I’ve got another post brewing, but I’m in the mood today for something a little lighter. So you’ll get three different sections, each of which will tell you something small about the way that I think, and they’ll connect up by the end.
Names
When I first arrived at Syracuse, our department wasn’t actually a department, but a program, with a Director rather than a Chair. If you work outside of academia, you would rightly be inclined to ask “So what?” and on a day-to-day basis, there was little practical difference for those of us who worked in the Writing Program. Any large-scale organization (like a university), however, reaches a size where stuff like this begins to matter in subtle ways. Sure, there’s a little awkwardness when someone asks what department you’re in, when you’re technically not. But there are also plenty of examples where the distinction might become more relevant: perhaps a Chair’s salary is calculated differently from a Director’s, or Departments receive more resources than Programs. Where there are HR units doing their damnedest to standardize terminology across various divisions (or Colleges, in the case of a university), there are opportunities for the nominal distinction to gain material consequence.
We successfully became a Department almost a decade ago now, and when we did so, we had what is actually a very rare opportunity in academia. I’ve written before about the somewhat unusual disciplinary status of rhetorical work, but the upside of fitting somewhat oddly into things is that there’s no particular standard or expectation when it comes to names for programs like ours. Most doctoral degrees in my field are located inside English Departments; there aren’t so many stand-alone programs (like our own) that there’s any consensus about what to call ourselves. For a while, we called the discipline itself “rhetoric and composition,” but “writing studies” has also gained ground in recent years. Our department’s major is a BA in Rhetoric and Writing while our doctorate is officially a PhD in Composition and Cultural Rhetoric. From the outside, these are vanishingly small distinctions, each of which means slightly different things1. But that opportunity I mentioned above? We had the chance to pick a name, beyond simply converting to a Department of Writing (though we could also have done that).
Eventually, we settled on the Department of Writing Studies, Rhetoric, and Composition.
In one sense, this is okay, although it wasn’t an option that I favored especially. My biggest objections to it came from very different places, though. As faculty, each of us wanted a name that best reflected what it was that we thought we were doing—we were concerned with how the name represented us. And that’s an entirely valid way to approach the naming process. But it also imagines that we ourselves are the primary audience for that name. Ultimately, we were more worried about what the name said to ourselves than we were about what it said to other people (admin, faculty, students) about us. And I don’t think that we gave sufficient weight to how that broader audience encounters that name.
Here’s one example: courses at Syracuse are named with a department prefix and a course number, and that prefix is three letters. When we were the Writing Program, our prefix was WRT. And we used it almost interchangeably with “writing”—we thought nothing of saying WRT105 aloud as “Writing 105,” for instance. Nearly 10 years later, we are still WRT, despite the name change. In no small part, I’d argue that changing our department to a 4-word name meant that there was no obvious, clear alternative to WRT. Technically, using the first three initials would result in WSR, which I’ve seen sometimes, but “studies” is the least essential term, so I’ve also seen us referenced as WRC. And I tend to use WSRC when I refer to the department in official communications. The majority of our students, then, are taking WRT courses in the WSRC department, and some of them major in RW (with a number of our courses taught by CCR doctoral students!). In the grand scheme of things, does this really matter? Nah. But maybe it makes things a little more complicated than it needs to?
Origins
This is going to sound even more finicky, I know, but if I had my preference, I would rather be the Department of Composition, Rhetoric, and Writing Studies (or just Writing), because I’m someone who pays attention to acronyms2. Again, this has an impact on how other people encounter our department—there are literally thousands of people on campus whose primary interaction with our department occurs through that course prefix.
Why would CRWS (or CRW) feel better to me? For that answer, I need to zip back to the 5th century BCE. Rhetoric isn’t necessarily a practice that was “invented” per se, but insofar as it has an origin story, it’s traced back to a seaside city on the isle of Sicily, Syracuse. (A-ha!) The town is perhaps better known as the birthplace, a couple of centuries later, of the mathematician Archimedes, but in the 5th century, upon the overthrow of a tyrant, the cityfolk needed to develop systems to redistribute property and to conceive of some sort of system of justice other than the application of the tyrant’s whims. The court, insofar as it tries to determine what happened in the past, and the legislature, as a body tasked with figuring out what to do in the future, are two of the traditional and enduring sites of rhetoric. And as the citizens of Syracuse began to advocate for themselves in both milieus, a secondary industry rose up of scholars who’d offer to help prepare them to do so, the first(ish) rhetoric teachers. And the first among them to set down rhetorical principles in a more formal sense was a fellow by the name of Corax3. Corax is the ancient Greek word for crow (or raven).
So yeah, this is fussy, and completely obscure, but how cool would it have been to name the department in a way that acronyms to CRoW at the university named after the Sicilian city where rhetoric was “invented”?
[This is completely beside my point here, but if you want to know why some people (Plato, e.g.) found rhetoric so annoying, and others (like me) find it appealing, this is one of the few stories of Corax that’s survived. Corax had become wealthy teaching the newly freed citizens of Syracuse these rhetorical strategies, when a student named Tisias approached him. Tisias asked Corax to teach him (initially for free) and then, once Tisias won his first case in court, he would use the winnings to pay Corax’s fee. Corax agreed, but afterwards, Tisias avoided going to court (perhaps teaching others Corax’s strategies (and charging his own fee)?). So Corax sued Tisias to recover his tuition, arguing that if he (Corax) won, then Tisias would have to fork over the money, and if Tisias won (thereby winning his first case in court), Tisias would also have to pay the money. For his part, Tisias countersued, claiming that if he made his case, he shouldn’t have to pay the fee. And if Corax won, then Tisias (having lost) still wouldn’t yet owe him for the teaching. Allegedly, the judge threw them both out of court.]
Joy
I joke sometimes about how smart it was for someone as introverted as I am to go into a profession where, at least twice a year, he is required to walk into rooms full of strangers and make himself the center of attention. And that’s to say nothing of the “opportunity” to give talks at professional conferences, a hiring process that inevitably entails an hour-long “job talk,” and so forth. For a long time, I internalized that shame, assuming that it was just something wrong with me. As it turns out, there are far more of us than I suspected. I still have vivid memories of speaking with a visiting scholar over coffee, someone that I really respected, only to learn that he went the same process that I had yet really to begin myself, the process of hacking one’s self and coming to peace with that anxiety.
It took me a long time. I’d estimate that for maybe the first ten years of my career, I couldn’t walk comfortably into a classroom until we’d gotten four or five weeks into a semester. At its absolute worst, which only happened a couple of times, I had full-blown panic attacks, which I don’t recommend, 0 out of 10 stars. But it did get better after a while. I figured out little tricks to make things easier on myself, I got more confident in my ability to speak off the cuff, and I even trained myself eventually to give talks from slides/notes rather than scripts. I do still sometimes kind of blank out at the beginning of a class period or a talk, but I don’t come off as nervous or anxious apparently.
Anyway, one of the small things that seemed to help me was to focus on design. For talks, I’ve gotten to the point where I design the slide decks simultaneously—I write in Keynote. My thinking is that, if people are focused on my slides, they’re not focused on me. Whether or not that’s the case, it lowers my anxiety to believe so. For courses I teach, I spend time really designing my syllabi, including things like course logos, webpages, and the like. It’s the same sort of diversionary tactic, where if I put energy into the auxiliary stuff, it takes the attention away from myself. It doesn’t matter if it actually functions that way—it’s enough for me to think that it does, to the point that saying it out loud (and understanding that it’s illusory) doesn’t diminish its effectiveness.
So I spent some time this week noodling around in Photoshop, as a means of bringing my stress levels down, and I put together a laptop sticker that will make much more sense after reading the first two sections of this post. It ends up serving as kind of an inside joke4, I know, but I thought it turned out nicely. And at our graduate program orientation on Friday, when folks asked me how my first week was going, this is what I showed them.
So yeah, it was a pretty solid week for me, all things considered. More soon.
An added complication, which doesn’t matter much here, is that the communications program at SU is “Communication and Rhetorical Studies,” which required them to negotiate with us. We had to do the same when we changed our name, but the relationship between the two programs is pretty good, so it wasn’t as fraught as it could have been, each of us trying to claim “rhetoric” to the exclusion of the other.
In some ways, I think “Writing and Rhetoric Department,” acronymming to WRD (and mirroring our BA in Rhetoric and Writing) and allowing us to play with “word,” would have been perhaps my top choice.
Was Corax a real person? No idea. His “first student” was named Tisias, and there’s some evidence that they were the same person. They/he might also be “real” in the same sense that the heroes of Greek myth were “real.”
But now, you’re in on it, too. The icon is actually a raven (corvus corax), and appears as part of an icon set on The Noun Project, designed by Imogen Oh, whose work I recommend.