David Gold Rhetoric at the Margins: Revisiting the History of Writing Instruction in American Colleges 1873-1947

Got a contemporary problem? Blame it on that darn old current-traditional rhetoric --Robert Conners in Composition-Rhetoric 5

Introduction:
Major Assumptions:
* Current traditional rhetoric (CTR) has had a large reaching influence on our assumptions about ideology and pedagogy, which has led us to blame our current problems on CTR
* Justification of English studies in the academy, increase in German model of education and scientism, and narrowing conception of rhetoric lead to instruction that downplayed the public discourse aspect of writing and instead highlighted grammar over rhetoric
* Figures like Adams Sherman Hill and scholars like Susan Kates & Lucille Schultz we see that a debate about pedagogy has always been a part of the process (indeed without stretching too far the Sophist vs Socratic debate includes issues of who is the vanguard of knowledge and its instruction). Or, as we see in Charles Paine, the neat divide between Crowley and Berlin as modern vs CTR requires further thought because there exists a tidy binary and a neat cause-and-effect relationship
* Assumptions about historiography informing this book:
1) cannot make broad claims about rhetorical education without looking at a broad sample, including those institutions underrepresented
2) must compliment comprehensive narratives with local micro-histories
* We too easily draw lines between conservative practices and conservative ideology, classroom discipline and disciplinary epistemology (8).
* Relies on archival materials to inform historiography, with attention toward expanding notions of writing and speaking that would otherwise be limited to within English studies
* With archiving and analysis from inside the discipline comes the risk of either celebrating or getting even with the field. Since it is impossible to avoid any bias or narrative interpretation, it is best, according to Hayden V White, to admit biases openly, which he does.

Key Peeps:
* Sharon Crowley
* James Berlin
* Robert Connors
* Hayden White
* Charles Paine
* Adams Sherman Hill & Edward T. Channing
* Susan Kates
* Lucille Schultz

Ch 1: Integrating Traditions at a Private Black College
Major Assumptions:
* When we open ourselves to investigating diverse local histories, we see rich sites of inhomogeneous rhetorical instruction
* Sites of diverse rhetorical practices can be found within spaces of the institution as well as without the institution of higher education
* Tolson as example troubles taxonomies of traditional rhetorical instruction
* Tolson as example of pedagogue questions our contemporary notions of the function and effect of CRT
* Liberal arts education in black institutions resisted a definition of what educational instructions should operate like
* Black education served its community in far reaching ways, including increasing literacy in a population facing low literacy rates, which had decidedly civic goals, orientations and ramifications in line with our contemporary conception of pedagogy
* Religious organization's sponsorship helped progress race issues and opportunities for blacks
* Black leaders, while wielding power over their campuses, held little to no power with the white surrounding culture whom they fought for continuing their schools
* Black education institutions were survived in large part to their rhetorical framing as a necessary American process for training citizens
* Tolson's success was due in large part to his mastery of rhetorical training, which he picked up at university
* Prescription, a CTR method, was used toward ends of reason rather than sheer grammar
* Tolson worked within his environment to create small fissures of resistance, to work around the system through its own measures and limitations, which he turned into advantages; he embodied the African American rhetorical spirit
* Most scholars/teachers post 1960 distrust the authority of the institution even though they embody it and curricular innovations (expressivism, students rights, and decentered classrooms) are responses to the paradox
* From Tolson, two important lessons:
1) the ability to teach dominant discourse norms and liberal culture to the point or success that students embody it as their heritage is our worthwhile mission
2) the ability to be at peace with the tension in the desire to be both nurturing and rigorous

Key questions:
* Do the ends justify the means when it comes to things like Tolson's use of power over his students or his prescribed methods?
* What are our own limitations that we face?
* Can we interpret culture for students both like and unlike us?
* Can teaching be responsive to the needs of all students (he argues yes, and through Tolson we see that it might be an issue of embracing contradictions)

Challenges to/from me:
* How does Tolson's treatment of students avoid the expectations for meritocracy or "talented tenth" ideology, which troubles the notion of education as being a service to the community as well as rhetorical underpinnings of an argument for Constitutionally inherent rights?
* In what ways does Tolson's behavior fall into the caveat of "absent-minded professor" and thus is replicable for people who have different personalities?
* How does gender enable Tolson to be the way he is? Does this same ideology/pedagogy work in examples of feminism or in feminist tropes?