Inside the Teaching Machine: Rhetoric and the Globalization of the U.S. Research University (review)

Catherine Chaput offers a rigorous and accessible analysis of the contradictory articulations of the U.S. public research university (hereafter: USPRU) since its emergence in the late 1800s. Articulations is an appropriate word here, as Chaput analyzes the political economic linkages between the USPRU, the state, and the market in three phases of capitalist development (industrial, monopoly, and global). She also demonstrates how these linkages are expressed and clarified in rhetorical processes "that mediate political messages, move them through institutions, and produce a specific model of education." (2)

For Chaput, the purposes defined for, and the actual uses of, the USPRU result from an interplay of valuations made—through rhetorical processes—between the political, economic, and cultural domains of the university. Chaput uses a "rhetorical hermeneutics of valuations" to show how this interplay constructs a "rhetorical boundary" that "outlines possibilities…and offers understandings about the appropriate knowledges, pedagogies, and professional work contained by [the university]." (21) This approach is illuminating when Chaput shows how the somewhat competing interests between early industrialists, the state, and local communities were partially resolved by rhetorically linking the land grant university with identifications of local communities. Chaput later puts paid to the idea of the market's "invisible hand," particularly during the monopoly phase of capitalism, where she unravels strategic interchanges between the government, USPRU, and business, particularly that associated with the then emerging military industries. USPRU emphases on military industries and workplace psychology did not materialize because "Joe, the Citizen or Line Worker" demanded new sciences to rework his perspective on foreign policy or management and workplace conditions. Rather, these emphases emerged because people's interests in citizenship and labor and notions of individualism were rearticulated, albeit in occasionally contradictory ways, with government and industrial interests in military technologies and a cult of efficiency.

Analyzing USPRU mission statements in the global capitalist stage, Chaput demonstrates how mission statements mask and illuminate the often contradictory purposes universities must serve in relation to political, cultural, and economic stakeholders on local, state, national, and international levels. The "rhetorical" face of the university put forth in mission statements, as Chaput shows, produces material consequences in terms of the allocation of resources to—and within—the university, the definition of curriculum, and the legitimation of particular modes of pedagogy and research. The "structural adjustment" that is happening in the USPRU is related, Chaput carefully argues, to the structural adjustment of entire economies abroad because the USPRU model is exported by global economic organizations as a condition of structural adjustment agreements.

In comparison to the thick analysis that constitutes her argument about the contemporary articulations of the USPRU, Chaput's response—working class professionalism—seems slightly thin. Chaput's historical materialism emphasizes macro-level forces—at the level of the USPRU and its interplay with the state and cultural and economic institutions. Yet, Chaput's working class professionalism is constituted primarily by micro-level activities (e.g., classroom pedagogy and transdisciplinary projects) where what she calls "guerilla knowledges" can be created and deployed. Such activity is both interesting and important, especially given the ways Chaput conceptualizes this type of work, but it also needs to be linked to a more fully conceptualized praxis beyond the classroom—in and between the sites where, as Chaput convincingly demonstrates, the rhetorical boundaries of the university are constructed most powerfully. Perhaps another installment is in the offing and will correct for this minor contradiction. I would read it, and others in various fields would likely benefit from it as much as they would from the rich analysis and historical insight that constitutes the bulk of this astute volume.