Arguing Ethically

Mark Longaker on a 1980s curriculum debate and its present-day echoes

The rhetoric about higher education got heated recently. What started as a civilized debate about teaching quickly deteriorated into a polarized, media-fueled mud fight, with once friendly colleagues accusing each other of radical indoctrination, authoritarian censorship, and Marxist agendas.

Sorry, did I say, “recently”? I meant over 30 years ago, because then as now, invoking culture wars was both a great way to get people to pay attention to your issue and a guarantee that all nuance would be lost in its presentation.

The rhetorical fight I’m talking about comes from The Battle of Texas: Adjuncts, Composition, and Culture Wars at UT Austin, a new book from UT Austin professor of rhetoric Mark Longaker and Ph.D. alumnus Nate Kreuter. In it they weave together letters, newspaper articles, and other archival documents to describe two controversies that shook UT’s English department during the 1980s and early 1990s. Their narrative restores balance to historical events while also providing insight into debates raging in higher ed today.

“We might not be fighting the same culture war on 21^st-century campuses,” the authors write. “But many people are using the same rhetorical artillery.”

The two skirmishes chronicled in The Battle of Texas were both products of the changing higher education landscape during the late 20^th century. The first concerned the English department’s increasing reliance on underpaid, adjunct instructors in the face of shrinking state funding, while the second was more focused on what was taught than who was teaching. In both cases, faculty and other interested parties fought to improve the teaching of rhetoric and writing at UT while using the tools of rhetoric and writing to wage their battles.

“Rhetoric is an attempt to figure out what is true, just, and good in moments of uncertainty,” Longaker says. “If you don’t know the truth, if you don’t know what to do, the best you can do is argue it out.”

It was in this pursuit of truth through argumentation that the second conflict in the book began. Its protagonists advocated differing solutions for a revamp of the English department’s first-year writing course — a university-wide requirement for incoming freshmen — but soon found themselves caught in a series of fiery rhetorical battles that spread far beyond the writing curriculum.

Faculty disagreed about much of what goes into the teaching of writing, including which subjects were worth writing about. Some saw writing as a technical skill that should be honed on apolitical subjects, whereas others felt writing instruction demanded cultural and political context. The debate crystalized in early 1990 around a proposed syllabus for the first-year writing course by Linda Brodkey, a newly arrived associate professor. In her ambitiously reimagined version of the course, “Writing About Difference,” all UT freshmen would read and respond to arguments that were decidedly not politically inert but instead addressed topics such as race, class, gender, and disability.

While Brodkey’s syllabus found many supporters within the English department, others expressed concerns. Their objections, at least initially, weren’t to a particular opinion expressed in Brodkey’s reading list but to the inclusion of any politically charged materials, which they argued would be a hindrance to students’ acquisition of writing skills.

It was the kind of curricular debate that typically wouldn’t escape its departmental confines. But it did, and as the debate widened — first to the college level, then to the university level, and finally to the press — its language quickly escalated and its priorities became less clear. Longaker and Kreuter write about how “rumor of a politically subversive writing course had spread around campus,” scandalizing deans and administrators outside of the liberal arts. Brodkey was soon defending her syllabus not just against accusations of irrelevance but of “bias” and “propaganda.”

Looking back at the “Writing About Difference” debate, Longaker sees many parallels to more recent battles over what should or shouldn’t be taught in university classrooms. Take the ongoing debate around critical race theory (CRT), which Longaker says began as a reasoned deliberation on the teaching of U.S. history. Very quickly, though, “this turned into a conversation about how everybody who teaches critical race theory is a Marxist, or anybody who opposes teaching critical race theory is a racist,” he says. “So now we’ve got two identities, and the conversation is completely stalled.”

As with the CRT debate, those arguing for or against the “Writing About Difference” curriculum gradually shifted the focus of their arguments in order to persuade a wider audience. Rather than trying to convince the general public that their preferred teaching approach would yield better learning outcomes, the combatants started appealing to rights-based concerns like academic freedom. Teachers should have the freedom to teach unfettered by administrative censorship, some claimed. Students deserved the freedom to learn unencumbered by radical agendas, others retorted. And as faculty members made their cases in op-eds and voiced grievances to journalists and politicians, what began as nuanced argumentation got swept into an increasingly partisan version of the story.

Brodkey’s proposed syllabus ultimately didn’t survive the fray, but elements of it did go on to influence the direction of UT’s writing program. The program itself is now housed in a separate Department of Rhetoric and Writing, which was established a few years after the “Writing About Difference” debacle and is where Longaker has spent his academic career thinking about the kinds of rhetorical arguments that shaped the syllabus debate.

For the observer of politically charged debates — whether over “Writing About Difference” in the past or CRT in present — Longaker says it can be all too easy to sort players into opposing teams rather than meaningfully engaging with their arguments. “That binary is so seductive,” he says. “It’s so enthralling to watch two camps square off and fight it out.” But by indulging in the allure of a polarized brawl, we risk damaging our institutions and our relationships with others.

“There’s an ethical question that people in rhetoric worry about quite a lot,” he says. “Even if an argument works, even if it’s persuasive, is it a good idea to make the argument in the long term and in regards to the larger social circumstances?”

With regards to Brodkey’s curriculum, Longaker says faculty members made persuasive arguments both for and against. But just because they were effective doesn’t mean they were ethical. “They resulted in fractured friendships and a complete disintegration of comity within the department,” he says. “And it got in the way of their ability to talk seriously about what makes a quality writing program.”

Longaker hopes that The Battle of Texas can serve as a teaching tool in two ways. For one it provides historical material that can be used to teach future rhetoric courses, where the “Writing About Difference” debate could offer students a way to explore issues that are still relevant to today’s political arguments. More generally, he sees it as an opportunity to study how attempts at discourse failed in the past — and to consider how to make more ethical arguments in the present.

“Right now, we really need to have some productive conversations about higher ed,” he says. “Let’s really talk about what’s going on in higher ed and what changes we can make to better serve our students and produce knowledge that’s going to be useful to the community and the nation.”