RHETORIC’S COMMENCEMENT

Winter graduation 2009, I delivered the Commencement Address at Penn State York. At the time, I was the coordinator of the Communication Arts & Sciences degree at the campus. At the campus, I initiated  a student group affiliated with the National Communication Association and called it CAS Club and dedicated it to enriching the lives of undergraduate Communication majors and minors as well as non-majors. I started the Honor Society Lambda Pi Eta at the campus. Our campus was the Pi Rho Chapter. This commencement address came from the heart of my interest in teaching undergraduate students from 1980-2018. (Before that college stint, I taught high school for 7 years and was Olathe High School’s debate coach in Montrose County, Colorado.)   

Commencement is a time of beginnings. I offer a portion of my 2009 Commencement Address to spread the wings of rhetoric one more to all the classes of 2023. 

After a rallying  WE ARE call …. 

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Speaking of football, did you know that intercollegiate football is coming to Georgia State University next year? They are getting a big marching band and a new fight song. 

On my way to rhetorical theory class one morning, I turned on the radio and caught a portion of Robert Siegel on All Things Considered interviewing Georgia State University’s new director of athletic bands. 

Siegel says, “I was wondering. “Of all the changes that have happened in band music, does it make sense that college fight songs are still kind of double-time, Sousa-like marches played by a brass band?  Couldn’t there be some totally different kind of music that college students would relate to as a fight song?”

Pause. (I pretend to turn off the radio).

Would you want your BLUE BAND to give up your fight song? So, what do you think the band director said?  

“NO!”

You’re exactly right.   I don’t think Georgia State University would ever give up their John-Phillip-Sousa style of marching music to become the Panthers. Nor is any other university going to give up their march grandioso’s to be the Lions.

But universities did give up a something of a tradition that once held the focus of commencement addresses for many generations of graduates from American universities and colleges. What was that tradition? It was the tradition of speaking to graduates about rhetoric.  

One of my favorite commencement addresses on rhetoric is “The Question of Our Speech,” which was delivered by Henry James to the class of 1905 graduates at Bryn Myr College. I am not going to get into the meat of his speech, and neither am I going to tell you all the reasons why the tradition of speaking on rhetoric has faded from distinction. Instead, I am going to give you a gift. Besides your diploma, lots of fond memories, a PSU sweatshirt, and picture of yourself with the Nittany Lion, you have one more thing to take with you as you leave this university behind for another adventure. Rhetoric. Don’t leave home without it. 

Let’s start with rhetoric as a gift. 

The story goes that rhetoric was a gift from the gods. You might be familiar with the story that fire is a gift from the Greek god Prometheus. Well rhetoric is a gift from a Greek god named Zeus.  The story goes something like this:  The people –dēmos—were living like wild beast. They used violence to settle their differences. For Zeus the people’s violence was wrecking his idea of civilization and of people living peacefully. So, he asked one of his lackeys –the god Hermes aka Mercury—to distribute rhetoric among the people as a gift to enable people to settle their differences by means of talk rather than violence. 

How should we distribute this art, Hermes asked Zeus’ messengers? Should we give rhetoric –the power to speak—to a few? Zeus thought for a moment. Give rhetoric to everyone, Zeus said, and distribute its power equally. This is how some say democracy was born. Rhetoric made democracy realizable and attainable. Today we would say that rhetoric embodies the relationship between language and people to form art of political decision-making or deliberation. People rely on the gift of rhetoric when they are uncertain about the best course of action to take. Rhetoric gives them a way to move forward. It is a method or an art, that when applied, offers direction on how to employ reason, emotion, and other features of ethics and language to arrive at a place where people can settle their difference and move forward freely and helpfully. While we can’t see the gift of rhetoric, like we can see the gift of fire, we can see its places. Rhetoric appears to us as a house. This could be a courthouse, a meeting house, a schoolhouse, the lower and upper houses of Congress. These are the houses where people employ rhetoric. Houses contain democracy. 

So rhetoric is something of a gift in your education and something that you can take with you as you enter the civic sphere. John Quincy Adams, who is better known as a President of the United States (1825-1829), taught rhetoric at university. He began lecturing on rhetoric on Friday mornings at Harvard in 1806, commuting between Cambridge and the new capital city. He said rhetoric was the only way to prepare students to be people of a democracy and of the world. 

Adams finds rhetoric indispensable for being in the world. It enables citizens, giving them a practical way to make decisions about the best course an institution, a government, a society should take. Rhetoric is our house of democracy, and it is perpetually in the building process. We use it to create the houses we want to have and hold.

Perhaps no one took this gift—this house—as s seriously as Abraham Lincoln. It is a bit of common lore that he taught himself all the subjects he knew. He had access to a few books as he grew up. The Bible. Aesop’s fables. The poetry of Robert Burns. Lincoln read speeches of the ancient Greeks and he had access to Hugh Blair’s Rhetoric. It may be no exaggeration to say he saw rhetoric as a house and this imagery guided his strong view of country as a house that cannot be divided against itself. He saw rhetoric as vital to a democracy, a gift to the people, of the people and by the people. Since rhetoric is one of the only two gifts from the gods, it is fair to say that rhetoric encompasses something of that better angel of ourselves. Lincoln never wavered on his view of rhetoric as an instrument of democracy.  

It is this dream of democracy that brings me to approach the gift of rhetoric as a vision or a way of seeing.  

We can catch a glimpse of rhetoric as a way of seeing in Lincoln’s Niagara speech. In the fall of 1848, Lincoln visited Niagara Falls, and he was taken by its power and magnificence. This was truly an American wonder and he said of Niagara Falls that is it is “a great arrangement of foam and roar and mist and there will be a perpetual rainbow.” Rhetoric provides a perspective of competition (roar) and cooperation (great arrangement). It architects a dream of what can be. The rainbow is an effect of the possible.

The rainbow is a metaphor of the cosmos. When you observe the universe in different wavelengths you get to see different things. Thus, when you observe a political situation, rhetoric provides many ways of using its different parts to try and understand how all the different pieces of what is happening fit together. Rhetoric is intellectual and political.

The rainbow is a metaphor of culture. Chinchero, where women weave multi-hued blankets out of naturally dyed alpaca wool, is considered the mythical Incan birthplace of the rainbow. Rhetoric is a practice relying on discipline and beauty. 

The rainbow is comparable to the body’s multicolored chakra system. https://health.clevelandclinic.org/chakras/ Rhetoric is agentic. We can use rhetoric for reducing anxiety, indecision, and hesitation.  

I could go on and on about rhetoric as a means of seeing and creating, but I pause because, by now, you might be thinking…

All this rhetorical flourish is well and good, but isn’t the country overfull of rhetoric as it is?  Well yeah (if you think of rhetoric as bombastic)—but the study of rhetoric may be important for the very reason that there is too much of it—too  much undisciplined argument, and too few citizens who know how to use the gift and envision its power critically. We complain about being manipulated by advertising, and political campaigns and then allow ourselves to be seduced. We decry the raucous nonsense of this and that on TV and radio and then put up with it daily. We yearn for real leaders, men and women who can seize the spirit of the nation and lead it to some great place and then we distrust the possibility of it. Partisan gridlock may be a sign of an inability even to understand what consensus means and how to achieve it. So yes, we need the gift of rhetoric and its vision that it contains.

As you leave us—university—tonight, my best hope is that you take the gift of rhetoric along with your and  use it freely in your homes, workplaces, and communities. 

Dare to envision.  See more, hear more, feel more, so you can be more. 

We are …