The start of the 2007-08 academic year marks the third for the rechristened Rhetoric Department.  Although the Wabash College Speech Department had a long and distinguished history, and a legacy that we are proud of and continue to both honor and extend, Speech was no longer an accurate or useful descriptor for the work of the faculty and students of the department.

The change was a decade in the making, starting with a1995 directive by then President Andy Ford that the Speech Department “strengthen and develop a modern rhetorically-based curriculum.” In turn, the department introduced a series of new courses that emphasized rhetorical studies, and, in the process, made the name “Speech” inappropriate.  Finally, we asked a set of scholars, who visited the department to conduct an outside review, about the merits of changing the name to Rhetoric. Their report endorsed the change, saying it “would reflect the substance of the revised major; would be consistent with its evolution from performance and technique to critical thinking and rhetorical inquiry; and resonates with the history of rhetoric as part of the trivium of the liberal arts.”

Thus, at root, the change was undertaken for the simple sake of accuracy. “Rhetoric” more accurately reflects the content of courses in the department.  Likewise, rhetoric serves as the discipline or academic field of the department’s faculty.

More than this, however, Rhetoric reflects an intellectual heritage and content that Speech simply could not capture.  When we were identified as the Speech Department, and our students were Speech majors, the most common connotation held by those we encountered involved the assumption that the professors must be professional speechwriters and performers, concerned exclusively with speechmaking, and the students received an education the concentrated on how to make a good speech. (Others assumed that the major offered instruction in speech therapy or speech pathology)  To be sure, these are important skills and the department continues to be dedicated to the improvement of self-presentation, but this perspective did not begin to capture our work or that of our students.

Instead, rhetoric provides a historical connection to the liberal arts and thus is a natural fit for the Wabash curriculum. In important respects, the change in name was a reaffirmation of the rhetorical tradition that generations of Wabash men experienced during their time at Wabash, a tradition dating back to at least W. Norwood Brigance, and further developed by Vic Powell and Joe O’Rourke.  Likewise, the name rhetoric places greater emphasis on the intellectual content of the field and the academic sophistication and rigor of the courses. And, pragmatically, our majors see rhetoric as a better representation of their course work and training and see it as advantageous to potential employers.

In the coming days, and perhaps weeks, we will do more to consider the meaning of this change and, in particular, address the more complicated question of “What is Rhetoric?”