Quarterly Journal of Speech

Vol. 96, No. 4, November 2010, pp. 427
435

(UN)Disciplining the Scholar Activist:

Policing the Boundaries of Political
Engagement
Anna M. Young, Adria Battaglia, & Dana L. Cloud

Sixteen years ago, Carole Blair, Julie R. Brown, and Leslie A. Baxter argued in the
Quarterly Journal of Speech that disciplinary territoriality grants legitimacy to
specialists while denying it to out-of-the-mainstream scholars who challenge
disciplinary norms.1 Demonstrating how the practices of writing, publication, and
reward defining what counts as scholarly discourse systematically disadvantage
women, Disciplining the Feminine called on scholars to scrutinize and evaluate
their own rules for engagement and practice.2
Political activism among scholars likewise calls into question unspoken collective
rules, often meeting with a hostile response not unlike those lobbed at women
scholars. Despite a rich and storied tradition of public intellectualism in our field, we
are most rewarded for attending annual conferences to compare notes . . .
constitut[ing our] own universe.3 As activists, we understand engagement to
entail working toward positive social change in a sometimes uncivil, aggressive
manner. As scholars, however, our enthusiasm for engagement is often policed by our
affiliate institutions via various forms of depoliticization and/or apoliticization inside
the academy. Put differently: Agency as publicly engaged scholars becomes subject
to depoliticizing norms when we transgress the border between scholarship and
politics. So, we might ask: What are these norms? How do communication scholars
negotiate this boundary and with what consequences? What do these consequences
reveal about the norms and values of scholarly associations, particularly our own?
Here, we argue that policing the border between activism and scholarship impedes
most significantly the activist scholar who understands engagement as unavoidably
and inherently political, who recognizes objectivity and apoliticization as institutional
smokescreen. Honoring the interdisciplinary history of communication studies, we
Anna M. Young is Assistant Professor in the School of Arts and Communication at Pacific Lutheran University.
Adria Battaglia is Visiting Assistant Professor of Communication and Rhetorical Studies at Illinois College.
Dana L. Cloud is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Texas at
Austin. Correspondence to: Anna M. Young, Ingram 127, School of Arts and Communication, Pacific Lutheran
University, Tacoma, WA 98447, USA. Email: youngam@plu.edu.
ISSN 0033-5630 (print)/ISSN 1479-5779 (online) # 2010 National Communication Association
DOI: 10.1080/00335630.2010.521179

428 A. M. Young et al.

also argue that boundary policing runs contrary to the ethical commitments of the
rhetorical tradition. In support of these claims, we examine the rhetorical framing of
the 2008 controversy over the National Communication Associations (NCAs)
patronage of the San Diego Grand Hyatt, owned by anti-labor and anti-gay magnate
Doug Manchester.4 Then, we place the efforts of those who chose to boycott the
convention held in the Grand Hyatt in the broader context of the severing of
communication scholarship from its historical commitment to public engagement.
Finally, we issue an invitation to think with us about the potential relationships
between activism and scholarship.
Victimage, Dialogic Free Speech, and Civility in the 2008 Controversy
Institutional responses to activist scholars during the 2008 convention of the National
Communication Association illustrate the rhetoric of boundary policing. Before the
convention, NCA members learned that a grassroots movement of local
Californians*LGBTQ groups and the labor union UNITE HERE*had organized
to boycott the Manchester Grand Hyatt on the grounds of exploitative and
discriminatory practices at the hotel. Responding both to the working conditions
of hotel employees and to Manchesters $125,000 contribution to the passage of
Californias Proposition 8 (against marriage equality for gays and lesbians), many
NCA members asked the leaders of the association to relocate the meeting. The
association refused on economic grounds.
Several hundred NCA members then organized an alternate convention nearby,
dubbed the UNconvention (playing on the ironic theme of the official conference,
unCONVENTIONal!). NCAs e-newsletter CRTNET, its legislative assembly, and
the hallways of departments across the country became sites of vigorous debate as
members argued for reform inside the association and agitation outside of it.
Meanwhile, other NCA members, along with NCA leaders, became increasingly,
publicly incensed. A rhetorical analysis of CRTNET postings, Spectra, and personal
e-mails aimed at activist participants in the UNconvention toward the end of 2008
through the present day reveals how NCA leaders engaged in conservative victimage,
cast activist academics as powerful and caustic aggressors, posited an abstract and
dialogic norm of free expression, and appealed to civility in ways that delimited the
scholarly boundaries of appropriate inquiry and action. In short, these rhetorical
moves demonized the political engagement of academic scholars.
A Rhetoric of Victimage
Victimage is perhaps the most common trope in political discourse. Some may
remark that this essay engages in a rhetoric of victimage, and certainly, this trope is
not the province of a single ideology, group, or partisan leaning. Insofar as political
engagement in scholarship questions the hegemony of the established institutions
and challenges the assumed neutrality of power, however, it is important to show how
NCAs response to the activism of its members reflects a larger, conservative

(UN)Disciplining the Scholar Activist

429

cultural discourse, and one that is historically posed against political activism as a
form of engagement.
While the Right often accuses the Left of playing the victim, many self-professed
conservatives also charge liberals, progressives, and radicals with victimizing them,
projecting their own investment in censure and exclusion onto those demanding
greater openness and inclusion. Los Angeles Times columnist Gregory Rodriguez
wonders, [I]f conservatives hate victimhood so much, why then . . . [do
conservatives] encourage [their] base to feel so aggrieved, especially at the hands of
those snotty elites?5 Such an opportunistic logic describes not only the doublespeak
of pundits like David Horowitz (censoring critique in the name of academic
freedom), but also the surprisingly defensive posture adopted by the 2008 leadership
of NCA in response to activist members. Against those standing up for workers and
LGBTQ persons, these leaders claimed to be the victims of a belligerent faction of the
membership.
The seemingly official, tangled stance of NCA is characteristic of the column series
it published in its newsletter Spectra, Voices from the Margins.6 The first column
featured self-described conservative scholar Richard Vatz on the challenges of being a
white, heterosexual, and tenured Republican male. Vatzs grievance was followed by
several meaningful columns from the real, rather than imaginary, margins, tackling
such topics as condescension toward community college faculty and the concerns of
members with mobility impairments. In her response denying a request to represent
the labor/LGBTQ movements as voices from the margins, former NCA President
Betsy Bach explained, The intent of the column is to hear voices from the
margins. . . . I am looking for personal accounts from people who feel marginalized. 7 Defining the margins as a series of aggrieved, tokenized individuals (rather
than oppressed collectives), Bach pitted the interests of activist scholars against those
of good-faith NCA members facing discrimination.8
In her final column, Engage All Voices, Bach explicitly drew a line between
scholarship and activism with victimage. Noting that she recognized that people
involved in social movements often engage in interactions that are painful for those
they are trying to change, Bach tellingly added, at what cost?9 In particular, she
argued that UNconventioners muted the voices of others, and suggested that it cost
too much to recognize the legitimacy of political advocacy. To liberals seeking cover
for lapses in solidarity with those actually oppressed, the logic is quite compelling:
Blame real victims while casting oneself as martyr.10
Free Speech as Discipline
The second kind of boundary policing that separates scholarship from activism
within communication associations is the paradoxical embrace of a discourse of
freedom, particularly the freedom of expression.11 For example, NCAs official code
of communication ethics upholds commitments to free speech and rational
deliberation.12 Valorizing dialogism, however, becomes conspicuously ideological
when it ignores real antagonism and discourages necessary public confrontation. At a

430 A. M. Young et al.

broad, cultural level, the free speech contract appears politically neutral; within the
field of communication, this contract limits the strongest sense of freedom to the
boundaries of the practices of communication. Our field has been uncomfortable
with what Franklyn S. Haiman describes as protests exceed[ing] the bounds of
rational discourse, which teachers of rhetoric value so highly and are dedicated to
promote.13 Under a rhetoric of border patrol, dissent is construed as a coercive
threat rather than a democratic intervention.
In principle, NCA values all voices and all communicative acts. In reality, it
encourages a kind of communication that falls within the lines, that can pass as
apolitical, and that enables scholars to socially and politically isolate themselves from
the activism of the street. The willful denial of antagonism in the context of
differential power relations was clear in former NCA Executive Director Roger
Smitters defense of the decision to remain at the Manchester: It was a matter of free
speech that Manchester had the right to do what he wished with his money.14
Smitter also suggested that NCA should respect all views and actions equally, as
if the effects of such expressions were limited to the symbolic domain. He
wrote, Those . . . occupying leadership positions in NCA remain committed to the
principles of debate, discussion and dialogue.15 NCA responded to member concern
by inviting Mr. Manchester . . . to attend the spotlight panels.16 Working in tandem
with the trope of victimage, this rhetoric of universal free expression equates money
with speech, and thereby casts UNconvention organizers as enemies of open debate.
The result was a paradox: appealing to a commitment to free expression as a means to
neutralize the articulation of politics as scholarly engagement.17
Civility as Discipline
Finally, the norms of civility and decorum also operate as border patrols, disciplining
the activist-scholar into forms of engagement that would only reinforce, rather than
reform, the status quo.18 Indeed, resistance to change is reflected in appeals to civility,
for it assumes that conflicts are matters of disagreement always resolvable in polite
talk.19 For example, referencing a contentious meeting of the associations governing
body in 2009, Bach criticized the conflict as uncivil:
[O]ne of the best ways that we can practice what we preach is by engaging in civil
discourse. This is central to our continued future success as a discipline. I often
wonder what those outside of our discipline would think if they walked by a
Legislative Assembly meeting or read CRTnet [sic] regularly. We are at times less
than civil with each other. A perfect example is provided in the events that
surrounded last years dissention [sic] over the convention location at the
Manchester Hyatt. I wonder how civil some of the emails flying back and forth
would be perceived by those unfamiliar with either the situation or the credos of
our association.20

This passage enacts the paradoxical position that ideal communication is coterminous with self-policing speech. Practicing what we preach*an ideal wholly

(UN)Disciplining the Scholar Activist

431

embraced by participants in the UNconvention*amounts to censoring in the name

of propriety.
Only an organization that hopes to deny its discrepancies of voice and power could
reject with such outrage stakeholders challenge to expand rather than constrict the
voices of its members alongside the voices of workers and LGBTQ communities.
Making the argument for greater attention to the redress of inequality shows up the
organization to be less than neutral, and because the organization is devoted to the
study of communication, the great neutralizer among our god terms, antagonistic
communication appears on its face to be uncivil. We suspect that this conundrum
explains the vitriolic and defensive response among even well-meaning believers in
the virtues of democratic communication against its most engaged practitioners.
With the invocation of civility, calls for change are muted in favor of the status quo.
This drive toward equilibrium and the status quo, this desire to avoid the true
engagement of social transformation and change, is not reducible to the inner
workings of NCA, of course, especially in the context of recent cross-disciplinary
witch hunts against activist scholars in the wider academy.21 No academic
organization exists in a vacuum, but rather, all are party to larger cultural struggles*
and histories. During the red scare, it was professional suicide to be public about
politics. Now, this once-necessary caution has become a disabling norm warranting
the discipline of critical scholars like Cornel West, who left Harvard after being
scolded that his work creating rap CDs and starring in the Matrix series was not a
legitimate part of his academic scholarship and a waste of his professional time, or
Robert Jensen, publicly rebuked for an antiwar column as a fountain of undiluted
foolishness by then-University of Texas president Larry R. Faulkner.22 One of the
authors of this essay received an email exhorting her to refrain from political
argument about NCAs 2010 convention (again sited at a boycotted hotel) on
CRTNET. Perversely, the scholar signed his email, Its a great day to communicate!
The message is Please keep your politics to yourself and out of the business of NCA.
If scholars want to win favor, publish, earn acceptances to conferences, and receive
tenure or promotion, they must bend to the institutional demand to be apolitical
and objective, a standard that is both impossible and ridiculous.
The Activist Scholar: A Rhetorical Model
Scholar activists regard creative, positive social change as their major goal. In this
brief essay, we have identified what we understand as the three ways in which a border
is created between scholarship and politics so as to make it difficult to be a scholar
activist. A rhetoric of victimage, an abstract and dialogic conception of free
expression, and appeals to civility all limit activism to traditional, accepted modalities
of academic scholarship like pedagogy and publication while quashing even the idea
of political activism as appropriate to the life of the mind. We want to conclude
with a number of suggestions for how best to combat and resist the unnecessary and
unproductive disciplining of such boundaries.

432 A. M. Young et al.

At the outset, we took it as axiomatic that engagement must entail working for
social change for the scholar who sees herself as an activist. Here, we suggest that
whether one likes it or not, an activist position is inherent to all forms of public
engagement. From classical rhetoric to Gramscian cultural studies, pragmatist
philosophy, and public sphere theory, the rhetorical tradition has celebrated critical
public engagement as the preeminent task of the intellectual. Ekaterina V. Haskins
discovers this principle at work in Isocrates, whose challenge to Aristotle lay in the
refusal to separate theory and practice.23 On this view, the teaching and practice of
rhetoric are performatively grounded and socially productive forms of human
agency; any separation among theory, pedagogy, and public practice is artificial.
Public sphere scholar G. Thomas Goodnight observed, [T]he interests of the
public realm*whether represented in an appropriate way or not*extend the stakes
of argument beyond private needs and the needs of special communities to the
interests of the entire community.24 Pragmatist John Dewey likewise believed that
scholars should shape reality toward positive social goals, not stand aside in selfrighteous isolation.25 Antonio Gramsci argued, The mode of being of the new
intellectual can no longer consist in eloquence but in active participation in practical
life, as constructor, organizer, [and] permanent persuader. 26 In contrast to
traditional, hyper-specialized, technical intellectuals, Gramsci argued, the engaged
scholars role is to mediate the relationship between intellectual knowledge and
practical activity in their conjoint emergence.27 More recently, Michael Eric Dyson
has argued that academics must look beyond a comfortable career, a safe niche
behind academes protective walls, and a serene existence removed from cultural and
political battles that shape the nations fate.28 In other words, all scholars are
political, since even an apolitical stance is a stance in favor of the status quo.29
To be sure, all scholarship works for change, be it for understanding or social good.
In this spirit, we entreat our colleagues to work with rather than against us in the
project of extend[ing] the stakes of argument . . . to the interests of the entire
community.30 Here we offer a partial list of principles to inform the ongoing
conversation about the relevance of activism in, about, and out of our disciplinary
communities.
1. Talk among yourselves. We respect both the need and the desire to in traditional
domains, but we also must make the case for the relevance and importance of
publishing in fora that reach other audiences. Winning credibility for such efforts
requires ongoing research about the relationships between scholarship and
activism.31
2. Think style. Russell Jacoby encourages critical intellectuals to write and speak to
and for the educated public*surrender[ing] the vernacular of specificity for a
more public style.32
3. Space out. The great success of the UNconvention in San Diego was that we acted
and interacted in public space with constituencies outside of NCA that are
invested in specific issues in a particular geography. We occupied space online
and on camera. One of the unfortunate outcomes of campus life is the perception

(UN)Disciplining the Scholar Activist

4.

5.

6.

7.

433

that the campus is life. We must stop physically isolating ourselves from the
broader publics to which we belong because it reifies an antagonistic relationship
between scholars and citizens outside the boundaries of the campus.
Infiltrate institutions. One of the ideas advanced at the UNconvention roundtable
in Chicago in 2009 was to get elected to positions of power in our home
institutions and within NCA in order to promote scholar-activist goals.
Be active. Communication studies is a discipline founded in the public interest,
and our skills are central to political engagement and social change. As Aristotle
reminds us in his Politics, Man [sic] is by nature a political animal (1253a1).
Pull together. Solidarity is sometimes elusive when the interests of subsections of
a larger community (workers, LGBTQ members, members with disabilities) are at
odds. Even so, we must engage in sustained, respectful conversation on the basis
of shared criteria to decide whose interests should have priority, and when.
Reframe politics as our job description. What we do and say has*or should
have*meaning and consequences beyond our hallowed halls. The artificial
constructs of neutrality deny the broader meaningfulness of our work and our
ethical obligation to be public and political.33

Across the sweep of modern history, students and scholars have been vital to
grassroots movements, from the Free Speech Movement and the struggles for civil
rights in the 1960s, to the antiwar demonstrations of the 1970s, to the marches
against South African apartheid in the 1980s, and todays movements for social
justice. With Haiman, we recognize that we will not attain those conditions by
closing our eyes to the realities of the world about us and condemning out of hand
the contemporary rhetoric of the streets.34 The productive travesty of the
UNconvention*however faithful it was to the associations stated embrace of
controversy*was that it revealed our collective involvement in relations of and
struggles over power. Neither the language of victimage, the appeal to civility, nor the
advocacy of a paper freedom can undo that revelation. We seek to dismantle the
artificial boundary separating our scholarly community from the exigencies of an
unjust world. We invite you to join us.
Notes
[1]
[2]
[3]
[4]

[5]
[6]

Carole Blair, Julie R. Brown, and Leslie A. Baxter, Disciplining the Feminine, Quarterly
Journal of Speech 80 (1994): 402.
Blair, Brown, and Baxter, Disciplining the Feminine, 402.
Russell Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe (New York:
Basic Books, 1987), 7.
We mention the discourse of particular individuals not to single them out as an enemy, but
to recognize their official and structured roles as defenders of the norms of the discipline. We
are all as much spoken by the narratives and ideals that govern us; our target is that set of
narratives and ideals, not individual leaders or members.
Gregory Rodriguez, The GOP as Victim, Los Angeles Times, September 15, 2008.
Betsy Bach, Engage All Voices, Spectra, December 2009, 3.

434 A. M. Young et al.

[7]
[8]
[9]
[10]
[11]
[12]

[13]

[14]
[15]
[16]
[17]
[18]
[19]
[20]

[21]
[22]
[23]
[24]

[25]
[26]
[27]
[28]
[29]

[30]

[31]

Betsy Bach, email message to Adria Battaglia, February 14, 2009 (emphasis added).
We stand unequivocally with community college professors and persons with mobility
impairments, among all other exploited and disadvantaged groups.
Bach, Engage All Voices, 3.
By liberal, we mean those who believe in freedom of action and who advocate progressive
political reform.
See Adria Battaglia, The Rhetoric of BFree Speech: Regulating Dissent Since 9/11 (PhD
diss., University of Texas at Austin, 2010).
For example, Smitter cites the NCA Credo as an extension of classical ideals defining our
proper aspirations to all forms and settings of communication and function as a social
contract in a democratic society. Roger Smitter, The Development of the NCA Credo for
Ethical Communication, Free Speech Yearbook 41 (2004): 2.
Franklyn S. Haiman, The Rhetoric of the Streets: Some Legal and Ethical Considerations,
in Readings on the Rhetoric of Social Protest, ed. Charles E. Morris III and Stephen H. Browne
(State College: Strata Publishing, 2001), 13.
James Brandon, #10560, email to CRTNET mailing list, September 19, 2008.
Roger Smitter, #10554, email to CRTNET mailing list, September 16, 2008.
Smitter, #10554.
See Herbert Marcuse, Repressive Tolerance, in A Critique of Pure Tolerance, ed. Robert Paul
Wolff, Barrington Moore Jr., and Herbert Marcuse (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 95
137.
See Robert Hariman, Decorum, Power, and the Courtly Style, Quarterly Journal of Speech
78 (1992): 149
72.
See Nina M. Lozano-Reich and Dana L. Cloud, The Uncivil Tongue: Invitational Rhetoric
and the Problem of Inequality, Western Journal of Communication 73 (2009): 220
26.
Betsy Wackernagel Bach, On Practicing What We Preach, (presidential address, annual
convention of the National Communication Association, Chicago, IL, November 14, 2009),
http://www.natcom.org/NCA/files/ccLibraryFiles/Filename/000000002131/Pres%20Address%20
2009.pdf.
See Dana L. Cloud, The McCarthyism that Horowitz Built, Counterpunch, April 30, 2009.
Larry R. Faulkner, Jensens Words His Own, Houston Chronicle, September 19, 2001.
Ekaterina V. Haskins, Logos and Power in Isocrates and Aristotle (Columbia: University of
South Carolina Press, 2004).
G. Thomas Goodnight, The Personal, Technical, and Public Spheres of Argument:
A Speculative Inquiry into the Art of Public Deliberation, Journal of the American Forensics
Association 18 (1982): 214
27.
John Dewey, The Collected Works of John Dewey: The Later Works, ed. Jo Ann Boydston
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969
1991).
Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and
Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971).
Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 3, 10.
Michael Eric Dyson, The Michael Eric Dyson Reader (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2004),
xxvii.
Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 3. See C. Kay Weaver, Reinventing the Public
Intellectual through Communication Dialogue Civic Capacity Building, Management
Communication Quarterly 21 (2007): 92
104.
For purposes of space and avoiding tangents, we will bracket the much-needed discussion
about what kinds of work count toward tenure. See the debate at What If College Tenure
Dies? New York Times, July 19, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2010/07/19/
what-if-college-tenure-dies?scp1&sqtenure%20university&stcse.
This already growing literature includes Lawrence R. Frey and Kevin M. Carragee,
Communication Activism, vol. 1, Communication for Social Change (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton

(UN)Disciplining the Scholar Activist

[32]
[33]

[34]

435

Press, 2007); Seth Kahn and JongHwa Lee, Activism and Rhetoric: Theories and Contexts for
Political Engagement (New York: Routledge, 2010); Omar Swartz, In Defense of Partisan
Criticism: Communication Studies, Law, and Social Analysis (New York: Peter Lang, 2005);
Omar Swartz, Transformative Communication Studies: Culture, Hierarchy and the Human
Condition (Leicester, UK: Troubador, 2008); George Cheney, Morgan Wilhelmsson, and
Theodore E. Zorn, 10 Strategies for Engaged Scholarship, Management Communication
Quarterly 16 (2002): 92
100; J. Kevin Barge, Jennifer Lyn Simpson, and Pamela ShockleyZalabak, ed., special issue, Journal of Applied Communication Research 36 (2008); Lee Artz,
Steve Macek, and Dana L. Cloud, Marxism and Communication Studies: The Point Is to
Change It (New York: Peter Lang, 2006). Approaches vary, from considering scholarship as
activism, pedagogy as activism, and activism as informing scholarship. Our approach might
be best described as activism and scholarship in dialectical relationship.
Jacoby, Last Intellectuals, 26.
See Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, Conventional Wisdom*Traditional Form: A Rejoinder,
Quarterly Journal of Speech 58 (1972): 451
54. Also see Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, The
Rhetoric of Mythical America Revisited, in Critiques of Contemporary Rhetoric, ed. Karlyn
Campbell and Thomas R. Burkholder, 2nd ed. (New York: Wadsworth, 1996), 202
12.
Haiman, Rhetoric of the Streets, 24.

Copyright of Quarterly Journal of Speech is the property of National Communication Association and its
content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's
express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.