Writings – Page 11 – RHETORICAL CRITIC

The question of how to measure the “effect” of rhetoric is one of the most difficult problems in rhetorical theory. I consider it practically unsolvable. How can you reliably point to a specific instance of speech and connect it to a specific effect?

Simple interactions are of no practical difficulty, of course. If I tell my 8-year-old son to get dressed for school and he immediately does so, we might assume, reasonably, that my request triggered his action, absent some other unstated context. But few would dispute such a conclusion, and it’s only the conclusions that are under dispute that are generally worth talking about.

For example, some time ago in this space, I discussed a striking speech by President Biden. Since then, the Democrats had a strong midterm, by any historical or contemporary measure; they still have Senate control and the GOP has a slim and unstable majority in the House. The question of effect thus comes into play here: did Biden’s aggressive stance toward MAGA Republicans in the speech bring about that outcome?

Now, I should be clear, I don’t think this question can be answered, at least in any authoritative way. Rather, I’m interested in discussing how this case can render the complicated nature of all rhetorical utterances. Perhaps a medium-size case, rather than a huge one, might help illustrate my larger point.

Imagine Biden stumping across Iowa in the 2024 presidential election to come. He enters a diner for the usual lunch and photo opportunity. Suddenly one of the customers begins to choke on a chicken bone, and Biden promptly executes the Heimlich maneuver. The bone dislodges. The man is saved. An impromptu video makes the social media rounds to acclaim. Later on, he wins the state primary handily. Did this incident win him the state?

Maybe. Maybe not. Simple cause-and-effect chains are appealing, of course. Aristotle was dead-on about the centrality and power of the enthymeme. But the absence of a warrant – or, rather, the implication of one, to be filled in by the listener – allows a rhetor to avoid the responsibility and risk of making a direct connection between one event and another. Most of the time, therefore, the tactical dodge that an enthymeme allows is a sound plan. I wish Toulmin had discussed this more, as he offloads most of rhetorical evasion to modals.

The problem of induction, usually as formulated by David Hume, is related, though the P of I is far more epic in scope and character. No future event can be guaranteed based on analysis of past events, according to Hume, including relatively straightforward stuff like the sun rising in the morning or your death after falling from the Empire State building. Something else can always happen or intervene – the classic black swan, perhaps, will consume the sun, or swoop past and catch you.

The problem of rhetoric and effect, therefore, is the problem of induction in reverse. Instead of future events being impossible to logically guarantee, past events that might seem to be in a cause and effect relationship with later ones cannot be conclusively linked. We can only argue for a connection between a possible cause and a possible effect. Rhetoric is therefore a hack that makes decision-making between humans possible. Acknowledging the impossibility of “proving” the warrant is generally considered a weakness and a vulnerability (“That’s just a theory!”) but I consider such a realization of the limits of human knowledge to be the absolute bedrock of intellectual inquiry.

I’ve been thinking about my long 2008-2009 academic job search lately, and how many crazy things happened during that hellish stretch that eventually (and happily) led to my employment at UHD.

At the time, I did not appreciate how deeply disturbing the process was. Even today, I am not sure I have fully processed the trauma of a ten-month wait to see if my doctoral degree was worth anything. My heart goes out to anyone who has been through it. I offer these anecdotes as a cautionary tale: don’t run your search like this.

The basic principle that got violated again and again was the ethical need to treat job candidates like humans and equals. More often, the semblance or form of such an effort won out over the actual delivery.

I submitted roughly 50 applications to universities in the fall/spring of 2008-2009. There were approximately 12-16 phone interviews (I lost count after awhile), 9 MLA interviews (including 6 scheduled on the same day), 5 campus visits, and one offer. The offer came from the very last application that I filled out, during an extremely late month (May) and I still work there, at the University of Houston-Downtown, 14 years later, as a full professor.

What should academic job interviews avoid?

Holding the interview in a hotel room with people they have never met. When the MLA conference still served as the first cattle call in the humanities, this was the preferred method. Not a restaurant. Not a public place. A hotel room. With the door closed. How this was ever a good idea, I don’t know.

Aggressive incompetence. One interviewer decided to critique an article I’d written in such a way that showed they hadn’t read it. I’m not even sure if they phrased it as a question. I had to decide on the spot whether I should point this out, regurgitate the same reasoning I’d written, or foul it off. I don’t remember my response; I think I chose “foul off,” but I remember how it made me feel. I was vulnerable then. I had my degree in hand (all my interviews were after my defense). The interview should have been a genteel meeting between peers. Given bringing a knife to a departmental potluck is a good way to get stabbed, the same rule should apply for interviews. It’s not the time to loudly announce the candidate’s teaching demonstration was really not what you expected, or that the candidate does not understand what a basic concept of their field is when it is quite clear that they do, or that the candidate needs to speak more plainly about their subfield, which is exactly what the department is hiring for. Yep, yep, yep.

Picking sides. Another campus had an endless battery of one-on-one interviews with people that wanted me to take sides in a long-running curriculum dispute. I fouled these off consistently, which is not what they wanted, but frankly, how the hell is a guy just off a plane, new to your city and university, going to resolve a dispute years in the making that involves analyzing years of complex data to which he doesn’t have access? And why would you drag the department’s dirty laundry in front of a candidate?

Ghosting. Most of my in-person MLA interviews may as well have never taken place. Only one generated a campus visit. Then again, most universities never replied to my materials at all. I spent December to May in a listless, half-alive state, never very far from a phone, and almost always in the dark about the status of any given search. Perhaps the only honest interaction I had for most of this period was the gentleman who genially informed me at the MLA interview that the funding for the position had evaporated. We had a nice chat. I like honesty offered without malice.

Third Wheeling. Most of my time at on-campus interviews was spent being dragged from office to social occasion to classroom with people that neither had the time to talk to me in detail, or particularly wanted to. If you’re going to create a dense schedule for a candidate, it should be with people that are deeply engaged in the process and have at least read the candidate’s CV and know what the department is looking for. Two days is more than enough. Build in dead time. Give them a break, by themselves. Once I was brought to a professor’s house where the gathered faculty spent the entire social occasion complaining about other faculty members and the university. I think they forgot I was there for a few hours; was I supposed to pitch in? “Yeah, he/she/they/it sounds awful, all right…”

Dress Code. Business casual, but maybe not even that. Graduate students are poor. The suit jacket and blazer that I brought to interviews cost more than my entire preexisting wardrobe. I never wore them again. I now dress slightly more upscale than Jeff Bridges’s Dude. I know what I’m about.

Failed Searches. A low point was a search where I became quickly aware that my visit was after the initial round of on-campus interviews, the search committee was in the midst of a great civil war, and I might as well have gone sightseeing until my flight out, as no hire was going be made. I will credit them in never letting me find out exactly what they were arguing about. But there is something deeply unethical in bringing someone into town for a multi-day ordeal with zero intention of hiring them.

Food. I managed to avoid this pitfall because I damn well eat when I’m hungry, but I’ve heard many tales of candidates afraid to eat much during the interview-dinners because they haven’t been put at ease. Yes, yes, it is a continuous performance and all that, but it doesn’t take much courtesy to shut up long enough to let someone finish their salad and entree.

Now, a caveat.

Some of the nonsense in academic job searches cannot be legally avoided. One of my mentors told me he got his initial job in the 1970s after his dissertation chair called up a chair he knew, and that single phone call constituted his job search. That can’t happen now, and that’s a good thing; equity during the application/interview process is worth some of the overall reduction in search speed to the gait of a energetic glacier. Of course, a good committee chair, department chair, or dean can reduce much of the delays simply by not being the bottleneck in the approval chain, but the leisurely speed of a typical search is not completely without purpose.

Back then, I thought I was pretty well prepared back in the day for the typical bureaucratic delays, as I had participated in several searches as a graduate student. But I was still too insulated from the worse of the nonsense; I was too focused on my studies to appreciate the sheer length of time between the initial call, the screening meetings, the phone interviews, the campus visits, and the offer and negotiation phases – not to mention the hundreds of work hours burned by all of the involved parties. So as the early months of 2009 marched on – January, February, March, April, all without offers, my mental health deteriorated in lockstep.

I’ve heard the academic job market compared to the NBA draft. It’s not a bad metaphor to use when explaining the randomness to a non-academic, but I actually wish we had a draft. Universities would get draft picks according to some weighted scheme and then they would do ranked bidding on registered prospects. Everyone fills out a single standardized application with the same required materials, with accommodations to the needs of various fields. This would also eliminate one of the worst side effects of the long process – too many “stars” getting multiple offers, most of which they reject, slowing the entire process down to the point that searches run out of funds for bringing additional candidates to campus and then fail. It’s not as if the tenure-track search gives most of us many options of where to live anyway.

Such a system would require a ridiculous amount of co-operation between hundreds of universities. However, it would also have another huge benefit – a reduction in workload as Zoom or phone or campus interviews would be unnecessary. Want an assistant professor in field X? Form a committee that looks through the year’s prospects, ranks them, and bids. As long as there are enough candidates in the pool, a hire is guaranteed.

Departments might not always get what they want, but to be frank, departments rarely know what they want. My department once spent two hours arguing over the disposition of the water dispenser in the faculty lounge (a now-legendary meeting, almost Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra worthy: “English, its water in dispute!”). We might even benefit from the random diversity of just, well, ordering a new faculty member and taking whatever the chef decides to cook.