to identify guilt (whether on purpose or without being conscious) of assumed privileged or so-called dominant attributes has to stop

• • Be open to debate on these topics

• • Do not prefigure the conversation’s conclusion to support circular and teleological narratives undergirded by containment of constitutive rhetorics.
    • • It is extremely difficult to defend an absolute.
      • If you have an answer ready-made, you might not be listening.
      • Also, I need an assistant debate coach, and that’s a great quality!

• • Yes. Barack Obama being elected president is significant.
    • • And so is the backlash against his election–deal with the ambiguity as opposed to foisting the ready-made argument that ALL white people make advancement for so-called minorities impossible.

• • If you’re in the academy, you probably aren’t rich, but you have privilege.

---

Works Cited

• “Americans’ Confidence in Higher Education Down Sharply.” Gallup, 11 July 2023. https://news.gallup.com/poll/508352/americans-confidence-higher-education-down-sharply.aspx
• Asimov, Isaac. “Cult of Ignorance.” Newsweek, vol. 21, Jan 1980, 19.
• Charland, Maurice. “Constitutive Rhetoric: The Case of the Peuple Québécois.” Quarterly Journal of Speech, vol. 73, no. 2, 133-150, DOI: 10.1080/00335638709383799
• Hofstadter, Richard. Anti-intellectualism in American Life. Knopf, 1963.
• LoMonte, Frank. “Don’t Expect Professors to Get Fired When They Say Something You Don’t Like.” The Conversation, 7 May 2018. https://theconversation.com/dont-expect-professors-to-get-fired-when-they-say-something-you-dont-like-95984
• McEwen, Bill. “Fresno State’s Randa Jarrar Dragged Out of Event Featuring Big Bang Theory‘s Mayim Bialik.” GV Wire, 1 May 2024. https://gvwire.com/2024/05/01/fresno-states-randa-jarrar-dragged-out-of-event-featuring-big-bang-theorys-mayim-bialik/
• Poirot, Kristan. Domesticating the Liberated Woman: Containment Rhetorics of Second Wave Radical/Lesbian Feminism.” Women’s Studies in Communication, vol. 32, no. 3, 2009, 263-292.
• Rodriguez, Jesus. “Professor’s Anti-Barbara Bush Twitter Tirade Draws Ire.” The Free Speech Project, 29 June 2019. (Originally posted 30 April 2018) https://freespeechproject.georgetown.edu/tracker-entries/professors-anti-barbara-bush-twitter-tirade-draws-ire/
• Vivian, Bradford. The Roots of Anti-University Rhetoric. Inside Higher Ed, 13 June 2024. https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/views/2024/06/13/tracing-roots-anti-university-rhetoric-opinion
• White, James Boyd. Heracles’ Bow: Essays on the Rhetoric and Poetics of Law. U of Wisconsin P, 1985.

• Pulitzer Prize winner, 1964
• Traces the roots of anti-intellectualism to America’s Protestant founding
• Comes out at the height of the Cold War when there is societal dis-ease about “the persistent strength of the Soviet Union, capped by the Sputnik and other triumphs in space, has given a rude shock to this confidence [of American superiority]” (44).
• “…intellect is always on the move against something: some oppression, fraud, illusion, dogma, or interest is constantly falling under the scrutiny of the intellectual class and becoming the object of exposure, indignation, or ridicule” (45).
• “The case against intellect is founded upon a set of fictional and wholly abstract antagonisms….[Intellect] is pitted against character, because it is widely believed that intellect stands for mere cleverness, which transmutes easily into the sly or the diabolical” (45-46).
• Therefore, “Who cares…to pay deference to a type of man who at best is deemed to be merely clever and at worst may even be dangerous?” (46).

Isaac Asimov “The Cult of Ignorance”…

• One’s opinion (conviction) is as valid as an expert’s opinion
• If one doesn’t read, one can’t be informed; therefore, democracy is imperiled by uninformed voters

Rhetorical Grounding of the Presentation

Argumentation is lacking in scholarly discourse on rhetoric. The apparent need for consensus building leads to what could amount to citation circles. Instead of a “you cite me, I cite you,” a submission that doesn’t cite the appropriate scholars gets rejected.

• Well, what about the time honored tradition of showing that you’ve done your homework and are entering the conversation?
  • Good question: “entering the conversation” through citing the required scholars imposes a scope and/or appropriate area of focus.
  • If one has an alternative to the trajectory of the field, the editors* can reject the submission outright. *The type of rejection I’m discussing here isn’t post blind review but when the editor refuses to send out a submission for peer review because one isn’t reproducing the same argument.
  • Phrases like, “you must more effectively situate the piece with approved scholarship,” and “the article is rejected on the basis of its fit with the mission of the journal.”

Constitutive and Containment Rhetorics

• Constitutive rhetoric: “the art of constituting character, community, and culture in language” (White x).
  • Identity is discursively formed through narrative(s). Stories constitute groups to provide attributes, and I (Aaron) believe this attempts to establish essential features of an identity and, therefore, a subject.
  • “Narratives lead us to construct and fill in coherent unified subjects out of temporally and spatially separate events” (Charland 139).
  • “All narratives, as they create the illusion of merely revealing a unified and unproblematic subjectivity, are ideological, because they occult the importance of discourse, culture, and history in giving rise to subjectivity” (Charland 139).
• Containment rhetorics: originally an “attempt to tame the threat of alternative views through discipline and confinement, clearly articulating the other as outside of the dominant values and structures of U.S. culture” (Poirot 266).
  • Kristin Poirot, when discussing the types of competing feminisms, explains that “social movements themselves participate in modes of containment and/ or domestication” (267).
  • What is an appropriate “feminism,” “revolutionary,” and even “academic”?

Anti-Academic Discourse

There are many examples, but I like Bradford Vivian’s introduction on the topic:

Pundits and politicians feign surprise at polls that show sharply declining support for higher education. The source of this decline, however, is not mysterious. Over the past decade, both hyper-partisan and mainstream media have inundated the American public with caustic rhetoric about universities. We are ceaselessly told a dystopian tale. Radical students run college campuses through mob justice. Professors no longer teach, but merely indoctrinate. Administrators have eliminated freedom of thought and conscience via so-called witch trials and political tribunals. The tendency to blame universities for numerous civic failings using these fallacious platitudes has become one of the defining features of political discourse in our era. It is well past time to recognize where such toxic rhetoric originated and whose interests it serves. Conservatives have long argued that colleges are too liberal, pro-diversity measures are reverse racism and public education is too expensive. But the new anti-university rhetoric to which I refer is, in large part, not a product of domestic politics. Rather, it is the language of an international pro-authoritarian movement opposed to centers of learning that model liberal-democratic values.

There are plenty more examples, and I could talk about the idea of the value of a college education and the debt students go into, but that’s beyond the scope of this presentation.

Problematic Academic Discourse

We can point to many instances of faculty getting suspended and outright fired for comments after Charlie Kirk’s murder. I’d like us to go back April 17, 2018, when Randa Jarrar tweeted her glee of the passing of Barbara Bush:

• “Barbara Bush was a generous and smart and amazing racist who, along with her husband, raised a war criminal”
• “witch”
• “She also said she couldn’t wait for the rest of the Bush family to ‘fall to their demise the way 1.5 million [I]raqis have'” (Rodriguez)

To make matters, she mentioned her 6-figure salary being safe because she was a tenured Fresno State English Professor. And that was the last we heard of her… This is not a good look. Claiming to be pro-free speech but disrupting a talk is akin to censorship.

Back to the Nuance of Anti-Intellectualism

• Echo chamber of intellectual elites ostracizes many outside the academy
• Claiming whiteness is inherent privilege, men=patriarchy (toxic masculinity), and America/Western culture as the root of all evil collapses all of the layers of discourse those assumptions are based on.
• When Robin DiAngelo claims all white people are complicit in racism, her rhetoric constitutes the subject of whiteness, and we ought to remember that such a narrative “fill[s] in coherent unified subjects out of temporally and spatially separate events” (Charland 139).
  • DiAngelo and others espousing the inherent racism of white people present a Kafka trap fallacy: agreeing you’re racist supports the claims; denying you’re racist, supports the claim because, of course, you’d defend yourself–that’s the essence of white fragility
  • In her “workshops,” she rails against “color-blindness” and white people who claim “my ancestors never owned slaves,” but she gives no coherent argument for why a person who was not descended from those who actually perpetrated and profited from America’s “original sin” are to be blamed.
  • Only a rhetoric the essentializes whiteness can create an absolute about “whiteness.”
• Hofstadter, although he thinks intellectuals deserve to be seen as experts, points out how the elitism of intellectuals is a privileged position, which complicates the oppression tenured academics claim:
  • “[The intellectual] is the object of resentment because of an improvement, not a decline, in his fortunes….Intellect is resented as a form of power or privilege” (34)
  • “The common strain that binds together the attitudes and ideas which I call anti-intellectual is a resentment and suspicion of the life of the mind and of those who are considered to represent it” (7).

Conclusion: Abandon Shame

• • The push to identify guilt (whether on purpose or without being conscious) of assumed privileged or so-called dominant attributes has to stop

• • Be open to debate on these topics

• • Do not prefigure the conversation’s conclusion to support circular and teleological narratives undergirded by containment of constitutive rhetorics.
    • • It is extremely difficult to defend an absolute.
      • If you have an answer ready-made, you might not be listening.
      • Also, I need an assistant debate coach, and that’s a great quality!

• • Yes. Barack Obama being elected president is significant.
    • • And so is the backlash against his election–deal with the ambiguity as opposed to foisting the ready-made argument that ALL white people make advancement for so-called minorities impossible.

• • If you’re in the academy, you probably aren’t rich, but you have privilege.

---

Works Cited

• “Americans’ Confidence in Higher Education Down Sharply.” Gallup, 11 July 2023. https://news.gallup.com/poll/508352/americans-confidence-higher-education-down-sharply.aspx
• Asimov, Isaac. “Cult of Ignorance.” Newsweek, vol. 21, Jan 1980, 19.
• Charland, Maurice. “Constitutive Rhetoric: The Case of the Peuple Québécois.” Quarterly Journal of Speech, vol. 73, no. 2, 133-150, DOI: 10.1080/00335638709383799
• Hofstadter, Richard. Anti-intellectualism in American Life. Knopf, 1963.
• LoMonte, Frank. “Don’t Expect Professors to Get Fired When They Say Something You Don’t Like.” The Conversation, 7 May 2018. https://theconversation.com/dont-expect-professors-to-get-fired-when-they-say-something-you-dont-like-95984
• McEwen, Bill. “Fresno State’s Randa Jarrar Dragged Out of Event Featuring Big Bang Theory‘s Mayim Bialik.” GV Wire, 1 May 2024. https://gvwire.com/2024/05/01/fresno-states-randa-jarrar-dragged-out-of-event-featuring-big-bang-theorys-mayim-bialik/
• Poirot, Kristan. Domesticating the Liberated Woman: Containment Rhetorics of Second Wave Radical/Lesbian Feminism.” Women’s Studies in Communication, vol. 32, no. 3, 2009, 263-292.
• Rodriguez, Jesus. “Professor’s Anti-Barbara Bush Twitter Tirade Draws Ire.” The Free Speech Project, 29 June 2019. (Originally posted 30 April 2018) https://freespeechproject.georgetown.edu/tracker-entries/professors-anti-barbara-bush-twitter-tirade-draws-ire/
• Vivian, Bradford. The Roots of Anti-University Rhetoric. Inside Higher Ed, 13 June 2024. https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/views/2024/06/13/tracing-roots-anti-university-rhetoric-opinion
• White, James Boyd. Heracles’ Bow: Essays on the Rhetoric and Poetics of Law. U of Wisconsin P, 1985.

Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-intellectualism in American Life (1963)

• Pulitzer Prize winner, 1964
• Traces the roots of anti-intellectualism to America’s Protestant founding
• Comes out at the height of the Cold War when there is societal dis-ease about “the persistent strength of the Soviet Union, capped by the Sputnik and other triumphs in space, has given a rude shock to this confidence [of American superiority]” (44).
• “…intellect is always on the move against something: some oppression, fraud, illusion, dogma, or interest is constantly falling under the scrutiny of the intellectual class and becoming the object of exposure, indignation, or ridicule” (45).
• “The case against intellect is founded upon a set of fictional and wholly abstract antagonisms….[Intellect] is pitted against character, because it is widely believed that intellect stands for mere cleverness, which transmutes easily into the sly or the diabolical” (45-46).
• Therefore, “Who cares…to pay deference to a type of man who at best is deemed to be merely clever and at worst may even be dangerous?” (46).

Isaac Asimov “The Cult of Ignorance”…

• One’s opinion (conviction) is as valid as an expert’s opinion
• If one doesn’t read, one can’t be informed; therefore, democracy is imperiled by uninformed voters

Rhetorical Grounding of the Presentation

Argumentation is lacking in scholarly discourse on rhetoric. The apparent need for consensus building leads to what could amount to citation circles. Instead of a “you cite me, I cite you,” a submission that doesn’t cite the appropriate scholars gets rejected.

• Well, what about the time honored tradition of showing that you’ve done your homework and are entering the conversation?
  • Good question: “entering the conversation” through citing the required scholars imposes a scope and/or appropriate area of focus.
  • If one has an alternative to the trajectory of the field, the editors* can reject the submission outright. *The type of rejection I’m discussing here isn’t post blind review but when the editor refuses to send out a submission for peer review because one isn’t reproducing the same argument.
  • Phrases like, “you must more effectively situate the piece with approved scholarship,” and “the article is rejected on the basis of its fit with the mission of the journal.”

Constitutive and Containment Rhetorics

• Constitutive rhetoric: “the art of constituting character, community, and culture in language” (White x).
  • Identity is discursively formed through narrative(s). Stories constitute groups to provide attributes, and I (Aaron) believe this attempts to establish essential features of an identity and, therefore, a subject.
  • “Narratives lead us to construct and fill in coherent unified subjects out of temporally and spatially separate events” (Charland 139).
  • “All narratives, as they create the illusion of merely revealing a unified and unproblematic subjectivity, are ideological, because they occult the importance of discourse, culture, and history in giving rise to subjectivity” (Charland 139).
• Containment rhetorics: originally an “attempt to tame the threat of alternative views through discipline and confinement, clearly articulating the other as outside of the dominant values and structures of U.S. culture” (Poirot 266).
  • Kristin Poirot, when discussing the types of competing feminisms, explains that “social movements themselves participate in modes of containment and/ or domestication” (267).
  • What is an appropriate “feminism,” “revolutionary,” and even “academic”?

Anti-Academic Discourse

There are many examples, but I like Bradford Vivian’s introduction on the topic:

Pundits and politicians feign surprise at polls that show sharply declining support for higher education. The source of this decline, however, is not mysterious. Over the past decade, both hyper-partisan and mainstream media have inundated the American public with caustic rhetoric about universities. We are ceaselessly told a dystopian tale. Radical students run college campuses through mob justice. Professors no longer teach, but merely indoctrinate. Administrators have eliminated freedom of thought and conscience via so-called witch trials and political tribunals. The tendency to blame universities for numerous civic failings using these fallacious platitudes has become one of the defining features of political discourse in our era. It is well past time to recognize where such toxic rhetoric originated and whose interests it serves. Conservatives have long argued that colleges are too liberal, pro-diversity measures are reverse racism and public education is too expensive. But the new anti-university rhetoric to which I refer is, in large part, not a product of domestic politics. Rather, it is the language of an international pro-authoritarian movement opposed to centers of learning that model liberal-democratic values.

There are plenty more examples, and I could talk about the idea of the value of a college education and the debt students go into, but that’s beyond the scope of this presentation.

Problematic Academic Discourse

We can point to many instances of faculty getting suspended and outright fired for comments after Charlie Kirk’s murder. I’d like us to go back April 17, 2018, when Randa Jarrar tweeted her glee of the passing of Barbara Bush:

• “Barbara Bush was a generous and smart and amazing racist who, along with her husband, raised a war criminal”
• “witch”
• “She also said she couldn’t wait for the rest of the Bush family to ‘fall to their demise the way 1.5 million [I]raqis have'” (Rodriguez)

To make matters, she mentioned her 6-figure salary being safe because she was a tenured Fresno State English Professor. And that was the last we heard of her… This is not a good look. Claiming to be pro-free speech but disrupting a talk is akin to censorship.

Back to the Nuance of Anti-Intellectualism

• Echo chamber of intellectual elites ostracizes many outside the academy
• Claiming whiteness is inherent privilege, men=patriarchy (toxic masculinity), and America/Western culture as the root of all evil collapses all of the layers of discourse those assumptions are based on.
• When Robin DiAngelo claims all white people are complicit in racism, her rhetoric constitutes the subject of whiteness, and we ought to remember that such a narrative “fill[s] in coherent unified subjects out of temporally and spatially separate events” (Charland 139).
  • DiAngelo and others espousing the inherent racism of white people present a Kafka trap fallacy: agreeing you’re racist supports the claims; denying you’re racist, supports the claim because, of course, you’d defend yourself–that’s the essence of white fragility
  • In her “workshops,” she rails against “color-blindness” and white people who claim “my ancestors never owned slaves,” but she gives no coherent argument for why a person who was not descended from those who actually perpetrated and profited from America’s “original sin” are to be blamed.
  • Only a rhetoric the essentializes whiteness can create an absolute about “whiteness.”
• Hofstadter, although he thinks intellectuals deserve to be seen as experts, points out how the elitism of intellectuals is a privileged position, which complicates the oppression tenured academics claim:
  • “[The intellectual] is the object of resentment because of an improvement, not a decline, in his fortunes….Intellect is resented as a form of power or privilege” (34)
  • “The common strain that binds together the attitudes and ideas which I call anti-intellectual is a resentment and suspicion of the life of the mind and of those who are considered to represent it” (7).

Conclusion: Abandon Shame

• • The push to identify guilt (whether on purpose or without being conscious) of assumed privileged or so-called dominant attributes has to stop

• • Be open to debate on these topics

• • Do not prefigure the conversation’s conclusion to support circular and teleological narratives undergirded by containment of constitutive rhetorics.
    • • It is extremely difficult to defend an absolute.
      • If you have an answer ready-made, you might not be listening.
      • Also, I need an assistant debate coach, and that’s a great quality!

• • Yes. Barack Obama being elected president is significant.
    • • And so is the backlash against his election–deal with the ambiguity as opposed to foisting the ready-made argument that ALL white people make advancement for so-called minorities impossible.

• • If you’re in the academy, you probably aren’t rich, but you have privilege.

---

Works Cited

• “Americans’ Confidence in Higher Education Down Sharply.” Gallup, 11 July 2023. https://news.gallup.com/poll/508352/americans-confidence-higher-education-down-sharply.aspx
• Asimov, Isaac. “Cult of Ignorance.” Newsweek, vol. 21, Jan 1980, 19.
• Charland, Maurice. “Constitutive Rhetoric: The Case of the Peuple Québécois.” Quarterly Journal of Speech, vol. 73, no. 2, 133-150, DOI: 10.1080/00335638709383799
• Hofstadter, Richard. Anti-intellectualism in American Life. Knopf, 1963.
• LoMonte, Frank. “Don’t Expect Professors to Get Fired When They Say Something You Don’t Like.” The Conversation, 7 May 2018. https://theconversation.com/dont-expect-professors-to-get-fired-when-they-say-something-you-dont-like-95984
• McEwen, Bill. “Fresno State’s Randa Jarrar Dragged Out of Event Featuring Big Bang Theory‘s Mayim Bialik.” GV Wire, 1 May 2024. https://gvwire.com/2024/05/01/fresno-states-randa-jarrar-dragged-out-of-event-featuring-big-bang-theorys-mayim-bialik/
• Poirot, Kristan. Domesticating the Liberated Woman: Containment Rhetorics of Second Wave Radical/Lesbian Feminism.” Women’s Studies in Communication, vol. 32, no. 3, 2009, 263-292.
• Rodriguez, Jesus. “Professor’s Anti-Barbara Bush Twitter Tirade Draws Ire.” The Free Speech Project, 29 June 2019. (Originally posted 30 April 2018) https://freespeechproject.georgetown.edu/tracker-entries/professors-anti-barbara-bush-twitter-tirade-draws-ire/
• Vivian, Bradford. The Roots of Anti-University Rhetoric. Inside Higher Ed, 13 June 2024. https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/views/2024/06/13/tracing-roots-anti-university-rhetoric-opinion
• White, James Boyd. Heracles’ Bow: Essays on the Rhetoric and Poetics of Law. U of Wisconsin P, 1985.

• Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-intellectualism in American Life (1963)
  • Pulitzer Prize winner, 1964
  • Traces the roots of anti-intellectualism to America’s Protestant founding
  • Comes out at the height of the Cold War when there is societal dis-ease about “the persistent strength of the Soviet Union, capped by the Sputnik and other triumphs in space, has given a rude shock to this confidence [of American superiority]” (44).
  • “…intellect is always on the move against something: some oppression, fraud, illusion, dogma, or interest is constantly falling under the scrutiny of the intellectual class and becoming the object of exposure, indignation, or ridicule” (45).
  • “The case against intellect is founded upon a set of fictional and wholly abstract antagonisms….[Intellect] is pitted against character, because it is widely believed that intellect stands for mere cleverness, which transmutes easily into the sly or the diabolical” (45-46).
  • Therefore, “Who cares…to pay deference to a type of man who at best is deemed to be merely clever and at worst may even be dangerous?” (46).
• Isaac Asimov “The Cult of Ignorance”…
  • One’s opinion (conviction) is as valid as an expert’s opinion
  • If one doesn’t read, one can’t be informed; therefore, democracy is imperiled by uninformed voters

Rhetorical Grounding of the Presentation

Argumentation is lacking in scholarly discourse on rhetoric. The apparent need for consensus building leads to what could amount to citation circles. Instead of a “you cite me, I cite you,” a submission that doesn’t cite the appropriate scholars gets rejected.

• Well, what about the time honored tradition of showing that you’ve done your homework and are entering the conversation?
  • Good question: “entering the conversation” through citing the required scholars imposes a scope and/or appropriate area of focus.
  • If one has an alternative to the trajectory of the field, the editors* can reject the submission outright. *The type of rejection I’m discussing here isn’t post blind review but when the editor refuses to send out a submission for peer review because one isn’t reproducing the same argument.
  • Phrases like, “you must more effectively situate the piece with approved scholarship,” and “the article is rejected on the basis of its fit with the mission of the journal.”

Constitutive and Containment Rhetorics

• Constitutive rhetoric: “the art of constituting character, community, and culture in language” (White x).
  • Identity is discursively formed through narrative(s). Stories constitute groups to provide attributes, and I (Aaron) believe this attempts to establish essential features of an identity and, therefore, a subject.
  • “Narratives lead us to construct and fill in coherent unified subjects out of temporally and spatially separate events” (Charland 139).
  • “All narratives, as they create the illusion of merely revealing a unified and unproblematic subjectivity, are ideological, because they occult the importance of discourse, culture, and history in giving rise to subjectivity” (Charland 139).
• Containment rhetorics: originally an “attempt to tame the threat of alternative views through discipline and confinement, clearly articulating the other as outside of the dominant values and structures of U.S. culture” (Poirot 266).
  • Kristin Poirot, when discussing the types of competing feminisms, explains that “social movements themselves participate in modes of containment and/ or domestication” (267).
  • What is an appropriate “feminism,” “revolutionary,” and even “academic”?

Anti-Academic Discourse

There are many examples, but I like Bradford Vivian’s introduction on the topic:

Pundits and politicians feign surprise at polls that show sharply declining support for higher education. The source of this decline, however, is not mysterious. Over the past decade, both hyper-partisan and mainstream media have inundated the American public with caustic rhetoric about universities. We are ceaselessly told a dystopian tale. Radical students run college campuses through mob justice. Professors no longer teach, but merely indoctrinate. Administrators have eliminated freedom of thought and conscience via so-called witch trials and political tribunals. The tendency to blame universities for numerous civic failings using these fallacious platitudes has become one of the defining features of political discourse in our era. It is well past time to recognize where such toxic rhetoric originated and whose interests it serves. Conservatives have long argued that colleges are too liberal, pro-diversity measures are reverse racism and public education is too expensive. But the new anti-university rhetoric to which I refer is, in large part, not a product of domestic politics. Rather, it is the language of an international pro-authoritarian movement opposed to centers of learning that model liberal-democratic values.

There are plenty more examples, and I could talk about the idea of the value of a college education and the debt students go into, but that’s beyond the scope of this presentation.

Problematic Academic Discourse

We can point to many instances of faculty getting suspended and outright fired for comments after Charlie Kirk’s murder. I’d like us to go back April 17, 2018, when Randa Jarrar tweeted her glee of the passing of Barbara Bush:

• “Barbara Bush was a generous and smart and amazing racist who, along with her husband, raised a war criminal”
• “witch”
• “She also said she couldn’t wait for the rest of the Bush family to ‘fall to their demise the way 1.5 million [I]raqis have'” (Rodriguez)

To make matters, she mentioned her 6-figure salary being safe because she was a tenured Fresno State English Professor. And that was the last we heard of her… This is not a good look. Claiming to be pro-free speech but disrupting a talk is akin to censorship.

Back to the Nuance of Anti-Intellectualism

• Echo chamber of intellectual elites ostracizes many outside the academy
• Claiming whiteness is inherent privilege, men=patriarchy (toxic masculinity), and America/Western culture as the root of all evil collapses all of the layers of discourse those assumptions are based on.
• When Robin DiAngelo claims all white people are complicit in racism, her rhetoric constitutes the subject of whiteness, and we ought to remember that such a narrative “fill[s] in coherent unified subjects out of temporally and spatially separate events” (Charland 139).
  • DiAngelo and others espousing the inherent racism of white people present a Kafka trap fallacy: agreeing you’re racist supports the claims; denying you’re racist, supports the claim because, of course, you’d defend yourself–that’s the essence of white fragility
  • In her “workshops,” she rails against “color-blindness” and white people who claim “my ancestors never owned slaves,” but she gives no coherent argument for why a person who was not descended from those who actually perpetrated and profited from America’s “original sin” are to be blamed.
  • Only a rhetoric the essentializes whiteness can create an absolute about “whiteness.”
• Hofstadter, although he thinks intellectuals deserve to be seen as experts, points out how the elitism of intellectuals is a privileged position, which complicates the oppression tenured academics claim:
  • “[The intellectual] is the object of resentment because of an improvement, not a decline, in his fortunes….Intellect is resented as a form of power or privilege” (34)
  • “The common strain that binds together the attitudes and ideas which I call anti-intellectual is a resentment and suspicion of the life of the mind and of those who are considered to represent it” (7).

Conclusion: Abandon Shame

• • The push to identify guilt (whether on purpose or without being conscious) of assumed privileged or so-called dominant attributes has to stop

• • Be open to debate on these topics

• • Do not prefigure the conversation’s conclusion to support circular and teleological narratives undergirded by containment of constitutive rhetorics.
    • • It is extremely difficult to defend an absolute.
      • If you have an answer ready-made, you might not be listening.
      • Also, I need an assistant debate coach, and that’s a great quality!

• • Yes. Barack Obama being elected president is significant.
    • • And so is the backlash against his election–deal with the ambiguity as opposed to foisting the ready-made argument that ALL white people make advancement for so-called minorities impossible.

• • If you’re in the academy, you probably aren’t rich, but you have privilege.

---

Works Cited

• “Americans’ Confidence in Higher Education Down Sharply.” Gallup, 11 July 2023. https://news.gallup.com/poll/508352/americans-confidence-higher-education-down-sharply.aspx
• Asimov, Isaac. “Cult of Ignorance.” Newsweek, vol. 21, Jan 1980, 19.
• Charland, Maurice. “Constitutive Rhetoric: The Case of the Peuple Québécois.” Quarterly Journal of Speech, vol. 73, no. 2, 133-150, DOI: 10.1080/00335638709383799
• Hofstadter, Richard. Anti-intellectualism in American Life. Knopf, 1963.
• LoMonte, Frank. “Don’t Expect Professors to Get Fired When They Say Something You Don’t Like.” The Conversation, 7 May 2018. https://theconversation.com/dont-expect-professors-to-get-fired-when-they-say-something-you-dont-like-95984
• McEwen, Bill. “Fresno State’s Randa Jarrar Dragged Out of Event Featuring Big Bang Theory‘s Mayim Bialik.” GV Wire, 1 May 2024. https://gvwire.com/2024/05/01/fresno-states-randa-jarrar-dragged-out-of-event-featuring-big-bang-theorys-mayim-bialik/
• Poirot, Kristan. Domesticating the Liberated Woman: Containment Rhetorics of Second Wave Radical/Lesbian Feminism.” Women’s Studies in Communication, vol. 32, no. 3, 2009, 263-292.
• Rodriguez, Jesus. “Professor’s Anti-Barbara Bush Twitter Tirade Draws Ire.” The Free Speech Project, 29 June 2019. (Originally posted 30 April 2018) https://freespeechproject.georgetown.edu/tracker-entries/professors-anti-barbara-bush-twitter-tirade-draws-ire/
• Vivian, Bradford. The Roots of Anti-University Rhetoric. Inside Higher Ed, 13 June 2024. https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/views/2024/06/13/tracing-roots-anti-university-rhetoric-opinion
• White, James Boyd. Heracles’ Bow: Essays on the Rhetoric and Poetics of Law. U of Wisconsin P, 1985.

• Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-intellectualism in American Life (1963)
  • Pulitzer Prize winner, 1964
  • Traces the roots of anti-intellectualism to America’s Protestant founding
  • Comes out at the height of the Cold War when there is societal dis-ease about “the persistent strength of the Soviet Union, capped by the Sputnik and other triumphs in space, has given a rude shock to this confidence [of American superiority]” (44).
  • “…intellect is always on the move against something: some oppression, fraud, illusion, dogma, or interest is constantly falling under the scrutiny of the intellectual class and becoming the object of exposure, indignation, or ridicule” (45).
  • “The case against intellect is founded upon a set of fictional and wholly abstract antagonisms….[Intellect] is pitted against character, because it is widely believed that intellect stands for mere cleverness, which transmutes easily into the sly or the diabolical” (45-46).
  • Therefore, “Who cares…to pay deference to a type of man who at best is deemed to be merely clever and at worst may even be dangerous?” (46).
• Isaac Asimov “The Cult of Ignorance”…
  • One’s opinion (conviction) is as valid as an expert’s opinion
  • If one doesn’t read, one can’t be informed; therefore, democracy is imperiled by uninformed voters

Rhetorical Grounding of the Presentation

Argumentation is lacking in scholarly discourse on rhetoric. The apparent need for consensus building leads to what could amount to citation circles. Instead of a “you cite me, I cite you,” a submission that doesn’t cite the appropriate scholars gets rejected.

• Well, what about the time honored tradition of showing that you’ve done your homework and are entering the conversation?
  • Good question: “entering the conversation” through citing the required scholars imposes a scope and/or appropriate area of focus.
  • If one has an alternative to the trajectory of the field, the editors* can reject the submission outright. *The type of rejection I’m discussing here isn’t post blind review but when the editor refuses to send out a submission for peer review because one isn’t reproducing the same argument.
  • Phrases like, “you must more effectively situate the piece with approved scholarship,” and “the article is rejected on the basis of its fit with the mission of the journal.”

Constitutive and Containment Rhetorics

• Constitutive rhetoric: “the art of constituting character, community, and culture in language” (White x).
  • Identity is discursively formed through narrative(s). Stories constitute groups to provide attributes, and I (Aaron) believe this attempts to establish essential features of an identity and, therefore, a subject.
  • “Narratives lead us to construct and fill in coherent unified subjects out of temporally and spatially separate events” (Charland 139).
  • “All narratives, as they create the illusion of merely revealing a unified and unproblematic subjectivity, are ideological, because they occult the importance of discourse, culture, and history in giving rise to subjectivity” (Charland 139).
• Containment rhetorics: originally an “attempt to tame the threat of alternative views through discipline and confinement, clearly articulating the other as outside of the dominant values and structures of U.S. culture” (Poirot 266).
  • Kristin Poirot, when discussing the types of competing feminisms, explains that “social movements themselves participate in modes of containment and/ or domestication” (267).
  • What is an appropriate “feminism,” “revolutionary,” and even “academic”?

Anti-Academic Discourse

There are many examples, but I like Bradford Vivian’s introduction on the topic:

Pundits and politicians feign surprise at polls that show sharply declining support for higher education. The source of this decline, however, is not mysterious. Over the past decade, both hyper-partisan and mainstream media have inundated the American public with caustic rhetoric about universities. We are ceaselessly told a dystopian tale. Radical students run college campuses through mob justice. Professors no longer teach, but merely indoctrinate. Administrators have eliminated freedom of thought and conscience via so-called witch trials and political tribunals. The tendency to blame universities for numerous civic failings using these fallacious platitudes has become one of the defining features of political discourse in our era. It is well past time to recognize where such toxic rhetoric originated and whose interests it serves. Conservatives have long argued that colleges are too liberal, pro-diversity measures are reverse racism and public education is too expensive. But the new anti-university rhetoric to which I refer is, in large part, not a product of domestic politics. Rather, it is the language of an international pro-authoritarian movement opposed to centers of learning that model liberal-democratic values.

There are plenty more examples, and I could talk about the idea of the value of a college education and the debt students go into, but that’s beyond the scope of this presentation.

Problematic Academic Discourse

We can point to many instances of faculty getting suspended and outright fired for comments after Charlie Kirk’s murder. I’d like us to go back April 17, 2018, when Randa Jarrar tweeted her glee of the passing of Barbara Bush:

• “Barbara Bush was a generous and smart and amazing racist who, along with her husband, raised a war criminal”
• “witch”
• “She also said she couldn’t wait for the rest of the Bush family to ‘fall to their demise the way 1.5 million [I]raqis have'” (Rodriguez)

To make matters, she mentioned her 6-figure salary being safe because she was a tenured Fresno State English Professor. And that was the last we heard of her… This is not a good look. Claiming to be pro-free speech but disrupting a talk is akin to censorship.

Back to the Nuance of Anti-Intellectualism

• Echo chamber of intellectual elites ostracizes many outside the academy
• Claiming whiteness is inherent privilege, men=patriarchy (toxic masculinity), and America/Western culture as the root of all evil collapses all of the layers of discourse those assumptions are based on.
• When Robin DiAngelo claims all white people are complicit in racism, her rhetoric constitutes the subject of whiteness, and we ought to remember that such a narrative “fill[s] in coherent unified subjects out of temporally and spatially separate events” (Charland 139).
  • DiAngelo and others espousing the inherent racism of white people present a Kafka trap fallacy: agreeing you’re racist supports the claims; denying you’re racist, supports the claim because, of course, you’d defend yourself–that’s the essence of white fragility
  • In her “workshops,” she rails against “color-blindness” and white people who claim “my ancestors never owned slaves,” but she gives no coherent argument for why a person who was not descended from those who actually perpetrated and profited from America’s “original sin” are to be blamed.
  • Only a rhetoric the essentializes whiteness can create an absolute about “whiteness.”
• Hofstadter, although he thinks intellectuals deserve to be seen as experts, points out how the elitism of intellectuals is a privileged position, which complicates the oppression tenured academics claim:
  • “[The intellectual] is the object of resentment because of an improvement, not a decline, in his fortunes….Intellect is resented as a form of power or privilege” (34)
  • “The common strain that binds together the attitudes and ideas which I call anti-intellectual is a resentment and suspicion of the life of the mind and of those who are considered to represent it” (7).

Conclusion: Abandon Shame

• • The push to identify guilt (whether on purpose or without being conscious) of assumed privileged or so-called dominant attributes has to stop

• • Be open to debate on these topics

• • Do not prefigure the conversation’s conclusion to support circular and teleological narratives undergirded by containment of constitutive rhetorics.
    • • It is extremely difficult to defend an absolute.
      • If you have an answer ready-made, you might not be listening.
      • Also, I need an assistant debate coach, and that’s a great quality!

• • Yes. Barack Obama being elected president is significant.
    • • And so is the backlash against his election–deal with the ambiguity as opposed to foisting the ready-made argument that ALL white people make advancement for so-called minorities impossible.

• • If you’re in the academy, you probably aren’t rich, but you have privilege.

---

Works Cited

• “Americans’ Confidence in Higher Education Down Sharply.” Gallup, 11 July 2023. https://news.gallup.com/poll/508352/americans-confidence-higher-education-down-sharply.aspx
• Asimov, Isaac. “Cult of Ignorance.” Newsweek, vol. 21, Jan 1980, 19.
• Charland, Maurice. “Constitutive Rhetoric: The Case of the Peuple Québécois.” Quarterly Journal of Speech, vol. 73, no. 2, 133-150, DOI: 10.1080/00335638709383799
• Hofstadter, Richard. Anti-intellectualism in American Life. Knopf, 1963.
• LoMonte, Frank. “Don’t Expect Professors to Get Fired When They Say Something You Don’t Like.” The Conversation, 7 May 2018. https://theconversation.com/dont-expect-professors-to-get-fired-when-they-say-something-you-dont-like-95984
• McEwen, Bill. “Fresno State’s Randa Jarrar Dragged Out of Event Featuring Big Bang Theory‘s Mayim Bialik.” GV Wire, 1 May 2024. https://gvwire.com/2024/05/01/fresno-states-randa-jarrar-dragged-out-of-event-featuring-big-bang-theorys-mayim-bialik/
• Poirot, Kristan. Domesticating the Liberated Woman: Containment Rhetorics of Second Wave Radical/Lesbian Feminism.” Women’s Studies in Communication, vol. 32, no. 3, 2009, 263-292.
• Rodriguez, Jesus. “Professor’s Anti-Barbara Bush Twitter Tirade Draws Ire.” The Free Speech Project, 29 June 2019. (Originally posted 30 April 2018) https://freespeechproject.georgetown.edu/tracker-entries/professors-anti-barbara-bush-twitter-tirade-draws-ire/
• Vivian, Bradford. The Roots of Anti-University Rhetoric. Inside Higher Ed, 13 June 2024. https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/views/2024/06/13/tracing-roots-anti-university-rhetoric-opinion
• White, James Boyd. Heracles’ Bow: Essays on the Rhetoric and Poetics of Law. U of Wisconsin P, 1985.

Scope of the Presentation

• • Brief discussion of anti-intellectualism
  • Rhetorical Theory
    • The ethos/credibility of the academy
    • Constitutive and Containment Rhetorics

• • Anti-Academic Discourse
  • Academic Discourse that doesn’t do us any favors

• • Conclusion: Abandon shame

Anti-intellectualism

• Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-intellectualism in American Life (1963)
  • Pulitzer Prize winner, 1964
  • Traces the roots of anti-intellectualism to America’s Protestant founding
  • Comes out at the height of the Cold War when there is societal dis-ease about “the persistent strength of the Soviet Union, capped by the Sputnik and other triumphs in space, has given a rude shock to this confidence [of American superiority]” (44).
  • “…intellect is always on the move against something: some oppression, fraud, illusion, dogma, or interest is constantly falling under the scrutiny of the intellectual class and becoming the object of exposure, indignation, or ridicule” (45).
  • “The case against intellect is founded upon a set of fictional and wholly abstract antagonisms….[Intellect] is pitted against character, because it is widely believed that intellect stands for mere cleverness, which transmutes easily into the sly or the diabolical” (45-46).
  • Therefore, “Who cares…to pay deference to a type of man who at best is deemed to be merely clever and at worst may even be dangerous?” (46).
• Isaac Asimov “The Cult of Ignorance”…
  • One’s opinion (conviction) is as valid as an expert’s opinion
  • If one doesn’t read, one can’t be informed; therefore, democracy is imperiled by uninformed voters

Rhetorical Grounding of the Presentation

Argumentation is lacking in scholarly discourse on rhetoric. The apparent need for consensus building leads to what could amount to citation circles. Instead of a “you cite me, I cite you,” a submission that doesn’t cite the appropriate scholars gets rejected.

• Well, what about the time honored tradition of showing that you’ve done your homework and are entering the conversation?
  • Good question: “entering the conversation” through citing the required scholars imposes a scope and/or appropriate area of focus.
  • If one has an alternative to the trajectory of the field, the editors* can reject the submission outright. *The type of rejection I’m discussing here isn’t post blind review but when the editor refuses to send out a submission for peer review because one isn’t reproducing the same argument.
  • Phrases like, “you must more effectively situate the piece with approved scholarship,” and “the article is rejected on the basis of its fit with the mission of the journal.”

Constitutive and Containment Rhetorics

• Constitutive rhetoric: “the art of constituting character, community, and culture in language” (White x).
  • Identity is discursively formed through narrative(s). Stories constitute groups to provide attributes, and I (Aaron) believe this attempts to establish essential features of an identity and, therefore, a subject.
  • “Narratives lead us to construct and fill in coherent unified subjects out of temporally and spatially separate events” (Charland 139).
  • “All narratives, as they create the illusion of merely revealing a unified and unproblematic subjectivity, are ideological, because they occult the importance of discourse, culture, and history in giving rise to subjectivity” (Charland 139).
• Containment rhetorics: originally an “attempt to tame the threat of alternative views through discipline and confinement, clearly articulating the other as outside of the dominant values and structures of U.S. culture” (Poirot 266).
  • Kristin Poirot, when discussing the types of competing feminisms, explains that “social movements themselves participate in modes of containment and/ or domestication” (267).
  • What is an appropriate “feminism,” “revolutionary,” and even “academic”?

Anti-Academic Discourse

There are many examples, but I like Bradford Vivian’s introduction on the topic:

Pundits and politicians feign surprise at polls that show sharply declining support for higher education. The source of this decline, however, is not mysterious. Over the past decade, both hyper-partisan and mainstream media have inundated the American public with caustic rhetoric about universities. We are ceaselessly told a dystopian tale. Radical students run college campuses through mob justice. Professors no longer teach, but merely indoctrinate. Administrators have eliminated freedom of thought and conscience via so-called witch trials and political tribunals. The tendency to blame universities for numerous civic failings using these fallacious platitudes has become one of the defining features of political discourse in our era. It is well past time to recognize where such toxic rhetoric originated and whose interests it serves. Conservatives have long argued that colleges are too liberal, pro-diversity measures are reverse racism and public education is too expensive. But the new anti-university rhetoric to which I refer is, in large part, not a product of domestic politics. Rather, it is the language of an international pro-authoritarian movement opposed to centers of learning that model liberal-democratic values.

There are plenty more examples, and I could talk about the idea of the value of a college education and the debt students go into, but that’s beyond the scope of this presentation.

Problematic Academic Discourse

We can point to many instances of faculty getting suspended and outright fired for comments after Charlie Kirk’s murder. I’d like us to go back April 17, 2018, when Randa Jarrar tweeted her glee of the passing of Barbara Bush:

• “Barbara Bush was a generous and smart and amazing racist who, along with her husband, raised a war criminal”
• “witch”
• “She also said she couldn’t wait for the rest of the Bush family to ‘fall to their demise the way 1.5 million [I]raqis have'” (Rodriguez)

To make matters, she mentioned her 6-figure salary being safe because she was a tenured Fresno State English Professor. And that was the last we heard of her… This is not a good look. Claiming to be pro-free speech but disrupting a talk is akin to censorship.

Back to the Nuance of Anti-Intellectualism

• Echo chamber of intellectual elites ostracizes many outside the academy
• Claiming whiteness is inherent privilege, men=patriarchy (toxic masculinity), and America/Western culture as the root of all evil collapses all of the layers of discourse those assumptions are based on.
• When Robin DiAngelo claims all white people are complicit in racism, her rhetoric constitutes the subject of whiteness, and we ought to remember that such a narrative “fill[s] in coherent unified subjects out of temporally and spatially separate events” (Charland 139).
  • DiAngelo and others espousing the inherent racism of white people present a Kafka trap fallacy: agreeing you’re racist supports the claims; denying you’re racist, supports the claim because, of course, you’d defend yourself–that’s the essence of white fragility
  • In her “workshops,” she rails against “color-blindness” and white people who claim “my ancestors never owned slaves,” but she gives no coherent argument for why a person who was not descended from those who actually perpetrated and profited from America’s “original sin” are to be blamed.
  • Only a rhetoric the essentializes whiteness can create an absolute about “whiteness.”
• Hofstadter, although he thinks intellectuals deserve to be seen as experts, points out how the elitism of intellectuals is a privileged position, which complicates the oppression tenured academics claim:
  • “[The intellectual] is the object of resentment because of an improvement, not a decline, in his fortunes….Intellect is resented as a form of power or privilege” (34)
  • “The common strain that binds together the attitudes and ideas which I call anti-intellectual is a resentment and suspicion of the life of the mind and of those who are considered to represent it” (7).

Conclusion: Abandon Shame

• • The push to identify guilt (whether on purpose or without being conscious) of assumed privileged or so-called dominant attributes has to stop

• • Be open to debate on these topics

• • Do not prefigure the conversation’s conclusion to support circular and teleological narratives undergirded by containment of constitutive rhetorics.
    • • It is extremely difficult to defend an absolute.
      • If you have an answer ready-made, you might not be listening.
      • Also, I need an assistant debate coach, and that’s a great quality!

• • Yes. Barack Obama being elected president is significant.
    • • And so is the backlash against his election–deal with the ambiguity as opposed to foisting the ready-made argument that ALL white people make advancement for so-called minorities impossible.

• • If you’re in the academy, you probably aren’t rich, but you have privilege.

---

Works Cited

• “Americans’ Confidence in Higher Education Down Sharply.” Gallup, 11 July 2023. https://news.gallup.com/poll/508352/americans-confidence-higher-education-down-sharply.aspx
• Asimov, Isaac. “Cult of Ignorance.” Newsweek, vol. 21, Jan 1980, 19.
• Charland, Maurice. “Constitutive Rhetoric: The Case of the Peuple Québécois.” Quarterly Journal of Speech, vol. 73, no. 2, 133-150, DOI: 10.1080/00335638709383799
• Hofstadter, Richard. Anti-intellectualism in American Life. Knopf, 1963.
• LoMonte, Frank. “Don’t Expect Professors to Get Fired When They Say Something You Don’t Like.” The Conversation, 7 May 2018. https://theconversation.com/dont-expect-professors-to-get-fired-when-they-say-something-you-dont-like-95984
• McEwen, Bill. “Fresno State’s Randa Jarrar Dragged Out of Event Featuring Big Bang Theory‘s Mayim Bialik.” GV Wire, 1 May 2024. https://gvwire.com/2024/05/01/fresno-states-randa-jarrar-dragged-out-of-event-featuring-big-bang-theorys-mayim-bialik/
• Poirot, Kristan. Domesticating the Liberated Woman: Containment Rhetorics of Second Wave Radical/Lesbian Feminism.” Women’s Studies in Communication, vol. 32, no. 3, 2009, 263-292.
• Rodriguez, Jesus. “Professor’s Anti-Barbara Bush Twitter Tirade Draws Ire.” The Free Speech Project, 29 June 2019. (Originally posted 30 April 2018) https://freespeechproject.georgetown.edu/tracker-entries/professors-anti-barbara-bush-twitter-tirade-draws-ire/
• Vivian, Bradford. The Roots of Anti-University Rhetoric. Inside Higher Ed, 13 June 2024. https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/views/2024/06/13/tracing-roots-anti-university-rhetoric-opinion
• White, James Boyd. Heracles’ Bow: Essays on the Rhetoric and Poetics of Law. U of Wisconsin P, 1985.