Activism in the Ivory Tower: Finding Hope for Academic Prose

I went to Chapel Hill (University of North Carolina) for my undergraduate degree with grudging permission from my family, who hoped I would choose a quieter place for my education. In my eighteen-year-old mind, Chapel Hill was a radical place. Mine was not a radical family (at least not in my mind). I felt positive that if I could only make it to Chapel Hill there would be a Greenpeace bus there to pick me up. I had lived most of my life on the ocean and needed to save the whales. I even declared marine biology as my major but was foiled by my gross lack of skill in the lab. I learned a lot about myself in school: I can be painfully shy, don’t much like joining groups or talking to strangers, and am much better at writing than organizing people. While I was right about Chapel Hill-activism was rampant on campus-becoming an activist was not as easy as getting on a bus. I soon realized that I was good at writing, so I became an English major. Even in this rather traditional major (at least at Chapel Hill in the 1990s), I was drawn to the provocateurs. While I did not get on a Greenpeace bus, I did train to be a rape crisis counselor and participated in Take Back the Night marches. While the marches were not my speed (educating frat boys while they threw beer cans at marchers did not seem particularly useful at the time), I wanted to do something, stay in motion, but sometimes had trouble finding a space. Despite the hard activist work at the rape crisis center (person by person, day by day), the fearless Greenpeacer charging the whaling ship remained my image of a good activist (see Kevin Michael Deluca’s discussion of the images of protest). However, in the past decade or so, something changed. I went to graduate school. I have taken two different tenure-track jobs. In my more recent role as academic, I feel I have lost my connection to those provocateurs and radicals of my imagination, as well as my own activist roots. Ironically, it is through my scholarship on protest rhetoric that the disconnection became palpable. As I wrote my dissertation on the discourse of protest many years ago, my cramped office reverberated with a note of dissonance resulting from a clash of form and content. It is a din that has never quite dissipated. The realization that I had lost touch with my own activist longings struck at the end of the dissertation. About a week before I turned it in, I panicked. I thought: I am writing about protest, and I haven’t done a “real” protest since being an undergraduate. I do not think of myself as a “protester” or even a real activist, so what right do I have to write this paper? I felt like a phony. My dissertation, “A Vision of Consequence: The Discourse of Protest”, was populated by rhetorical actors who developed innovative means to enter public discourse. I studied the ways they developed their rhetoric, the media they used, and, especially, their creative and collaborative spirit. I remember feeling inspired as I analyzed each new image event, piece of artwork, or rhetorical strategy. Their work seemed useful. Although this project was about protesters and activists, about participatory democracy, on the day I panicked, I realized that maybe one or two people might actually read my dissertation outside of my committee’s obligatory examination (a bored grad student or maybe my mom). This was a difficult realization. While I hoped to argue about the potential for the minority discourse of protesters to have real political consequences, my own voice might do little more than reverberate off the library shelves holding hundreds of bound dissertations. My ideas about protest would probably remain between the hard green covers that marked the “dissertation” shelf. It is not that I thought the ideas were brilliant revelations that would save the world, but that I was mourning a project whose only future was dormancy. The panic brought about two realizations. First, my concentration on scholarship over the past several years may have stymied my activist participation in favor of contemplation and analysis. Second, the kind of work and study required to create academic prose, especially the dissertation, felt isolated from public discourse and civic action. It felt useless. I began to understand that, perhaps, the discourse of dissertation writing, the quintessential academic discourse, was an insider discourse and not necessarily a prose pointed toward the larger public. Universities had been the center of my universe for so long that I had forgotten they were not actually the center of the universe. The dissonance I felt between the subject of my writing and the genre of the writing was a real dissonance, not cooked up in a panicky mind damaged by lack of sleep and moved only by coffee and sugar. This discomforting image of my dissertation quietly waiting in the library reflected my experience writing it. Although I had worked on several collaborative writing projects, the experience of my first real academic product felt like a lonely task. While my committee was infinitely helpful and available, the process included thousands of hours at a desk staring out of my small window as I theorized public action. Don Randel writes, “The study of the humanities has largely been a very solitary activity” (229). This is not a new idea and neither is the paradox of humanities scholars and their isolation from humans! Those of us working in the humanities know that we are largely measured by the quantity and quality of our individual academic prose-whether or not we are good teachers. Of course our ideas participate in a kind of dialogue on the two-dimensional page, but few of us actually experience real public exchange about our work before or after publication, barring the strange ritual of the dissertation defense, a review, or conference presentation. However, my particular dissertation topic called me to question the consequence of this solitary activity. The people and events I studied were all about public action, yet my toil seemed more about jumping through an institutional hoop rather than participating in public discourse. If this kind of writing was to be my life’s work, I wanted it to do some work. The public acts I studied reminded me of this. Participation in public discourse is an essential quality of good citizenship, activism, and, perhaps, of good writing itself. I wanted to change the potential consequences of my writing or, more accurately, change my writing so that it might have consequences beyond self-promotion. How did I get to this point, a point that has not changed as much as I would like for it to in the years since I have become a professor? Here is what I think. Instead of an actor, I had become an observer. I guess after undergrad, I was quite a cliché. I worked on “finding myself” from Atlanta, GA to Costa Rica to Colorado. Beginning with my Master’s program, I started to feel the consuming pressure of academic study that left little time for work outside of the library. I made the shift from acting and participating to introspection and theorizing (which, unfortunately, suited my personality). During my PhD program, I also became an administrator, which gave me a different place within the university. These choices began a trend that only became visible during my dissertation writing. My first job was as a Writing Program Administrator, and I felt my time and priorities move even more significantly from outside of the university to inside: I officially took a room in the Ivory Tower. Although this shift was not exactly “real,” it felt like movement to a new insulated space that was not about public discourse or activism (even if students talked about activism daily). Being a professor turned out to feel like a different space altogether. Sure, I understand that jobs and lives are separate for many people. For many, they should be. However, my job and my life constantly intersected and begged for that recognition. Basically, I have to admit to myself, though I feel ashamed in a book filled with real activists, that I had become an “armchair” activist. I worried and thought and read and wrote and even had brilliant discussions with my colleagues, friends, and family about social issues and the need for change. Yet, I’m not sure what came out of these activities. I was not in motion like my activist heroes. I felt very still. From rhetor to rhetorician, I was enacting the old saying that I had always found false: Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach-or, in my case, become an academic.