“Notes” in “Opening Ceremony”
Notes
Introduction
“Memorial of the Tutors and Fellows,” Colonial Society of Massachusetts, https://www.colonialsociety.org/node/1645.
“Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities,” American Association of University Professors, https://www.aaup.org/report/statement-government-colleges-and-universities.
“Accreditation in the United States,” U.S. Department of Education, https://www2.ed.gov/print/admins/finaid/accred/accreditation.html.
Steven Bahls, Shared Governance in Times of Change: A Practical Guide for Universities and Colleges (Washington, D.C.: AGB Press, 2014).
“Shared Governance at Vanderbilt University,” Shared Governance Committee, Vanderbilt University, https://www.vanderbilt.edu/provost/wp-content/uploads/sites/390/2022/08/Shared-Governance-Final-Report.pdf.
“Reaffirming the Principles of Academic Government,” Academe 103, no. 1 (January–February 2017), https://www.aaup.org/article/reaffirming-principles-academic-government.
Robert Birnbaum, “The End of Shared Governance: Looking Ahead or Looking Back,” New Directions for Higher Education, no. 127 (2004): 5–22; Benjamin Ginsberg, The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
“The 2021 AAUP Shared Governance Survey: Findings on Faculty Roles by Decision-Making Areas,” Bulletin of the AAUP, July 2021, 82–96, https://www.aaup.org/file/2021-AAUP-Shared-Governance-Survey-Findings-on-Faculty-Roles_0.pdf.
Timothy Reese Cain, “The First Attempts to Unionize the Faculty,” Teachers College Record 112, no. 3 (2010): 876–913.
Eva Cherniavsky, “Faculty Governance in Academia,” Against the Current, no. 219 (July–August 2022), https://againstthecurrent.org/atc219/faculty-governance-in-academia/.
William G. Tierney, “A Cultural Analysis of Shared Governance: The Challenges Ahead,” in Higher Education: Handbook of Theory and Research, ed. J. C. Smart, 85–132 (New York: Springer, 2004).
“Tutor Sever’s Final Argument,” August 23, 1723, Colonial Society of Massachusetts, https://www.colonialsociety.org/node/807.
Though remnants of his legacy stand: Sever Hall, named for his great-grandson, is an architectural landmark on Harvard’s campus today.
Sara Ahmed, Complaint! (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2021), 9.
Carmen Kynard, “Black as Gravitas: Reflections of a Black Composition Studies,” Spark: A 4C for Equality Journal 2 (2020), http://sparkactivism.com/volume-2-call/vol-2-intro/black-as-gravitas/.
Kathryn Gindlesparger, “Trust on Display: The Epideictic Potential of Institutional Governance,” College English 83, no. 2 (2020): 127–46, https://library.ncte.org/journals/ce/issues/v83-2.
Nedra Reynolds, “Interrupting Our Way to Agency: Feminist Cultural Studies and Composition,” in Feminism and Composition Studies: In Other Words, ed. Susan C. Jarratt and Lynn Worsham, 58–73 (New York: Modern Language Association, 1998).
Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria [The orator’s education], ed. and trans. Donald A. Russell (Cambridge, Mass.: Loeb, 2001), 3.7.26.
Laurent Pernot, Epideictic Rhetoric: Questioning the Stakes of Ancient Praise (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015), 98.
Pernot, 95.
Nicole Loraux, The Invention of Athens: The Funeral Oration in the Classical City (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006).
Max Nesterak and Tony Webster, “The Bad Cops: How Minneapolis Protects Its Worst Police Officers Until It’s Too Late,” Minnesota Reformer, December 15, 2020, https://minnesotareformer.com/2020/12/15/the-bad-cops-how-minneapolis-protects-its-worst-police-officers-until-its-too-late/. In Philadelphia, for example, a 2021 independent review of the Philadelphia Police Department found that only one-half of a percent of civilian allegations resulted in consequences beyond a reprimand. See “Collaborative Review and Reform of the PPD Police Board of Inquiry,” Police Advisory Commission, https://www.phila.gov/media/20210521150500/Collaborative-Review-and-Reform-of-the-PPD-Police-Board-of-Inquiry.pdf.
Jennifer Kavanagh, Katherine Grace Carman, Maria DeYoreo, Nathan Chandler, and Lynn E. Davis, The Drivers of Institutional Trust and Distrust: Exploring Components of Trustworthiness (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation, 2020), xix, https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA112-7.html.
Cynthia Sheard, “The Public Value of Epideictic Rhetoric,” College English 58, no. 7 (1996): 771.
Although I use ceremonial and epideictic somewhat interchangeably so as to make the text more accessible to readers outside of the discipline, there are important differences I hope to convey. Epideictic is an ancient rhetorical tradition that is both studied and present today, with invitation at the core; I think of rituals as a kind of epideictic, and tradition is a pattern of expectation with associated behaviors that may or may not invite participation.
1. Tradition: Rechartering Governance
“TJU Charter of Incorporation (1969),” https://jdc.jefferson.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1000&context=tjucharter.
“Application by Philadelphia University to Amend Articles of Incorporation,” Pennsylvania Department of Education, Department of State Corporate Bureau, June 12, 2017.
The legislative act that appropriates funding for Southern Illinois Normal School—what would become Southern Illinois University—is housed in the Illinois State Legislature archives. Because the state of Illinois did not maintain minutes from the floor during that time period, there is no record of discussion about the founding of the institution among members of the legislature.
Carolyn Miller, “Genre as Social Action,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 70, no. 2 (1984): 151–57.
Linda Colley, The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen: Warfare, Constitutions, and the Making of the Modern World (New York: Liveright, 2021).
Colley, 65.
The accumulation and remixing of information over time is a rhetorical concept covered in Jim Ridolfo and Dànielle Nicole DeVoss, “Composing for Recomposition: Rhetorical Velocity and Delivery,” January 15, 2009, https://kairos.technorhetoric.net/13.2/topoi/ridolfo_devoss/velocity.html.
A useful task outside the bounds of this manuscript would be to catalog the textual features of the nine colonial college charters. These charters, as the Harvard website for its own charter says, copy royal charters of the seventeenth century, as well as the iconography of British institutions of the time, such as Oxford’s Wadham College. Even as the culture of American higher education institutions changed in response to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Enlightenment ideals, the genre conventions—the blueprint—for new institutional founding documents continued to copy the Harvard model. See https://guides.library.harvard.edu/c.php?g=880222&p=6323072#Transcription%20of%20the%20Charter%20of%201650.
Edwin D. Duryea and Donald T. Williams, The Academic Corporation: A History of College and University Governing Boards (New York: Routledge, 2013).
Michele Kennerly, Editorial Bodies: Perfection and Rejection in Ancient Rhetoric and Poetics (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2018).
Kennerly, 168.
Kathleen Lamp, A City of Marble: The Rhetoric of Augustan Rome (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2013).
“About the Charter,” Dartmouth College, https://www.library.dartmouth.edu/digital/digital-collections/dartmouth-college-charter.
Whitaker solicited these “worthy and generous contributors to the charity, viz., The Right Honorable William, Earl of Dartmouth, the Honorable Sir Sidney Stafford Smythe, Knight, one of the barons of his Majesty’s Court of Exchequer, John Thorton, of Clapham, in the County of Surrey, Esquire . . . to receive the several sums of money which should be contributed, and to be trustees for the contributors to such charity.”
Thelin describes how Wheelock “parlayed Moor’s Indian School” into an entirely different institution sited in a colony that hadn’t even been created at the outset of the charter. Thelin, A History of American Higher Education, 2nd ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011). When farmers and merchants in western Massachusetts complained that they did not have access to a college of their own, Thelin writes that Wheelock “urged the dissidents to secede from Massachusetts and create a new colony. His contribution would be to bring with him the collegiate charter for Dartmouth—on the condition that he would then be installed as governor of the new colony” (34).
Joan Wallach Scott, “Fantasy Echo: History and the Construction of Identity,” Critical Inquiry 27, no. 2 (2001): 284–304.
Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001).
“Act of Incorporation,” Howard University, https://150.howard.edu/facts/howard-university-charter.
In the wake of the country’s racial justice protests of summer 2020, and after alumna Kamala Harris was elected vice president, the university saw a wave of corporate philanthropy. “HBCUs are cool now,” one faculty senator told me. The university is working toward a $785 million capital campaign for modernizing its buildings. See https://thedig.howard.edu/all-stories/howards-785-million-capital-investment-where-funding-coming-0.
Imani Light, “An Open Letter to Nikole Hannah-Jones from a Howard Faculty Member,” Medium, July 12, 2021, https://howardprof.medium.com/an-open-letter-to-nikole-hannah-jones-from-a-howard-faculty-member-ad1fb3f9c05b.
Krista Ratcliffe, Rhetorical Listening: Gender, Identification, Whiteness (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2006).
Julie Jung, Revisionary Rhetoric, Feminist Pedagogy, and Multigenre Texts (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005), 59.
“UGA Founders’ Day, Exhibit of Charter,” University Libraries, University of Georgia, https://libs.uga.edu/events/charter.
Brown University lost the parchment copy of the section “the Exemplification” of its charter in a hurricane-related flood in 1938, a loss documented in its assiduously annotated “The Charter of Brown University.” See https://www.brown.edu/about/administration/corporation/sites/brown.edu.about.administration.corporation/files/uploads/charter-of-brown-university_08312020.pdf.
William and Mary’s “original” charter was lost when the university was being used as a military hospital during the Revolutionary War; the excerpt read at Charter Day is a reconstruction. See https://libraries.wm.edu/exhibits/charter-transfer-and-acts-1888-and-1906#:~:text=The%20Royal%20Charter%20is%20the,the%20original%20Board%20of%20Visitors.
State laws dictate what documents institutions must retain and what they must make public. Public institutions, perhaps obviously, have mandates to make more of their information public, but private institutions may also have dictates to retain and make public certain institutional documents public, depending on the amount and type of state funding they accept. See https://www.archivists.org/publications/proceedings/accesstoarchives/08_Mark_GREENE.pdf.
Ridolfo and DeVoss, “Composing for Recomposition.”
Brown Corporation Records I, 112; cited in Appendix II.3 of Brown Charter.
2. Status: Executives Are Awe-some
Matthew Roller, Models from the Past in Roman Culture: A World of Exempla (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
The Stoic rhetorical tradition, which originated in Greece in the fourth century B.C.E. and became important in ancient Rome, insists that an individual is in sole control of their own destiny and must block out chaotic forces that prevent them from fulfilling their natural place in the world. See Lois Agnew, Outward, Visible Propriety: Stoic Philosophy and Eighteenth-Century British Rhetorics (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2008). The centrality of the self as a restraining force against the world has persisted in the popular imagination of one of the components of masculinized strength. The gym brand Stoic, for example, makes power lifting accessories, vitamin supplements, and clothing that “demonstrate the mental fortitude required to accept and overcome the resistances faced in life.” https://www.lift.net/brand/stoic/.
The disciplinary divides between classics, communication, and rhetoric are visible in the descriptions and analysis of ancient concepts like exempla. Roller may not describe exempla as epideictic because they technically do not fit the description of ancient epideictic: they’re multimodal; they don’t follow the checklist format of encomium; and they don’t celebrate a birthday, civic holiday, or funeral. However, an approach to texts that contain epideictic gesture can use heuristics and analysis like Roller’s to prompt thinking about the discourse of praise and blame from any time period.
Roller, Models from the Past, 5.
Michele Kennerly and Damien Pfister, eds., Ancient Rhetorics and Digital Networks (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2018).
Lamp, City of Marble.
Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria.
Pernot, Epideictic Rhetoric, 58.
Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007), 180.
Barad, 172.
James Porter, “Intertextuality and the Discourse Community,” Rhetoric Review 5, no. 1 (1986): 34–47.
April C. Armstrong, “A Brief History of the Architecture of Nassau Hall,” Mudd Manuscript Library Blog, June 17, 2016, https://blogs.princeton.edu/mudd/2015/06/a-brief-history-of-the-architecture-of-nassau-hall/.
“Nassau Hall Faculty Room Video,” Princeton University Art Museum, https://artmuseum.princeton.edu/video/nassau-hall-faculty-room.
Charles Willson Peale, George Washington after the Battle of Princeton (1779–82), Princeton University Art Museum, https://artmuseum.princeton.edu/collections/objects/45234.
Roller, Models from the Past, 5.
“Acres of Diamonds,” Temple University, https://www.temple.edu/about/history-traditions/acres-diamonds.
Roller, Models from the Past.
Nathan Kleger, “28,000 Graves Being Shifted from Monument Cemetery,” Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, June 6, 1956.
Katrina Ohstrom, “Watery Graves,” Hidden City: Exploring Philadelphia’s Urban Landscape (blog), September 30, 2011, https://hiddencityphila.org/2011/09/watery-graves/.
Ann Weaver Hart, foreword to Temple University: 125 Years of Service to Philadelphia, the Nation, and the World, by James W. Hilty (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010), 44.
Pernot, Epideictic Rhetoric, 38.
Julie Christie, “Students Call for Board of Trustees Chair to Step Down,” Temple News, September 26, 2017, https://temple-news.com/students-call-board-trustees-chair-step/.
Rhondda Robinson Thomas, Call My Name, Clemson: Documenting the Black Experience in an American University Community (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2020).
Princeton recently renamed the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and Wilson College in response to protests over the former president and alumnus’s “significant” and “consequential” racism. See “President Eisgruber’s Message,” Princeton University Office of Communications, https://www.princeton.edu/news/2020/06/27/president-eisgrubers-message-community-removal-woodrow-wilson-name-public-policy. The university’s Committee on Naming seeks to balance campus iconography with university values. See “Principles to Govern Renaming and Changes to Campus Iconography,” Princeton University Committee on Naming, https://namingcommittee.princeton.edu/principles.
3. Ownership: Exclusive Authorship Practices
Geoffrey Cross, Collaboration and Conflict: A Contextual Exploration of Group Writing and Positive Emphasis (Cresskill, N.J.: Hampton Press, 1994).
Leigh Patel, “Desiring Diversity and Backlash: White Property Rights in Higher Education,” Urban Review 47 (2015): 657–75.
“2021 AAUP Shared Governance Survey.”
Rebecca Walton, Kristen Moore, and Natasha Jones, Technical Communication after the Social Justice Turn: Building Coalitions for Action (New York: Routledge, 2019), 28.
For two good examples, see https://www.cmu.edu/policies/university-policy-development/index.html and https://policies.vt.edu/PolicyProcess.
“Glossary of Policy Development Terms,” Carnegie Mellon University, https://www.cmu.edu/policies/glossary-terms/policy-development-terms.html. I chose Carnegie Mellon because it has one of the more transparent processes I reviewed and is likely doing more than most to facilitate collaboration.
“Committee on University Policy Development,” Carnegie Mellon University, https://www.cmu.edu/policies/university-policy-development/policy-board.html.
Ridolfo and DeVoss, “Composing for Recomposition.”
Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, 3.3.1.
Quintilian, 3.3.10.
Porter, “Intertextuality and the Discourse Community,” 34.
Lisa O’Malley, “Universities Go beyond DEI to Become Anti-racist Institutions,” Insight into Diversity (blog), February 11, 2022, https://www.insightintodiversity.com/universities-go-beyond-dei-to-become-anti-racist-institutions/.
Universities have never been compelled to have AIDS policies. Before 1990, people living with AIDS were not named as a protected class but were covered under section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. After 1990, the Americans with Disabilities Act protected individuals with HIV/AIDS. See https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/knowyourrightshivaidsfactsheet.pdf.
Paulette Curkin, in discussion with the author, June 2022.
Caleb Hale, “SIUC Chancellor Has Personal and Professional Problems with Issue,” Southern Illinoisan, July 31, 2004.
Caleb Hale, “Poshard Examines Wendler’s Demotion at SIUC,” Southern Illinoisan, November 18, 2006.
According to the mission statement, “SIU embraces a unique tradition of access and opportunity, inclusive excellence, innovation in research and creativity, and outstanding teaching focused on nurturing student success.” See https://siu.edu/about-siu/mission.php.
4. Courtesy: Robert’s Rules of Order Newly Revised
Christopher P. Loss, Robert’s Rules of Order, and Why It Matters for Colleges and Universities Today (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2021), viii.
“The Tradition of White Presidents at Black Colleges,” Journal of Blacks in Higher Education 16 (1997): 93–99; Marybeth Gasman and Thai-Huy Nguyen, “Myths Dispelled: A Historical Account of Diversity and Inclusion at HBCUs,” New Directions for Higher Education 170 (2015): 5–15.
“The ‘Conventions’ of the Conventions: The Practices of Black Political Citizenship,” Colored Conventions Project: Bringing 19th-Century Black Organizing to Digital Life, https://coloredconventions.org/black-political-practices/correct-conduct/.
Carmen Kynard, Vernacular Insurrections: Race, Black Protest, and the New Century in Composition-Literacies Studies (Albany: SUNY Press, 2013), 66.
“Who Is RRA,” Robert’s Rules Association, https://robertsrules.com/who-is-rra/.
Henry M. Robert III, Daniel H. Honemann, Thomas J. Balch, Daniel E. Seabold, and Shmuel Gerber, Robert’s Rules of Order Newly Revised, 12th ed. (New York: Hachette, 2020), xxxiv.
“DAR Presidents General,” Daughters of the American Revolution, https://www.dar.org/national-society/dar-presidents-general.
Keith Grant-Davie, “Rhetorical Situations and Their Constituents,” Rhetoric Review 15, no. 2 (1997): 270.
Reynolds, “Interrupting Our Way to Agency.”
Reynolds, 59.
Reynolds, 59.
Cross, Collaboration and Conflict.
5. A Case for Rhetorical Investment in Governance
la paperson, A Third University Is Possible (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017).
“NRA EVP Wayne LaPierre and Other Officers Elected Unanimously,” American Rifleman, April 19, 2019, https://www.americanrifleman.org/content/nra-evp-wayne-lapierre-and-other-officers-elected-unanimously/.
The authors of the recent AAUP report on contingent faculty involvement in governance note that one of the “more frustrating aspects of the survey” was “the high number of ‘not sure’ responses from senate leaders to questions about policies at their own institutions.” See American Association of University Professors, The Inclusion in Governance of Faculty Members Holding Contingent Appointments (Washington, D.C.: AAUP, 2012), https://www.aaup.org/report/inclusion-governance-faculty-members-holding-contingent-appointments.
“2021 AAUP Shared Governance Survey.”
Lindsay Ellis, Jack Stripling, and Dan Bauman, “The New Order: How the Nation’s Partisan Divisions Consumed Public-College Boards and Warped Higher Education,” Chronicle of Higher Education, September 25, 2020, https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-new-order.
Robert McRuer, “Critical Investments: AIDS, Christopher Reeve, and Queer/Disability Studies,” in Thinking the Limits of the Body, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Gail Weiss, 145–63 (Albany: SUNY Press, 2003).
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