Taking Public Address Seriously: A Graduate Student's Response

As a graduate student, I welcome Martin J. Medhurst's statement about the field's vigorous health and bright future. In the marketplace of ideas, scholarly entrepreneurship demands that one position oneself according to laws of supply and demand, and anticipate that unforeseen but compelling need so that one may provide accordingly. But, of course, graduate students know more than anyone that the model I give is inaccurate. We are not really entrepreneurs but intellectual laborers, compelled to sell our labor in a marketplace determined by administrators and academic marketers. With this in mind, public address, in order to perpetuate itself within the larger process of academic self-perpetuation, must also do two things: (1) it must reproduce an intellectual work force, and (2) it must argue for the marketability and relevance of its expertise.

One of the nicer things about Medhurst's essay is how in touch he appears to be with this imminent aspect of scholarship. Agree with him or not on specifics, one cannot argue that these issues are not firmly and forcefully addressed in his essay. If public address is to perpetuate itself it must be aware of the issues that Medhurst raises.

How, then, does he address these issues? The two issues are intimately related, because the higher the profile and the more indispensable the mission of public address scholarship, the greater the possibility that nascent scholars will hear and heed the call to service. Furthermore, as graduate students are socialized into the field we hear constantly how important it is that we do good scholarly work so that the discipline as a whole will flourish. Graduate student training is trying to reproduce not only a labor force but an army of crusaders for disciplinary growth.

If indeed the market for public address scholarship is booming, then the issue of a qualified work force also comes to the fore, as it does in any sector where highly skilled labor is needed. As with the hi-tech industry, it becomes necessary to look across borders in order to assemble such a force. Because the field envisioned is simultaneously so vast and so imperiled (one need only look to author Nicholson Baker's crusade to save America's newspapers for confirmation of Medhurst's own anecdotes of the decay of the public record), ¹ it is obvious that any discipline willing to join the crusade must be encouraged to do so. Therefore, the presence of "scholars in rhetoric, communication studies, English, literature--and even a few political scientists, historians, and sociologists" working in public discourse is one of the primary pieces of evidence Medhurst offers for the vitality of the field.

In response to this phenomenon, however, it is perhaps inevitable that nativist concerns from within the field of rhetorical studies should be raised. The rise of public address coincides with the rise of our field, and is coterminous with it to the extent that Medhurst endorses David Zarefsky's view that "what we study when we study public address . . . is really rhetorical practice in all its manifestations." There is a clear sense that those of us trained within rhetorical studies should therefore be the best there is at this kind of work, and furthermore should be recognized as such. To this end, Medhurst offers a clear plan of what needs to be promoted and avoided in scholarship. What are to be avoided are insular technical vocabularies, Esperantos that prevent us from sharing our knowledge with other communities outside rhetorical studies. What is to be promoted is expertise, defined not as expertise in a particular technical vocabulary but expertise in a field of objects towards which rhetoric as a field has a special relationship. ²

Implicit in this approach is a move away from rhetoric as method. Rhetoric is a phenomenon in the world that may be profitably studied by multiple methods, not a method that may study any...