Jim Amidon — Rhetoric Professor Todd McDorman asked me to swing by the Caleb Mills House on Tuesday night to take a few pictures of the senior rhetoric majors at a banquet that both honored the seniors and welcomed the Brigance Forum Lecturers Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites.

I sat quietly in the corner waiting for dinner to conclude, but listening to the lively conversations the students were having with their invited guests, as well as familiar faces like Joe and Bev O’Rourke, Vic and Marion Powell, and Jack Oest, William Norwood Brigance’s grandson.

When dinner concluded, Professor David Timmerman welcomed everyone to the living room and, alternating with Professor McDorman, talked about the accomplishments of the six seniors who majored in rhetoric.

What a remarkable group.

Three of them — Josh Gangloff, Pat Long, and Dan Masterson — were members of the Wabash football team which set an all-time record for most wins (40) and won three straight North Coast Athletic Conference titles.

Gangloff, a fierce nose tackle on the football team, is a soft-spoken leader whose Christian outreach has extended as far as Botswana and as close as the young people at Pleasant View Baptist Church here in Crawfordsville. Gangloff will pursue a master’s degree in divinity upon graduation, while working in his family’s business.

Masterson, while not the stars of the team like Long and Gangloff, minored in theater. He appeared in two main stage productions and in the Studio One-Acts. I’ll most remember Dan for his gripping performance as a dirty cop in the spring ’09 production of The Pillowman.

In addition to an amazing senior project for his rhetoric major, Derek Hickerson also spent last summer working on a “Know Indiana” research project with Professor Timmerman. Hickerson’s original research focused on James Matthew Townsend, Indiana’s third elected African American legislator. Hickerson researched the legislation Townsend authored to repeal Indiana’s “Black Laws.” And though Townsend’s bill was voted down, a year later a similar bill passed through the Indiana legislature.

Matt Dodaro, star baseball player, also is a rhetoric major. I’ve taken a couple hundred photographs of Matt diving for ground balls from his position at shortstop and crossing the plate after smashing a home run onto Jennison Street. I never knew he was a rhetoric major until last night, nor did I realize that he’s started every single baseball game during his four-year Wabash career.

Finally, the professors paid tribute to Grant Gussman, whom I did know was a rhetoric major. I knew that he won the famed Baldwin Oratorical Contest. I knew he had won both state and national titles in forensics. But I didn't know Grant was, perhaps, the most decorated forensics student in recent history.

I also learned that Grant finished his course work in December and has been coaching a speech and debate team back home. Beginning this summer, Grant will begin training for the Teach for America program and he’ll spend the next two years working at a high school in New Orleans. Teaching science!

The evening concluded when the professors presented Gussman with the Joseph O’Rourke Prize, which honors the outstanding senior rhetoric major. It was a touching occasion to see the expressions of pride and joy on the faces of Joe and Bev O’Rourke, seated closely to their dear friends — Jack Oest and the Powells.

And it was clear from his expression that Gussman, too, was honored to receive the prize named in honor of a legendary speech and rhetoric professor.

I did end up snapping the photo of the six senior majors on the front porch of the Caleb Mills House. But I left with a terrific feeling about the accomplishments of the seniors and the potential for greatness they have — as teachers, lawyers, ministers, and representatives of Wabash College.

Posted by Todd McDorman at 10:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Over the past two weeks students and faculty of Rhetoric have been busy with a number of activities inside and outside the classroom. In many respects these events reflect the active present and ambitious future of rhetoric at Wabash.

As noted in an earlier post, from February 26 to 28 the Rhetoric Department hosted the Brigance Colloquy on Public Speaking as a Liberal Art.  In addition to the excellent keynote address by Professor Denise Bostdorff of the College of Wooster, attending scholars engaged in a series of productive conversations about the role and future of rhetorical education.  Participants shared a vision of rhetoric as an art for civic engagement, discussing the role of public speaking in college curricula, how to place the practice of citizenship at the center of rhetorical study, and shared ideas of both practical import and theoretical significance in matters of teaching and scholarship.  The event energized the department’s CILA supported project and will have an important role in our work over the next 14 months.

While the colloquy holds great potential for the future of public speaking at Wabash the more visible aspects of rhetorical study have been the flurry of course related activities. Also as previously noted on this blog, on Monday March 2 Grant Gussman ’09, Daniel King ’10, and Professor David Timmerman shared their collaborative research on The Boondocks. On that same day, Professor Todd McDorman’s class met with artist Samuel Bak in the Eric Dean Gallery to discuss his work. Prior to the visit the Visual Rhetorics class read works analyzing Bak from Dean Gary Phillips and his co-author Danna Nolan Fewell. The students got their first look at the art work on Monday and engaged the artist in a discussion of the meaning of the work, testing out their own interpretations. Following the class hour the students were reluctant to leave the gallery, each flocking to the piece of his own choosing, lingering over it while considering the conversation.  The class also gathered for lunch with Samuel Bak and Dean Phillips’s class, “Parables in Jewish and Christian Traditions,” in the first of a series of collaborations between the two courses.

On Tuesday March 3 the Indiana Court of Appeals made its annual visit to Wabash.  A variety of community members attended the oral argument--students, professors, a local judge etc. However the case had the most significance for Professor Jeff Motter’s Legal Debate class. The week before the oral argument each of these students engaged in their own in-class debate on the case.  The students were able to test their understanding of the case as well as to see how the actual litigants and judges handled the argument.  Thursday, in their final class session of the half-semester course, the class exchanged their reactions and offered their evaluations of the oral argument and case.

Finally, on Friday March 6 at 6:00 a.m., Professors David Timmerman and Tim Lake left Crawfordsville with their students from African American Rhetoric and Expressive Culture.  This week the class has visited a number of significant Civil Rights sites in the south.  The student blog entries illustrate the value of the experience, the way it has brought new dimensions to their studies, and its life-changing nature.

Posted by Todd McDorman at 04:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A brief paper and presentation from a rhetoric course from spring 2008 has developed into a provocative collaborative project between Grant Gussman ’09, Daniel King ’10, and Professor David Timmerman.  Seeing potential in the text, the provocative adult swim cartoon The Boondocks (based on the comic strip of the same name), and the initial work of the students, David Timmerman offered to mentor Grant and Daniel in a four week internship last summer. During the course of their research, which was supported by the Undergraduate Research Celebration Committee (which is funded by the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts), the scholars spent many hours watching every episode from the first two seasons of the program and analyzing themes, characters, and visual elements from the show. They sought to find entry points into the way in which the show uses humor and race to address important societal issues and were guided by a difficult question: does The Boondocks provide a new space for dialogue about race?

While the four week summer internship was productive, it was not enough to complete a project of this scope and complexity.  And after the four weeks they each initially went their own way—Grant visiting Spain at the generosity of the Rudolph Fund, Daniel engaging in an off campus psychology internship before spending his fall semester abroad, and David Timmerman engaging two other students in collaborative research projects that were supported by Know Indiana.  Despite these seeming obstacles—and without the incentive of additional grades or additional internship monies—the project has continued to develop this semester.  The students continued working on the project while David Timmerman worked with them to assemble the ideas into a form fitting for publication in a rhetoric journal.  Grant and Daniel presented a revised version of their project at the Student Research Celebration in January and on March 2 the three of them combined to present the next iteration, an essay that is now approaching 12,000 words, to a room full of Wabash students and professors in the context of a Humanities Colloquium. On the one hand this is a non-traditional project: a collaborative humanities project, a rhetorical analysis authored by a Wabash professor and two students, outside of class. On the other hand, the project represents the best of Wabash and the most valuable aspects of our tradition: direct student-faculty engagement over a complex text; three engaged researchers collaboratively considering the social implications of contemporary depictions of race and humor.  What could be more influential on students’ educational experiences than that?

The presentation itself was a great success.  After an introduction by Timmerman, each participant presented a segment of analysis that showed how The Boondocks makes meaning.  Gussman discussed how the visual characteristics in the show, including the use of anime, lead an audience to either accept or reject characters. For instance, the scholars argue that the visual elements used to portray the character Huey encourage the acceptance of his views while visual elements used to portray the character Uncle Ruckus lead the audience to reject what he represents.  In a similar fashion, King illustrated how music is also used to signal the desire for comedic acceptance or rejection.  Uncle Ruckus is rejected through the application of a harsh trombone that undermines the most objectionable of his verbal messages while the philosophical reflections from Huey that are designed to explain the meaning of the message are positively accentuated with an elegant, graceful jazz piano.  Finally, in the last section, which is still in development, Timmerman examined the meaning of the dialogue delivered by Ruckus, reflecting on the use of satire and the grotesque as a transitional device that leads the audience between the possibilities of acceptance and rejection. Following the presentation the authors welcomed enthusiastic questions and discussion. Audience members at once corroborated and challenged the reading while suggesting additional avenues of development for the authors to consider as they finalize their essay for submission to a journal. 

Posted by Todd McDorman at 04:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)