Anytime I read an article that invokes the attitudes or ideas of graduate students, I find myself looking for my place in the continuum of those ideas. In this article, it's hard to see that I fit at all. Joe Harris's wonderful book A Teaching Subject was a primary inspiration for pursuing graduate work at all, but I did not come to Rhet/Comp as a disenchanted lit scholar. Like Brenda in the article, I chose this field for my PhD work precisely because I saw it as interdisciplinary in nature and because, like Brenda, I see it as "a great opportunity to engage any number of literary, theoretical, historical, and philosophical texts while resisting getting caught within a reductive 'specialty'..." (759). In short, I was interested in the field precisely because I am skeptical of narrow specialization as the defining hallmark of a scholar holding a Doctor of Philosophy degree.

Like some of the students quoted it the article, I found the content of some of my graduate courses did not match their catalog descriptions. Some part of my comprehensive exam process emerged from the sense attributed in the article to a student who "echo[ed] Mulderig and Swearingen" in her concern that she would have a degree in rhet/comp without ever taking a course in classical rhetoric. That wasn't my situation, but I did believe I needed a lot more of that history or even study of practices to honestly claim a degree in the field. Like Paul, I was asked to respond in my dissertation to why this topic is of interest to the field. While this is not precisely a "pedagogical" requirement, the discussion around that idea indicated that the pedagogical connection was at the heart of the request.

But like Clancy, I came to the field from a different path (though different from hers too). I always did like teaching, and did a fair amount of it in the financial services career I left to pursue it, but it wasn't just the teaching that drew me to rhet/comp. I'm also a writer, and like many writers, I enjoy literature, but I am always interested in how the literature is constructed and what the writer is doing as much as I am interested in the content.

I found some omissions in the analysis. First of all, the step away from "service" is taken as a given, as in it is a given that no one in the field of rhet/comp wants to be considered to be in a service discipline or activity. I don't mind one bit being in a "service" field. That is not to say that I believe I or anyone else in the field should shrink into the walls and take our marching orders from someone else, whether those someones are administrative or disciplinary. What I do mean is that investing time, energy, research and scholarship in developing my own skills with language across a range of communicative opportunities and being able to share that knowledge to enable students to communicate more effectively in what Harris referred to as "the discourse communities they already" or will choose to, inhabit, is a marvelous way to spend a life. To do so in an institution where effective communication is required of every student not only in every field of study but in the activities of life outside of and beyond their formal education is as rewarding a career as I could imagine.

The second omission I see in the analysis has to do with the nature of specialization, teaching, and interdisciplinarity. Kopelson cites Ellen Barton's comment about "one-way interdisciplinarity" in the discussion of the "import and apply" tendency of the discipline. I'd argue that it is precisely the specialization required for academic success as a scholar that prevents rhet/comp as a discipline from having its work imported by other disciplines. If the relationship is one way, might it be because it is easier for the generalist to adopt the particular than the other way around? And I understand that for some, scholarship is the more interesting part and teaching is the price paid for it, but that's not the case for me. I love both. I study composition as a means of professional development, because I get paid to teach. I research and study things I like and find interesting, in whatever subject, because I get paid by an institution that gives me both access to and time for these pursuits. I think we could end the question of what Zizek has to do with FYC for good if we as an entire field could embrace both.

That brings me to the conclusion, which Collin described as carrying the weight of "exhaustion." I understand why it is so hard to move from the charge Kopelson makes ("that we make a concerted, collective effort to release ourselves from the pattern reflected here") to the actual concerted, collective effort. The problem is that we don't agree, even yet, on who we are and what we do vis-a-vis the rest of the academic world. So I have an idea:

What if we "flipped the script" on that service notion. What if we embraced the idea and promoted the nature of our discipline as what it is: the center of a university education. Writing and rhetoric are central to the academic enterprise. We teach students how to do that, we analyze and critique the texts from which they learn other subjects, we contribute to public advocacy and engage social and political topics in meaningful discourse. That seems worth celebrating to me. So I think instead of shunning the service distinction, we might consider reconsidering what it could mean to really embrace that position.

Me and my crazy ideas. But it is a carnival, right?

Vacuumed both the floor and ceiling of the dining room.

Vacuumed the carpet in the living room.

Vacuumed the floor in the kitchen.

Did "some" laundry.

Put on "out of the house" clothes and walked down the street to the big pond and back. It seemed like a long walk (it's really the warm-up of the walk I used to be able to do every day).

Did Physical Therapy exercises (with only a minimum of vocal accompaniment and few cuss words).

Found updated assignment sheets for Analytical Writing class I was sure I had done but couldn't find this morning, thus eliminating hours of new assignment development and writing.

Posted aforementioned updated assignments.

Discovered chicken in the freezer suitable for the grill and sufficient vegetables for the salad, eliminating the need to enter The Vehicle with the Broken Air Conditioner this afternoon.

Watered the daylilys that are still in their pots from last spring, which miraculously survived the winter in those pots in the shed and are already growing for the summer to come.

Some work, some therapy, some progress, and some wonder. A successful day.

Seattle teacher, suspended for refusing to give WASL, calls test "bad for kids"

Thanks to Patty Ericsson at WSU for sharing this link.

Update:More thanks to the tuba player for seeing it the same way. You should stop by her place, by the way, if you don't already.

And then before you know it I have a rake in my hand, and then a wheelbarrow emerges from the shed, and leaves are being cleared from garden beds and fence gates and other winter gathering spots, and before you know it I'm out behind the fence, tidying up the now dead stalks leaning over said fence with no bugs to assault me in my efforts, and before you know it the whole line of the back fence looks changed, and the burn pile looks much bigger, and the tarp is off the compost heap, and green things are spotted throughout the several gardens.

And before you know it, I've done more than I should have, and it will hurt, but what a great way to overstress the back. A marvelous, delightful spring afternoon.

There are three things I love about this article:

1) Alaska Airlines gets it. In the new world full of security and other obstacles to actually getting on an airplane and back off again at your intended destination with your stuff, this airline employs "lobby coordinators" in the "decision zone." Unlike the annoying greeters in any given retail store, these people serve the twin purposes of facilitation movement AND bringing graciousness to a rather calloused process. But even more than that personal touch, read the description of the kiosk lobby - not an atm-like device at the end of the linear formation, but a genuine lobby, with multiple points of service, opening up the space and giving the whole thing a more relaxed, dignified feeling. Absolutely wonderful.

2)When Fast Company was a brand new magazine and I was a determined to be successful business person, I was a charter subscriber. I learned a lot from that magazine about moving, about changing, about seeing business and processes with new eyes and not shying away from change. Still love this magazine, especially for profiling very cool new solutions like this one.

3) Ed White's comment about the patents - happy to see others embracing what Alaska developed. Cool.

Today, for the first time in 34 days, I could bend over enough in the shower to wrap a towel around my hair.

We won't talk about how many pain pills it is taking to accomplish this. We will only record these small victories on the road to better-ness.

Game?

Okay, here goes. In the February 3 edition of the New York Times, one article and one advertisement stood out, in part for their proximity to each other, and in part for the contradiction they posed but could not address. The (full page, back of a section) advertisement was from Allstate. The question it asked? "How long a retirement should you plan for?" The subtitle, if you will, was this point:

Consider this: Hallmark sold 85,000 "Happy 100th Birthday!" cards last year.

Within the text of the message was this statement: "So, it's easy to understand why workers today should plan for a 30-year retirement" (my emphasis).

Got that part? Okay, let's go on to the article, written by N. Gregory Mankiw and titled: "My Birthday Wish: Not Burdening Our Children."

(In another interesting article on the same day, Wal-mart is given praise for advocating things the government doesn't want to take on, like universal health care. How about if Wal-Mart just gives all their employees, full or part time, free health care out of their astronomical profits and stops lobbying for the government to rescue them? Oh, sorry. That's another post.)

Professor Mankiw is hardly the first person to observe the statistics. Back in 1994, UNUM's Chief Economist, Keith Forrest, toured the West Coast giving presentations on current federal economic policy, including GDP growth rates, labor issues, the beginnings of what we now call global warming, and risk shifting - specifically the federal government shifting risk to future generations by toying with Social Security and Medicare rather than actually fixing them. Even back then the problem was clear and simple and took only one graph to demonstrate.

In 1935, when social security came into being, the average life expectancy for a person reaching the normal social security retirement age was less than 5 years. In fact, the average life expectancy at birth didn't even reach 65 until the early 1940s. But once it did, it never went down again. That means every person born after about 1945 had, at birth, an average life expectancy of at least 65. For persons born now, the average life expectancy is over 75 and increasing toward 80. So while the worker-to-beneficiary ratio continues to decline (originally 42-1, then 16-1, now less than 3-1), the payout period gets longer and longer. And this part is not in debate. As Mr. Forrest said even back then: these people have been born. They are here. And barring a global cataclysm, they will live a long long time.

Last time I checked the statistics on it, and it's been a few years, the fastest growing age group in America was the post-85ers. Again, see the advertisement above.

And yet, and here's the big important point that no one wants to talk about, the normal social security retirement age is still 65 for most people, 67 for some and may be as high as 70 for some people. That's not enough!

Look again at the ad above. Plan for a 30 year retirement. What is the assumption underlying that notion? The assumption that regardless of the gains in life expectancy we should still expect that everyone can and will retire, with government support, between ages 62 and 70. That assumption needs to be challenged. Without all the rhetoric about "entitlement" and "promises" and so forth. I don't know anyone my age who has grown up believing, really believing, that social security will be there for them, regardless of the number of payroll tax increases we've been asked to absorb. So it's not that big a stretch to imagine that we could seriously talk about raising the social security threshold to 75 or 80 or even more and still keep the original promise of social security. And if we could do that, then we could seriously talk about upping the saving quotient in this country, and curbing excessive consumerism and so on and so forth. If everyone working now believed their only retirement would be self-provided, many would know they could not retire at all, ever, and others would begin working seriously to provide for themselves.

As a first step, I suggest we start challenging this idea of retirement at 65 as a standard or a given. If you can save enough over your working life to be able to stop working and support yourself, great! By all means, retire. But if you depend on others to do it, then it's time for a different expectation, and a different conversation.

Professor Mankiw has re-opened this conversation. Let's take it up seriously, with some rhetorical astuteness. Let's talk about it, and see if we can do what the politics of party driven government don't seem to be able to. Let's talk about real solutions instead of accounting. Let's talk about it in ordinary conversations, and larger discussions, and seminars about retirement planning and in critiquing the advertisements and the politicians who won't offer alternatives to the 30-year retirement on their own.

Astute readers of this blog will recognize that Professor Mankiw's generation includes me. And I don't want my generation to be anybody's biggest economic problem either. But we will be.

Unless we change our minds and work to change other's minds too.

The interesting thing about these posts is that I found them because a colleague posted them on an all-campus list, and then wrote later to apologize for not realizing politics weren't allowed on the list - suggesting that she had gotten flamed by someone for posting these links.

All the more reason to go visit them. That, and, well, Lessig is who he is.

In an eloquent and somewhat poignant opinion column, Ms. Kennedy said that people were telling her that this candidate inspired in them the hope, the optimism, the potential, that her father had once inspired. That of all the available field, this man stood out, carried that same sort of sense that the world could be different, that we could make it different, that individual people with a concern could do something that had meaning in the larger scheme of things. So she endorsed him--anointing him in a way with the spirit of Camelot.

Barack Obama, a United States Senator from Illinois of mixed race heritage, won the Democratic primary in South Carolina.

Say that slowly. A black man won the Democratic party primary in the very Southern state of South Carolina, the home of Strom Thurmond, the home of a state defense of Confederate flag displays, the home of the Clarendon County School District, where an auto mechanic named Harry Briggs forfeited his livelihood and that of most of his family members to become the lead plaintiff in one of the cases that would make up the Brown decision. The Clarendon County that is probably today still segregated, though not officially, in a state that is still a harbinger of the deepest racial divides of America history.

Say it again, slowly.

A few months back, a reporter for the New York Times was interviewing black women in a hair salon in South Carolina. The question had to do with whether they would support Mr. Obama, the black man, or Hillary Clinton, the woman candidate. For those responding it was a dilemma. Both factions, and the party is dividing along these factions, unfortunately, were important to them. But you know what comment stood out for me the most?

The concern that if Barack Obama were elected president of this country, he would be assassinated.

Like Jack. Like Bobby. Like Martin.

These women are smart, even if they are not college educated, and even if they don't tote around many theories about leadership and identity and presence. They understand the gritty fact that if you stand up and say those of us who are Americans are not just white, we are many colors and many faiths and the true meaning of being American is to embrace all of that in the context of the liberty proclaimed in our founding documents, that your life may be the price.

I'm told that next week, New York is part of that media circus that is variously know as Super Tuesday or Tsunami Tuesday, or whatever, when most of the delegates to the very outdated electoral college will be decided. And my problem with that day is that I can't support the candidate I want to. Why? Because when I moved to the great State of New York, I registered, as I have always done, as a Republican.

My choices? Let's not even go there.

My party has let me down for so many years on so many levels that it is impossible to justify my allegiance. So I won't. I will only attempt to by saying that I consider myself a Lincoln Republican. More on that another time.

I ran across a quote by President Kennedy in my research today, about how the words we proclaim about democracy don't override the discrimination diplomats experience when they come to this country. 1963. Yes, it was a long time ago. But it was also nearly 10 years after Brown. He felt the need to say it. and in the same speech, the speech he never got to give in Dallas that November day, he would have concluded:

We in this country, in this generation, are--by destiny rather than choice--the watchmen on the walls of world freedom. We ask, therefore, that we may be worthy of our power and responsibility, that we may exercise our strength with wisdom and restraint, and that we may achieve in our time and for all time the ancient vision of "peace on earth, good will toward men." That must always be our goal, and the righteousness of our cause must always underlie our strength. For as was written long ago: "except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain."

He also promised in that speech that our nation's power would never be used aggressively, but always for peace. My party has failed in that promise. The "Audacity of Hope" that Barak Obama brings makes me wish, like never before, that party politics were not what they are, and that I could go out a week from now and vote for the best shining light I've seen since I was a toddler.

Thank you, Caroline.

Update: There's a great discussion on Obama's victory over on Hungry Hungry Hippos. Check it out.

we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and success of liberty

I wonder about this now. In the same excerpt, Albright recalls the words of Colin Powell as he spoke to Congress as the new secretary of state:

It is a challenge of leadership. For it is not a dark and dangerous idological foe we confront, but the overwhelming power of millions of people who have tasted freedom. It is our own incredible success that we face.

The strength of commitment promised to the world by the young president of 1961 had achieved the survival and success he envisioned. Communism as practiced by the former Soviet Union and its iron curtain devotees was gone, capitalism had taken on global proportions and the world was at peace when Powell warned of the challenge that success brought us. We failed. We - all of us in this democratic nation - failed because we retained political leaders who had already proven they were not up to the challenge. So far distant is Powell's challenge from this moment, from that cold January day when Kennedy's words rang out, the Albright warns the new president "you will enter office with respect for American leadership lower than it has been in the memory of any living person."

Jack Kennedy became president a little over two months before I was born. My young childhood was shaped by his vision of what America could be. I liked Kennedy. The older I got, and the more I learned about him, the more I liked him. And I'm not blind to his shortcomings. They were legion. But as a president of this country, as a national leader, he was the right man at the right time. I have wondered many times how our country might have been different if he had lived.

But this week it's really been Jack's dedicated younger brother, Robert, who has been on my mind. Reading about the violence in the South during the Civil Rights Movements, the records of Bobby's efforts as head of the Justice Department to walk the fine line between states' rights and citizen's rights, to do what was right with an eye always focused on what would be best for his brother's presidency, and eventually catching the belief that he could be president himself. In an article I read over this past weekend, the writer was comparing 1968 to 2008, and for the similarities there are these are not nearly those days. He recalled that period of Kennedy's campaign as a wild 85-day adventure.

The article showed a picture of Robert Kennedy, that young idealist and presidential candidate standing in a moment of quiet sobriety, head bowed, in the moments before he told a crowd in Indianapolis that Martin Luther King had been shot and killed in Memphis. His speech that night is nothing short of amazing. Impromptu, his own thought, his own encouragement to those who would be filled with hatred to choose unity and understanding instead, quoting Aeschylus from memory. Martin Kettle called it the "bravest speech of that campaign". In my lifetime, I have never seen another like it. Listen for yourself. It's currently the "Top 100 Speech of the Moment" at American Rhetoric.

Maybe it was because I had been so absorbed in this history, the awful times that followed the Brown decision, maybe it was the photograph, maybe it was the knowledge that 2008 isn't and can't be 1968, but as I sat with that article, I did something I almost never do with any seriousness. I looked at the man in the photograph and asked him, with tears threatening and the knowledge that this project I have engaged is changing me in ways I am only just glimpsing, "how might my life have been different if you had lived?"