In Rome, the Emperor's Tailors

Cushman, a rhetorician speaking to rhetoricians, argues for a “scholarly activism” that empowers people within communities, and calls for a “breaking down of the sociological barriers” between them and universities.

The assumption here seems that the university, as an entity, has taken on a life of its own. A life where the morals and traditions of the institution are not in harmony with its members. When this happens, members of that community begin to feel dehumanized from being made to feel insignificant and/or inadequate.  

A dichotomy, then, is created when considering Cushman’s apparent desire to retain at least some of the sociological barriers. Namely, then ones that allow them the privilege (through their sponsored position) to call for new group norms for some subsect groups outside their institutionalized community. Is the goal here, then, self-empowerment through the creation of an appearance of external empowerment?

Maybe I’m wrong — and it’s the community that has separated itself from the university, thus being themselves responsible for the sociological barriers that are now under attack. But is that even possible? Only if the community in question is not a product (or perhaps more aptly put, a ‘byproduct’) that has been defined as deviant from the larger community’s standards. We know that this is likely not possible since the dominant rhetoric defines not only the acceptable uses of language, but also what is valued in its society.

Thus this exclusionary larger community (of which may have taken on a life of its own) is the same one that, in large part, supports the university and its members. As such, it seems that Cushman’s “self-reflexive look” at the role of rhetoricians doesn’t look long or deep enough to see that it, the “self,” depends on the unbalanced systemic reciprocity that requires its negotiation. The very same system that allows Cushman to use terms like “they” when referring to Black people; the system that creates the conditions for and value of “learning” and “service”; the system that defines a community where its sociological barrier-busting “agents of change” are perhaps in fact indirectly advocating for a sanitization of the “Other’s” creativity through the homogenizing of interests and behaviors.