missteps toward publicizing a field

Music: Adiba Parveen: Raqs-e-Bismil (2000) Last week I was carbon copied to an email discussion among a number of leaders in my main professional organization, the National Communication Association. For context, this organization publishes the highest ranking journals in my field, such as the Quarterly Journal of Speech and Communication Monographs, and runs an increasingly huge conference every year the weekend before Thanksgiving (like, 8,000 people huge). The conference has become the MLA of communication and rhetorical studies, a massive black hole of the fall semester, sucking into it all energies on either side and generating massive anxiety for rat-in-the-mouth job seekers. The email conversation to which I was privy concerned whether or not to invite the recovered Marxist and neo-conservative commentator David Horowitz to speak at the next convention in San Diego as part of a new forum series. The honorarium that has been floated to lure him is $3000. No decision has been made at all, folks are just talking about possibilities on email. I hadn't planned to blog my views on this potential invitation until the decision was made, but my colleagues Dana Cloud and Rosa Eberly are urging public discussion and have already blogged on the topic, so, as one says when bungee jumping off a bridge, "what the hell."

Inviting public figures to speak at the National Communication Association Forum (NCA-F) is part of Herbert W. Simon's directed mission to publicize the field of communication studies by amplifying the values of civic engagement and deliberation to and on the public screen (my field started as one for public speaking in 1914 and justified itself in terms of the production of speaker-citizens, and only grew into the research gig for internal, academic respectability). At last year's NCA Simons helped to form and promote two NCA-F events: a discussion with Patrick Fitzgerald that was aired on NPR affiliates as a Justice Talking program; and another discussion among our most well-known scholars about "advocacy in the classroom." Simons is also known as an advocate of the "globalization of rhetoric," which is shorthand for a series of decades-long discussions about expanding the applicability of rhetorical analysis and criticism, promoting rhetoric in other fields, and so on. In a sense, Simons is a kind of bulldog for rhetorical and communication studies and is admirably trying to center the field for the popular media as a resource. Owing to our training, becoming a public intellectual in the United States is difficult because we simply are not trained to speak to the popular media. Simons' project is a kind of pedagogy in public intellectualism, then, and I applaud him for the successes.

Inviting Horowitz to speak at NCA should be seen as a part of this pedagogy of publicity. Horowitz is extremely smart and very good with the popular media; learning how to converse with him in front of cameras is probably a good skill to develop. Unquestionably having him at NCA would create publicity, and this certainly beyond Scott McLemme's write-up about rhetorical studies in The Chronicle of Higher Education. What, however, is the trade off to having someone like Horowitz descend on NCA? What might Horowitz teach us if he comes?

The discussion among leadership thus far has centered on the NCA audience: Cloud has suggested, for example, that there will likely be a noisy, vocal interruption of the forum because of Horowitz's tactics (appeals to decorum as a ruse for silencing, and so on). Robert Hariman, responding out of "personal disgust regarding political stupidity," said that the forum might provide the "rare opportunity to have five uninterrupted minutes to expose him for what he is." There is a clear clash here about the function and effects of deliberation. I have to admit I side with Dana on this, but not for the same reasons. I side with Dana on this issue because, while Hariman is right, I don't think for a minute that's how an engagement with Horowitz would go down on the public screen.

I think the focus needs to be on a different audience, not the choir of NCA, but media publics. Everyone knows that deep-seated beliefs are anchored to values, and values do not change over the course of a couple of hours. Rather, values take a long time to change. Consequently, most complex issues---such as activism in the classroom, the liberalness or conservativeness of education, and so on---take many discussions over months to move minds. Deliberation over controversial issues does clarify them so that we than think on them better, but most rhetoricians will tell you that it usually doesn't change minds. So, having Horowitz at NCA may potentially clarify stances, but it will only confirm what folks already believe going into that room. St. Augstine taught us this about preaching, and we might as well embrace its truth for rhetoric in general. In short, the true "content" of a forum on Horowitz's crusade to stop Prof. Lefty is inconsequential. This is about publicity for publicity's sake.

And hey, as far as organizations go, I have no problem with publicity. I think the issue is of kind: what kind of publicity will Horowitz's presence at NCA invite? To answer this question, I think it is important to consider what the popular press typically says about the academy: remember when Derrida died what The New York Times published as an obituary? Remember the heyday after the so-called Sokal Affair? What about the things said of academics immediately after Nine-eleven? The answers to these questions point us to an assumption that is safe to make: journalists are typically skeptical of the government, and they are skeptical of academics. Their habit is to be suspicious. Second, the stories written about the academy feed a popular fantasy of professorial life (which TIAA-CREFT commercials only corroborate): we live lives of leisure, pontificating in leather-chairs surrounded by mahogany bookshelves. Horowitz has been popular in the media for a reason: what he says confirms the fantasy of the arrogant, well-off, "liberal" professor brainwashing young people into queer commies. He contorts and de-contextualizes what really goes on at the university to encourage and recirculate the fantasy toward his own political ends. The force of form would be behind his appearance, and we can easily predict how it will appear in the newspaper (not pro-NCA).

In an era when even 60 Minutes lampoons academics, joining forces in the call to erase tenure, do we really think the publicity that Horowitz will invite will be good PR for communication scholars? No matter how civil, good natured, and productively clarifying any discussion with Horowitz will be, the write-up in the paper, the television spot, and the radio broadcasts are not going to highlight any of it. While we may learn something from the experience, and while I agree we should pursue and promote public intellectualism, paying Horowitz to teach us something about media relations is a bad idea.