Weasel Summation
Merrill D. Whitburn
Exposé on Academic Corruption and Denial of Human Rights
at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY and University of Washington, Seattle, WA.
Compromised principles for personal gain and academic advantage without merit.
The author attended all sessions of the course. At the final session, a graduate student became so incensed that he made a recording of the Whitburn’s summation as evidence so that he could sue the university later. The author obtained a copy of the tape and transcribed it verbatim in order to support the contentions made in his article Rensselaer’s Weasel (Mustela rhetorica). Ellipses in the transcript denote the omission of incomprehensible material. The editor’s comments appear in brackets.
[The one session at which Whitburn let forth cost fifteen doctoral students $121.00/hr each for a total $1,815. The required 3-credit course cost each student $4,363.00 for a total of $65,445.
Whitburn absented himself the first two weeks and nobody substituted. Twelve weeks consisted of questions on an inordinate amount of reading handed out the previous week and absolutely no discussion by Whitburn. A novice teaching assistant would probably have done better handling the remaining sessions. The final examination consisted of prepublished questions so convoluted that PhD students held a special meeting to discuss them.
The ambiguous questions had nothing to do with the course or technical communication. A consensus concluded that they made no sense and decided to “throw mud at the wall” because Whitburn would not know the difference. In a later survey, they claimed that they all threw their mud and received “A” grades except for the author whom Whitburn arranged expulsion for complaining about the fraud. A reasonable person will ask what any of the following ramble has to do with technical and graphic communication.]
Whitburn rambled:
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Well, somehow fate brought us together a few months ago, and we shared our lives with one another. We've gone from I to B, from Isocrates to Bitzer. Our subject has been rhetoric, and you have been exposed to a few of the better nuclei in the ova - in chronological order, for the most part in their own words. Since each of you is unique, I hope and trust that each of your experiences was unique and will bear unique fruit.
I have always tried to start with your perceptions, your reactions to our authors. We have accepted many of those reactions. I learned from them. We have also tried to improve them through discussion. When we have exhausted the points you wished to explore, I have asked questions to stimulate additional discussion, and I have presented my own reactions, always encouraging you to recognize my reactions as my own and to be critical, to be suspicious. I have had at least three goals:
1. The first is selfish; I wanted to learn through your criticism.
2. I hoped my comments may be helpful to you. Just as your reactions taught us, I hoped my reactions might teach you - teach you . . . are important to determining your own identity, not an unimportant quest.
3. The sum of my statements constitutes one more modern view of rhetoric offered for your consideration.
I can speak for myself about what I have learned from you this semester. I have said a lot of things to a lot of classes [such as?], but I don't really ever reflect on what I learned from them. [what, never?] I truly believe that I have learned more from you than any other class I have taught and I appreciate that [He should: the class consisted of fifteen mature students seasoned in rhetoric and technical communication. They knew: he did not]. Any statement suggesting where we have been this semester will, of course, be a personal statement, and so I want to make it overtly that, as ever, encouraging you to be critical [The class had no problem with that]. I want to explore some of what we have covered this semester with the context of my own thinking.
We ended this semester with Bitzer, who was concerned about the ways situations or problems call discourse into being, the way defeats or obstacles to something needing to be done promotes language [Like this rendition!].
[Whitrack the Weasel, Industry Consultant]
A concern for defects is where I began years ago. I was concerned about defects in corporations and in universities. Let me begin with corporations. The discourse was embarrassingly bad - written discourse, oral discourses, pictorial discourse.
The first problem I thought I perceived was too great a focus on style and punctuation, [they] were placed at the end of product development processes with the task of clearing up the style and punctuation of the materials they received from others. The trouble is, they couldn't really improve the style much without knowing the subject, and they weren't knowledgeable, say, about computer science in a computer corporation; also, materials were inaccurate and missing.
Also, materials usually described products rather than providing instructions for use, but to provide such instructions you had to know audiences from all over the world. You had to know cultures and their history. They didn't. Materials often called for graphical treatment, but insufficient awareness of graphics and the history of all were problems here. So focus on style and punctuation and isolation from knowledge about subject, audience, and graphics. Much more was involved, but these can be suggestive.
If style was largely the focus of writing in industry, the second problem was the approach to style. Writers constrained their style by formulas like readability formulas. The goal was to write words of few syllables and sentences of few words. I don't have time to demonstrate how misleading such formula approaches can be now, but we've touched on it during the semester.
Many writers were aware of these problems, but a third problem - their powerlessness - made it difficult to do anything about it. Corporations saw technology as applied science, and that theory of innovation has given science importance and diminished humanities. Furthermore, a view of writing as improving style - punctuation hardly calls for much in the way of power; writers don't have to know about audiences, technology, or graphics. And anyway, corporations themselves didn't have complete power. Governments imposed contracts on contracts [sic] on corporations that mandated formulaic approaches like readability formulas.
Writers sought help from universities. They wanted programs that would give them stature and better prepare writers with a knowledge of things like audiences, technology and graphics. They hoped academics in their field would consult in government and industry and encourage reforms. They hoped academics would help them learn through research. But the major discourse commodity in universities focused on literature and around writing and industry. The only audience concerned with writing focused on freshman English.
[Now for the Weasel, Researcher Extraordinaire]
My knowledge of the history of science led me to believe that many of the problems confronting writers in industry resulted from the successes of science. My research seemed to confirm that belief [What research?]. A major goal in science was contemplation - the discovery of true representative reality, what is, and their presentation so that others could understand them. We find people often focusing on contemplation rather than action, on what is rather than what ought to be, on understanding rather than judgment. Little wonder that writing problems tend to be ignored.
[The Weasel as Philosopher]
Readability formulas certainly are supported by the florification [sic], the desire for simplicity, and the need to place instruments between humans and their problems to minimize human error. The emphasis on specialization led to isolation in one area after another. Universities were isolated from industry and government; professionals like computer scientists were isolated from knowledge . . . like speech, writing, and history that they needed to know. Humanists, like writers were isolated from technological knowledge and like graphics. People engaging problems discovered that educational institutes were broken up in ways so that graduates were not fully equipped to help in solving problems. Definitions were off [To where?].
[The Weasel as Rhetorician]
I turned to the history of rhetoric for help and discovered much that I found fruitful, that I found Isocrates helpful. He was concerned about discourse . . . response to problem solving like Bitzer. He was fully aware of the complexity of discourse situations. His contemporary Plato [this must be the chronology the Weasel referred to earlier] was something else again. Plato concerned with universal representations of truth, achieved by moving away from the concrete world of abstraction. There was a move toward the otherworldly. The permanent became more important than the changing mood, more important than body, abstract over concrete, contemplative over action. In many respects Christians like Augustine strengthened the value of the worldly absolutes and the mind over the body. Certainly science in many of its respects supported contemplation, the abstract, the permanent and the rhetorical laws. These were powerful forces moving attention away from the concerns of rhetoric.
I also found Plato problematic in his insistence that the first step in solving a problem is definitions. There reason is that everywhere I seem to turn in modern society today, I find definitions often frozen into institutions. Isolation and narrowness that prevent fruitful engagement of problems. Definition is essential but should be delayed as long as possible in the discovery of process or inventive process. [Plato was a problem, he insisted on defining the problem. Everyone seems to be defining problems early these days. Better wait as long as possible to define a problem.] Plato was right in attacking previous rhetoricians for implying that it didn't seem to matter which side of an argument you supported. But his attack has too much . . . Quintillian was right in suggesting that there is a need for men (and today we would say women) [especially as the Weasel surrounds himself with a circle of sycophantic womynx (Revelation: Womyn and Womynx)] to be able to learn how to develop discourse in response to problems. Cicero and Quintillian made rhetoric the crown of education, and to my mind, especially in an emerging information society, we need to rethink the goals for humanity, and rhetoric is the art to help us do so.
We see rhetoric being progressively narrowed in antiquity and later. The focus of diverse studies in antiquity is forensic rhetoric, which highlights persuasion - a definition that . . . might accept but not one that Isocrates, Quintillian, Bitzer, or I could entertain. Isocrates and Cicero excluded science and mathematics from rhetoric. These subjects were not considered useful, nor could they be understood by the audience. Again they could not be excluded.
Aristotle the inclination toward . . . by defusing rhetoric as the development of forms argument and distinguishing it from specific subjects - even though he himself in practice includes much in his discussion - one of the sources of his richness. In Cicero we begin to see rhetoric as a process of beautifying, rather than a process of developing notions of what to do or say.
If you are inclined to search for universals about rhetoric - if you pay no attention to specific contents and problems - you will find little to say about content and not too much about organization. You can find . . . to say about style, grammar, and punctuation. As concerned as Aristotle with narrow and sharp definitions cuts across content and arrangement from rhetoric and leaves it style - which has certainly been the notion of writing in 20th century corporations and often in freshman English.
Rhetoric in the Isocratian voice - or in the voice of Quintillian - had one more flurry of . . . in the Renaissance - among the humanists, the importance of breadth was emphasized - you made the notion, the Renaissance man or woman [there goes the neighborhood - those womynx again]. The active, engaged life was highlighted. But the rise of science in the 17th century - combined with the prevalence of Christianity gave absolutes on universals and contemplation a stature they have not been lost even today. The stage is set for rhetoric to become identified with sublime bombast or propaganda [so that is where the Weasel learned his propaganda and bombast: he must be a Christian Scientist]. The demise of Greek and Latin schools in the 19th century universities further diminished rhetoric.
The notion of specialization gave rise in the 19th century to the modern university - an aggregation of independent departments with little or no content between them. The world of discourse studies was hopelessly fragmented. Linguistics went the way of science. English went the way of good literature, although you find some good rhetoric of literature occasionally and a stepchild called freshman English. Speech split into rhetoric and the scientific approach to discourse; both concern only oral discourse, however, you get the interesting situation where literature studies the understanding of dramas and speech performance with little communication between the two areas. Speech became strong enough to support the Cornell School of Rhetoric. After World War II [the big one] technical writing emerged with enough strength to support rhetoric at schools like Carnegie Mellon and RPI.
The study of rhetoric has always been with us, although in the 18th and 19th centuries, as we have seen with Whatelly, Spencer, and DeQuincey only a diminished thing. But with Richards and Burke and Perelanier and the Cornell School of Rhetoric and Carnegie Mellon and RPI rhetoric is on the rise again. From that rhetoric must emerge from the flux of life. We must focus on achieving in actual contexts. It involves the study of human choice in what we do.
The task could hardly be more difficult. Only the possible survey of past insights, the possible survey of the situations that promoted these insights and with the help of these surveys the possible grasp of the unique totality of its complexity - could enable us to grasp all the conflicting demands inherent in our situation.
The consequences of commitment to rhetoric are extraordinary. Attention shifts from discoveries about the physical world to the world of human action, and the former are brought much more under the control of human purpose. The university, instead, being isolated from government and industry, becomes a collaborative partner in problem-solving. The world of action - government and industry - is once more helped by experience - the university. The university is no longer located in a place, it is in industry and in government and it is lifelong - people study in the university all their lives.
Rhetoric again becomes the crown of education, helping unify a badly fragmented university. It is the center that holds, helping engineering with its discourse, and so on always concerned with actual contexts. Everything is relevant. Take our economic system for instance. It promotes secrecy in corporations. If corporations do not exchange information about failures and successes, they do not learn as much as possible from one another limiting overall improvements and preventing the highest quality for people. Corporations keeping problems to themselves prevents those outside - like those in universities - from learning about them and addressing them - and so and so on. I wish we could say that what we have been concerned with this semester is achieving quality in our lives. But what we are concerned with now is the problem of their survival. We are everywhere hemmed in by dangers [paranoia about satirists] - atomic power, the environment. We are entering a major period of transition.
Major problems glare at us everywhere and cry for change. In engaging these problems, we must avoid narrowness. We must be informed by experience. We must not be remote. We must be supported by practice. We must work on our character. At the last of everything will be discourse. Rhetoric will be crucial.
[Conclusion . . . we fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our (rhetoric), whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender (to sub-literacy): apparently, all very "fruitful." Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Sir Winston Spencer Churchill must turn in their graves at this denial of freedom and sub-literacy, especially in a doctoral-level course taught by one who holds a named professorship in English at a prestigious American university. Current tuition at Rensselaer costs $1,454.00 per credit hour. Doctoral students must now pay $17,450.00 for four politically controlled, required courses with content no better than reported here. No academic freedom exists in these classes and most doctoral students do not graduate because of a policy of coerced attrition. Surely, high school and college counselors have a duty to warn potential students of these practices.]
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© Copyright 1998 by Paul Trummel |
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