Hauser Discusses Connections between Rhetoric and Civic Responsibility
Blake Sanz

Gerard Hauser, Professor of Communication at University Colorado-Boulder, gave a lecture on Wednesday, May 6, at DU entitled Rhetoric, Pedagogy, and Civic Responsibility.

Introducing Hauser was Ann Dobyns, professor of English and chair of DUs Department of English, who underscored the value and importance of Hausers work to the field of rhetoric. She mentioned her admiration for Vernacular Voices: The Rhetoric of Publics and Public Spheres and Introduction to Rhetorical Theory, which, she noted, has been valuable and useful in her own writing classroom.

The editor of Philosophy and Rhetoric for many years, Hauser spoke of the role that rhetoric as a discipline can play in fostering productive civic lives and creating a more civically engaged notion of academic communities.

He began with an overview of three distinct traditions of civic involvement in this country. Franklin Roosevelts candidacy and New Deal programs, Hauser explained, elicited from the public a sense of obligated civic engagement. In those times, the public responded to government programs out of necessity for example, by searching for government-created jobs which created what Hauser called a schoolhouse vision of citizenship: paying taxes, constructing buildings, acting on the right to organize. This developed into a kind of citizenship (best represented by the 60s) that was more centered on community engagement not just voting, that is, but doing. Emerging from this was an idea espoused most recently by Robert Boynton, the idea of citizenship as public work. This, Hauser argued, represented a different tradition the emphasis had shifted once again away from service.

Mirroring these generational shifts in public ideas on civic involvement were certain tasks-of-an-era associated with their times: in the 40s, the task was to overcome fascism; in the 60s, we struggled against segregation. Today, Hauser said, the challenge is to overcome the forces of radical individualism and division along economic lines, to create a new commonwealth based on public good.

Hauser then looked to demonstrate what our goals might be as publics and as academics regarding these new challenges of civic engagement. To do so, he highlighted Robert Putnams arguments in Making Democracy Work regarding Italian governmental structures. He pointed, for example, to Putnams conclusion that membership in a political party didnt lead to a more active sense of civic responsibility -- rather, it was consistent contact with different kinds of people that tended to get citizens more engaged. This led, Hauser noted, to a more trusting relationship from one community member to another, one of the important goals of creating a more civically engaged populace.

And what, then, is the role of rhetoric as taught in universities with regard to civic engagement? Hauser discussed how we must strive to create spaces and structures, like the composition classroom, in which students are made to interact with difference. Without opportunities, for example, to see that people in a class who disagree with you have sane things to say, a productive level of civic engagement will not be reachable. Hauser focused on the very word we in the academy use to describe ourselves -- professor. We profess, and this necessitates trust. In the same way that we trust that certain fields such as law and medicine will regulate themselves in a way commensurate with the public good, so too must professors look to meet norms of civic professionalism.

That is, like other disciplines, we should look not only to do no harm, to ensure the safety of what we profess, but also we must question whether our field is advancing the public good. This, for Hauser, called to mind an important distinction between the Athenian tradition of education and the Berlinian tradition. In the Athenian model, civic virtue had to be apprehended, and the goal of teachers was to bring their students from an understanding of technique to a kairos of praxis -- that is, in this model, teachers exist for students. This, Hauser reminded us, is at odds with how education occurs today. Today, we tend to follow the Berlin school of education, in which knowledge is most often confronted via research -- in this model, teachers dont exist for the student; students are used to achieve research goals, and it is research that is at the center of the university.

As Hauser sees it, the challenge with regard to civic engagement in universities is not to replace the Berlin school of thought but to restore Athenian values so that they can coexist with the research goals that institutions so value today. Toward that end, rhetoric has a place, and Hauser argued for three specific ways it might play a part in readjusting our academic values: (1) we must rethink the professional aspect of graduate education by reclaiming rhetorics ties to citizenship and identity; (2) we must expand opportunities for students to engage in public rhetoric, which might be done through classroom activities that put students in contact with communities and get them to interact with difference; and (3) we must pay greater attention to the canon of American democracy (striving to expose students to such works as the Declaration of Independence, the Gettysburg Address, Kings Letter from Birmingham Jail, etc).

Not only this, Hauser argued, but we must also internalize these concepts in new ways, make them relevant for students practical realities. Early in his talk, in supplementing his discussion of Putnams work, Hauser discussed a midwestern focus group made up of vastly varied demographic and political backgrounds who met to discuss the issue of abortion. As Hauser recollected, very few peoples minds changed on the issue. What did change was how they spoke to one another -- those who in past times might have chastised their opponents had grown more respectful and knowledgeable of their opponents opinions. That is, their minds didnt change, their behavior did -- and it is something like this that Hauser seemed to envision we might strive to achieve in the rhetoric classrooms of tomorrow.

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