Rhetoric and the Scholarship of Engagement: Pragmatic, Professional, and Ethical Convergences

By Heather Renae Speweik
Advisor: Dr. Richard C. Gebhardt
Committee: Dr. Kristine Blair
Dr. Sue Carter
Dr. Cynthia Baron

Abstract: In Scholarship Reconsidered, late Carnegie Foundation president Ernest L. Boyer lays the foundation for a significant reform movement known popularly as "the scholarship of engagement." This initiative asks faculty and administrators to value the type of service that grows out of scholarship as significant in the tenure and review process and to extend the conversation about this scholarship across disciplines and to the community. The field of rhetoric and composition has been a predominantly engaged discipline and has struggled professionally in many ways as a result of this. The overlap between rhetoric and the scholarship of engagement has positioned both as key players in American higher education reform because of their shared exigencies, common institutional forces that have made them central to the discussion of university governance. Three of these shared forces are examined in this dissertation: the preference for contingency theories of truth within American epistemologies, the origins and trajectories of the professions and concomitant notions of "professionalism," and the centrality of ethics in the history and structure of the curriculum. The first chapter establishes the background for the present research, foregrounding it by addressing the tripartite questions “Why rhetoric, why engagement, why now?” The intermediate chapters examine in turn, the history of pragmatism in higher education and rhetoric, the rise and fall of a professional ethos in the academy, and the tentative but persistent relationship between curricula and systems of ethics. The concluding chapter, while theorizing a possible public persona for the field in relation to the broader engagement initiative, offers a taxonomy of domains within the field’s research that might usefully represent disciplinary knowledge to the larger university community.

Table of Contents

• Chapter 1: Towards a Consensus Thesis of Rhetorical Engagement
• Chapter 2: Action in an Uncertain World
• Chapter 3: Up Through Professionalism
• Chapter 4: Virtue as a Traveling Concept
• Chapter 5: New Scholarly Citizenship