As part of a June 2015 keynote at an Alliance to Advance Liberal Arts Colleges conference titled “Professors and their Publics” at Furman University in South Carolina, I was invited to discuss my scholarship on classrooms as protopublic spaces. While classrooms can never be truly public spaces according to any robust definition of “public” -- the power of the instructor is one central reason why -- they can be spaces of shared study and deliberation where students can collaboratively learn the habits and practices of participatory democracy and come to recognize the potential of their own collective agency. Depending on the class, students may choose to engage in conjoint action during the semester or even after the course has ended. In sum, the collaborative work students and I have done in courses about violence and public memory at The University of Texas at Austin and Penn State has been central to informing my theories of publics, public scholarship, and democratic deliberation.
At the Furman conference, faculty across the arts and sciences from small, very select liberal arts colleges gathered to think and talk together with me about how our work might more directly engage and intervene in public problems involving various kinds of social injustice. What sets the Furman trip apart from the many other professional road trips I have taken is this: On the evening of the day I left South Carolina to drive back to Pennsylvania, nine people were murdered by a twenty-one-year-old white supremacist at Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal church in Charleston, just a few hours from Furman. These people were murdered because they had the temerity to welcome the young man into their historic church and into their Bible study despite his race being different from theirs. As a scholar who has been studying and teaching courses about connections between rhetoric and violence for two decades, the horrifying white supremacist murders at Mother Emanuel thus renewed my urgency to question the connections between academic expertise and its place in the deliberations, judgments, and actions of individuals and publics beyond our campuses.
Alter defines public scholarship as “a particular variety of action research and community-based research … creative intellectual work that is conducted in public, with and for particular groups of citizens” (462). He continues, “Scholars who practice public scholarship seek to advance the academy’s teaching and research missions in ways that hold both academic and public value.”
Yet institutions of higher education too often do not themselves adequately value academic work that attempts to address issues of public concern -- or public peril. As Chronicle of Higher Education reporter Paul Basken wrote in the first of his series of articles titled “Research and the Real World,” “University scientists have shown they’re good at turning research into products, and they’re getting better by the day. But are researchers, and their funders, making the same effort to translate the work of greatest benefit to society?” This chapter sets out not only to prompt readers to reflect on what role higher education itself may have played in widening the chasm between “academic and public value” (Alter 464), but also to urge us not to overlook our students as potential collaborators in building sustainable publics.
Following Arendt and Habermas -- as well as Eberly and Cohen on public scholarship -- I here assume a strong definition of “public” as distinct from not only the “private” but also the “social” realm. One marker of publics as Habermas defines them is an ability to recognize themselves as publics (62-63). This self-recognition has been a recurring challenge since modern, representative publics first began to form in western Europe in the eighteenth century. Indeed, Dewey wrote from his academic laboratory nearly ninety years ago that “the public is so bewildered that it cannot find itself” (122-23); I wonder often what Dewey would make of our fragmented, twittering polity nearly a century later. Nonetheless, networked publics can redirect attention in ways that can cut across differences of power and access.
“The Tower Course,” as it was known, provided a space for students and alumni to recognize themselves as a public and, consequently, for the university to come to terms publicly with the events of 1966 (Eberly, “Everywhere”). Yet 1966 marked yet another fulcrum point in public safety: the beginning of changes in perceptions of the importance of public higher education -- and in the case of California, of explicit attacks on public higher education. Pertinent to any academic studying and practicing public scholarship is the reality that our current situation is the result of a half-century of attempts to divorce higher education from the public interest.
In 1966, newly elected California governor Ronald Reagan made his political reputation by promising, in his words, "to clean up the mess at Berkeley" (Maclay). A story from the University of California website, published on the occasion of Reagan’s death, explains the role the Berkeley campus played in Reagan’s political rise: "Ronald Reagan launched his political career in 1966 by targeting UC Berkeley's student peace activists, professors, and, to a great extent, the University of California itself" (Maclay). The news story continues,
John Douglass, a historian and senior research fellow at UC Berkeley's Center for Studies in Higher Education, faulted Reagan for a “failure to understand the importance of the University of California in the life of the citizens of this state.” Douglass said that after his election in 1966, Reagan proposed cutting the UC budget by 10 percent across the board. He also proposed that, for the first time, UC charge tuition and suggested that Berkeley sell collections of rare books in the Bancroft Library…. Ray Colvig, the chief public information officer for the campus during these years, said the notion to sell rare books was quite telling. "Reagan did not think you needed a great university supported by public funding," said Colvig. "He thought if you wanted a world-class university, let the students pay for it. The idea of selling rare books went along with that."
Higher education thus began to be a target of the structure I first learned about from Engelman’s history of public television and radio in the United States: the socialization of risk and the privatization of reward. As with the telegraph, then radio, then television, and on up to and through the internet, public funds have repeatedly been devoted to developing technologies and other goods that are then privatized: public funds facilitated discovery and innovation, but private interests – usually corporations with shareholders who demand not just to make but to maximize profits – reap the rewards. In this structure, publics’ self-recognition and consequent deliberations about public problems and public goods are eclipsed by powerful private interests, too often not themselves subject to publicity.
The uniquely horrid public problem of gun violence in the United States offers a searing example of the subordination of public to private interests: “For two decades, the CDC has refused to investigate shootings as a public health problem, a position that even presidential pleas and strings of mass shootings have proved powerless to reverse” (Frankel). Despite mass shootings occurring nearly every day in 2015 (Ingraham), Congress continues to bow to pressure from the National Rifle Association in banning federal funding of gun-violence research.
Another venue in which formerly public goods have become privatized is higher education itself. In the context of political attacks on higher education in North Carolina, Wisconsin, and elsewhere in recent years, Habermas’s account of the structural transformation of the public sphere, inflected through the caveats of his many critics (see especially Benhabib; Fraser, “Rethinking,” “Transnationalizing”; Warner), bears reconsideration because it allows us not only to access the concept of public goods but also to assess how what is and what is not valued as a public good has changed over time.
Some in higher education are increasingly concerned that corporate practices imported into higher education are part of the cause of legislatures’ and wider publics’ misunderstanding of higher education. For example, according to a news article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Thomas W. Ross, whose tenure as president of the University of North Carolina system ended in 2016 because he was forced by lawmakers to step down, believes that
the discussion of higher education’s value has become too focused on metrics, return on investment, and work-force preparation. The result is that colleges are increasingly described more like factories than educational enterprises … with a mandate to produce more products at a lower price. “We can’t forget about the overarching public good of higher education,” said Mr. Ross. “The public good has fallen off the agenda." (Kelderman; see also Olssen & Peters)
Kelderman’s article articulates yet another way that higher education has become divorced from the common good:
Budget cuts are not the only fallout from a focus on individual financial benefits, Jeremi Suri, a professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin, said…. “Students come in and want to learn interesting things,” Mr. Suri said. “Sadly, they are told by their parents and everyone else, Just study to get a job. The message to them is, Go get what you can get, because if you don’t get it someone else will.” (Kelderman)
When academic practices are valued only or even primarily in terms of quantifiable individual gains, whither publics and the public good? Whither “We the People”?
The question of “We the People” echoes in my head partly because I teach the US Constitution every semester. Each spring semester we read the Constitution in my CAS 222/CIVCM 211: Foundations of Civic and Community Engagement class. After we take two days to explore together the history, promise, and peril of the document whose preface ungrammatically yet pragmatically constitutes us to aspire to “a more perfect union,” I assign a paper with the following question: “What does ‘We the People’ mean in the context of Penn State?”
Though I rarely limit the scope of students’ inventions by setting certain topics off-limits, for this paper I suggest that students should work hard to avoid settling for easy claims about how chanting “We Are . . . ” constitutes a public -- unless they have noticed the rare but fabulously counterpublic reply to the chant, one that rhymes “Penn State” with “not straight.” Many students at Penn State recognize themselves as a collective agential force only through the annual event formerly known as the Pan-Hellenic Dance Marathon and now branded as THON. Yet the corporate nature of THON does nothing to facilitate students’ self-recognition as potential publics; further, the hegemonic nature of THON obscures the fact that the event imperils students academically and too often even physically (Aramesh).
Fall semesters, students and I discuss the US Constitution in my CAS 478: Contemporary US Political Rhetoric, which focuses on rhetoric around public violence, specifically school shootings. On Constitution Day, when the US government requires any public educational institution receiving federal funds to mark the occasion in some manner, instead of requiring students to listen to an invited speaker or engage in other activities that hail them as mere spectators, I invite students to deliberate together about how they will mark Constitution Day. This year, their theme was “Don’t venerate! Educate!” They went as educational agents to the Old Main Lawn and, eventually, to the front of Willard Building, where a Willard preacher has, since the 1970s, been calling students “whores” and otherwise raising the level of campus civility despite not being in one of the university-approved areas for expressive activity on campus. For after we discuss the Constitution, we also read and discuss Penn State policy AD-51, “The Use of Outdoor Areas for Expressive Activities” (“AD51”). I urge you to educate yourselves about your own campus’s speech policies and to make them a topic of conversation and deliberation.
On Constitution Day in 2016, students made a new friend. A visiting graduate student scholar from Turkey, Emrah Atasoy, was more fascinated with the US Constitution than anyone else students talked with that day. He was particularly compelled by students’ views on the Second Amendment and admitted that he was fearful to travel to the US given the amount of gun violence. Take just a moment to dwell on that, given political and other violence in Turkey and surrounding countries.
Being a teacher-scholar studying public violence over two decades at two huge public universities has provided rich experiences for observing political rhetoric and engaging in public scholarship. Despite the local, state, and national media attention the Tower course attracted over the seven years I taught it, I found myself after a few years unwilling to do interviews after a television “weekly news magazine” producer told me what students and I did in the Tower course was “too complicated for a twenty-second sound bite.” Verily. Instead of doing additional interviews, I became more interested in organic discourse-farming: putting myself and students in situations where we could choose to engage with wider publics via various media. Further, as a scholar-teacher of rhetoric, I was mindful of Burke's theory of terministic screens: any term is a reflection of reality and thus simultaneously a selection and a deflection of reality. What does a focus on “school shootings” as public violence bring to light? And what does it subordinate or obscure? Focusing on the male perpetrators and fetishizing the details of their acts can blind us to the fact that women, people of color, and people with mental illness are exponentially more likely to be victims of gun violence. Further, ritualized attention on shootings in white rural schools can obscure the everyday terror of gun violence in urban areas.
The murders at Mother Emanuel occurring in such short chronological and geographical proximity to my talk at Furman prompted me to question my decision not to do interviews about the relationship between rhetoric and violence. Thus, in early December, when I received an email from a producer for To The Point, a respected Public Radio International news and commentary program based at KCRW in Santa Monica, just outside Los Angeles, I agreed to do the program. Just a few days earlier, a gunman had taken hostages at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs and eventually killed three people and injured nine others. The program’s host asked questions in his introduction that made me, as a professor of rhetoric, feel that appearing on the program was central to fulfilling my responsibilities as a scholar, teacher, and citizen of the United States: “Does rhetoric really affect reality? Are there limits to free speech in the midst of hard-fought political warfare?” (Olney). As the hour on KCRW progressed, I listened to the other guests on the program, responding when the host asked for my views. Near the end of the hour, the BBC news alert sounded on my tablet, and I saw something about a shooting at a county social services office in San Bernardino, just an hour east of KCRW’s studios.
In the face of what, by nearly every measure, seems to be an increasingly violent culture, among the positive things we can do as teacher-scholars is to talk with our students about difficult issues on our campuses and beyond them. We can work with students to help them come to see themselves individually and collectively as agential. As Flanagan noted, early adulthood is unique in the lifespan for nurturing “democratic dispositions and competencies in younger generations” (41). Further, this kind of engagement with students is increasingly understood to have mutually beneficial consequences (Jaschik). Using difficult or even controversial topics as exigencies to draw students into adult conversations with disciplinary rigor is one way to meet the criteria Alter sets for public scholarship. Students themselves are too often overlooked as potential publics, at least on the campus where I teach and am told regularly that I “pay too much attention to” my students. Yet seeing students primarily as tuition-paying units and faculty as collections of sunk costs is something higher education does at its own peril -- and at the peril of our shared world.
Finally, we might well reconsider as public scholarship some of the things we already habitually do. Given how little this kind of work “counts,” at least on my campus in my college, let’s consider every act we undertake as an ambassador for our academic discipline and institution, as at least potentially an act of public scholarship. Is, for instance, the song about the shootings at Mother Emanuel that I wrote in late July with four musicians -- a song called “Angels Unaware” -- is that public scholarship? Will it be public scholarship after it is recorded and “published”? In contrast to the KCRW program, where I was introduced as an expert, another model of public scholarship is a call I made to the BBC program World Have Your Say, when I was just another global citizen among many: no “professor of rhetoric,” no “Penn State,” no degrees conferred, just “Rosa.” That counted as nothing on my CV, as the KCRW appearance did not. Nonetheless, in the aftermath of Sandy Hook, calling up the BBC to think and talk together about the deaths of twenty first-grade children and six adults -- another attack on another public school -- seemed the most important thing I could do in that moment.
Publics are by their nature ephemeral. In the face of that ephemerality, what might we do to build not ephemeral but sustainable publics? And what would that do for how our Commonwealth and nation -- and our institutions themselves -- see the potential energy of higher education as a force not just for individual gain but for the public good?
