I and some of my favorite rhetoric majors – Elle, Paul, Kendel, Carrie and Tiara – (who in no way coerced this shout-out) recently attended a rhetoric conference in Coeur d’Alene, ID. Fully half of the trip was spent in a van, which is an interesting exposition and cultural study in and of itself.
At the conference proper, we attended luncheons and dinners, presented our papers, and generally pontificated on rhetoric theory. Even the movie we went to for fun also received its fair share of analysis.
But this rhetoric conference touches upon a more deep-seated difficulty that extends to the entirety of academia in general. The usefulness of this conference was questionable to the extent that it seemed like a group of intellectuals standing around congratulating each other for their respective accomplishments.
It seemed like the process of writing papers, publishing articles and giving awards is an attempt for academia to justify its own existence. The things that we are learning at college are nothing if, at some level, they are not applicable to how we live our life outside the institution.
Many of the papers we saw presented were not written to be understood outside of the discipline. The relatable knowledge requires some degree of training and professionalization. Admittedly, jargon and the specific understandings of a field can be a necessary component to deepen knowledge in a particular subjects.
In that way, academic specialization can be useful to the extent that it furthers, in a very real way, the human knowledge that exists in a particular realm. In terms of conferences, it can also be useful to be connected to other people in a discipline.
That’s the razor’s edge of academics. On the one hand, we can dismiss portions of its study for their needlessly narrow considerations of questions that seem to have no particular significance to life or anything outside that realm of inquiry.
On the other hand, academia has, almost by definition, been an instrumental process in increasing human knowledge upon every line of inquiry. The trick is to try and separate the needless from the useful.
Maybe part of the problem is the superabundance of information that can be found on nearly any subject. In the quest for originality, scholars seem to have to get more and more specialized in order to say anything new. This doesn’t mean that the entire field loses its relevance, but it’s easy to get distracted by the details. Academia can lose the forest for the trees.
In the end of my conference experience, I was struck by how applicable rhetoric can be to understanding nearly every aspect of our selves, culture and communicative enterprises. But I was also struck by how specific and segmented academia could be.
So, no matter where you are going after college, it is useful to understand the idiosyncrasies and tendencies that define the quest for human knowledge. Whether you are deepening your academic pursuits at graduate school or simply striking out into the world at large, it absolutely vital that we learn how our particular knowledge applies beyond the academic considerations and publications. Learn the particulars, but don’t drown in them.
Originally published in the Willamette Collegian.