5. A Case for Rhetorical Investment in Governance

So far, this book has argued that university shared governance is made up of processes that are ceremonial in nature, meaning that they rely on a stance of spectatorship. Not only are these processes ceremonial, they are epideictic: a category of rhetoric that describes discursive phenomena that are grounded in agreement and seek to praise or blame. In praising and blaming, epideictic discourse calls out to participants, invoking already agreed-upon tropes and orthodoxies to gather new followers. Epideictic discourse at once educates and celebrates the status quo but also invites rhetors to participate. When stakeholders participate in ceremonial communication in ways that are unexpected or beyond what is expected, they have the capacity to call attention to, and ultimately change, the values and orthodoxies celebrated by the ceremony. Faculty who want to save shared governance from slipping into busywork can reinvigorate their rhetorical tactics by using epideictic calls to organize their interventions. As la paperson has argued, “you, a scyborg,” can be a “reorganizer of institutional machinery” by using insider status and insight to reform automated systems.1 In the chapters presented here, the ceremonial aspects of shared governance are those automated systems. When faculty break the spectator seal of university ceremony, they can hold the institution accountable to its ideals and perhaps inch closer to materializing some of the promises of higher education. This conclusion argues for a more rhetorical investment in shared governance through participation that “exceeds expectation.”

University shared governance may seem far from urgent today. Yet the extent to which the governance procedures of institutions and other organizations, such as professional associations and corporations, expect assent has consequences for safety, well-being, and democracy. As I drafted this manuscript, the country suffered yet another school shooting, where, after nineteen children were killed, the National Rifle Association (NRA) held its annual convention, a feature of which included confirmation of the election results of the board of directors. In 2019, that board of directors unanimously reelected Wayne LaPierre as executive vice president, a position he has held since 1991. Upon election, LaPierre declared, “United we stand.”2 Although there are certainly malevolent actors to blame in continued gun violence, bystanders are also responsible for our own complicity in assuming that the governance of organizations like the NRA are out of our collective control. Assumed spectatorship in university shared governance is just a microcosm of the assent expected in other sectors. Epideictic rhetoric assumes agreement, but in its assumption of spectatorship, it also invokes and calls out for participation—which is, at the very least, a first step toward change. Faculty can and must answer these epideictic calls.

Faculty must answer the calls of shared governance because public trust of higher education hangs in the balance. One cause of waning trust might be a sinking suspicion among middle America that universities don’t have their best interests in mind and that the internal management of universities, of which shared governance is a part, is creaky, inflexible, and insistent on exclusionary tradition. These suspicions are perhaps not wrong. The way to change these systems is from the inside. As historian of rhetoric Laurent Pernot has argued, ceremonial communication is also a “rejuvenating bath” that reminds a culture of its highest ideals. Ceremonies can be used to awaken new participation and new growth in existing belief. It is a maximalist rhetorical approach that builds on a belief by adding new rhetors to it, those new rhetors performing beyond expectations and pushing the boundary of what was previously accepted.

Sever’s haunting statement—“besides Tuition it is uncertain what the business of a Tutor is, who is left out of the Corporation”—suggests the persistence of exclusion in university governance, both exclusion from the higher reaches of strategic planning and exclusion of particular types of faculty from governance at all. Yet what stopped Sever’s complaints was his inclusion. Shared governance seems to be at a nadir: faculty participation in governance is shaky at best;3 responsibilities of faculty are decreasing;4 and jurisdiction of politicized board members is at an all-time high, eclipsing even the power of the executive.5 An epideictic framework allows for a new perspective on these lows. Governance matters because it makes people matter within the institutional machine.

The idea that governance is ceremonial leads to several conclusions. One is that a stable voice of management in higher education has been built across continents and centuries. This voice is not just textual but also material and responds to a lack of oral discourse about institutional values. Understanding where this voice comes from can help faculty engage more productively with discursive stalemates (on boards, within faculty administration, within campus units, in public discourse about education). This voice of management has become so stable that it is nearly posthuman, meaning that it reproduces on its own with very little human interference. This voice of management, present in governance, maintains social hierarchies, a condition that is consequential for the ability of shared governance to act on urgent crises. If shared governance is going to survive the corporatization of the university, it must embrace its humanity. Often, those who are most familiar with felt needs are those with the least decisive agency; that is, the people who are often most invested in shared governance are the people who are least vested in the marketplace of higher education. Faculty who have remarkable teaching careers at institutions but are not researchers with the disciplinary capacity to change institutions often seek satisfaction and meaning in their institution’s shared governance. The desire for authority and gravitas that beats through shared governance is the desire for mattering. It originates, in part, from precarity. To break the spectator seal of governance, faculty and administration have to understand that investment is not only a problem of representation, finance, or geography; it is a problem of rhetoric.

Investment is rhetorical because it involves not just what is actual but what one believes and desires to be true. And as we have seen throughout this book, desire and belief are not just individual; they are collective in that the desires of a group accumulate over time. As disability theorist Robert McRuer notes in his work on the “critical investment” of the AIDS movement and queer/disability studies, investment can be returned to its Latin root, “to clothe, or surround.” In this way, investment is a critical practice that “refuse[s] methodological distancing in order to further systemic critique and coalition building.”6 Building on McRuer, a rhetorical approach to investment in shared governance similarly clothes or surrounds the institution with faculty who are committed to active and inclusive shared governance. A rhetorical approach to investment in shared governance identifies the values of an institution through its epideictic gesture and then holds the institution accountable to those values. As we have seen in previous chapters, these epideictic strategies include amplification (through repetition, across time and place); value talk/topoi; exaggeration, or exceeding expectations; and the expectation of assent. These strategies, when talked back and acted out by those not in power, interrupt the status quo.

I began this project wanting to know how to navigate my own university’s merger with another institution. Having come to the conclusion that shared governance is so reliant on assent that it has become ceremonial, I now find myself at a next, more troubling question: who is in charge of universities? This seems like it should have an easy, or at least definitive, answer: the board or the president. Yet at the core of this question is who makes universities matter. One answer is that it is the people who answer its calls, the people who participate in its ceremony. When faculty answer the calls of governance, they create openings in its ceremony for new actors, behaviors, and ideas. These openings are places where inclusion can flourish, and inclusion builds governance as a responsive and meaningful system. When people matter in governance, governance matters.