2009 Conference on College Composition and Communication presentation...

The Hidden Bigotry of Authenticity:
Student-Athletes and Professors Playing the Identity Game
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Abstract

Increasingly, universities have developed programs attentive and solicitous towards a range of student demographics from “at-risk” to “gifted.” Often, student-athletes fit both criteria, though universities have been slow to recognize, and attend to, their liminal status as both high achievers and anxious learners. After two years of teaching rhetoric classes entirely comprised of varsity athletes, and three years mediating plagiarism cases for my department, I contend that the student-athlete is a pedagogic creature about whom instructors know too little, frequently leading them to approach with caution and suspicion, especially in the composition classroom. At the core of this suspicion is a jumble of bad reputation and misunderstanding about the distinctions between essential and constructed student-athlete identity, often translating into a disposition of lowered expectations and bias confirmation. This paper points out in the rhetorical sphere something well-established in sociolinguistics, that students, particularly minority students, develop habituated situational standards for switching code, and the lessons of most college classes in argumentation only amplify these processes. My goal is to open up discussion about how instructor understanding of student-athlete identity and ability can be more finely parsed in order to break bad pedagogic habits rooted in unforgiving and incomplete societal expectations.

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Because I do not wish coyly to bury the lead, I’m saying that we should not assume that student-athletes who sound and act one way on the field, another way in class, and a different way on the page are cheating, a principle to which I assume most teachers will readily subscribe. This clearly is not a particularly revelatory conclusion for most of us. Still, I am reminded of an instance when, during a plagiarism conference I mediated for my department, a colleague unflaggingly insisted that the African-American basketball player in her class could not have written the essay she turned in because it quote—“didn’t sound the way she talks”—unquote. Such common knowledge and anecdotal experience, sustained by glances through media sources both professional and popular, suggest that the stigmatizing of student-athletes persists: they are often considered, at best, academically underprepared, and, at worst, intellectually incompetent; they are often presumed to carry deep senses of entitlement drowning shallow interest in their schooling; as a result, their work is often viewed warily, the product of small doses of forced but lackluster effort aided by large doses of heavy-handed, scare-quoted tutoring. Like commercial airplane crashes, systemic academic malfeasance in big-league athletic departments, though infrequent, is reported with such wide reproach that scandal is perceived as their standard operating procedure. These suspicious attitudes envelop like a clinging fog the teaching and assessment of student-athletes with a judicial rather than a judicious air. Running contra to these negative constructions of student-athletes is what we might call an equally common stigmatizing of stigmatization: teachers telling their colleagues that, regarding their student-athletes, if they can’t convict, they must acquit.

I find the parallel but paradoxic presence of these attitudes towards student-athletes fascinating, especially because their complex and concurrent existences underscore what I argue is another, more basal paradox in many public spheres, popular, political, and pedagogic: we love authenticity, even as we know, though regularly pretend not to, that ‘authentic’ is a highly molten concept, liquid and often too hot to grasp. Authenticity here can be understood as the demand by teachers of their students for a stable projection of a stable self. We very much want the one bit of good advice Polonius gives Laertes, “to thine own self be true” (Act 1.3) to be true. In our composition classes as in the world beyond, however, we generally and often genially allow self to “dissolve,” quoting from John Trimbur, “into the semiosis of intertextuality” (283). Or, as Sharon Crowley explains at the beginning of her Methodical Memory, “the sovereign authoring subject” is “no longer useful as [a] theoretical resource for the teaching of composition” (xiv). But evidence still remains of our deep fixation on the authentic, our compulsion to seek out and reward authenticity, our drive to actually be authentic, and our desire for an unwavering authentic self. Authenticity is a concept we have moved beyond but cannot get past. The result is a sort of cognitive dissonance promoting discouraging and potentially damaging public decisions, especially those educational, but political and cultural ones as well. Exhibit ‘A’ may be the continued presence of the stigmatization of student-athletes, along with the reaction against such stigmatization.

Stigmatize is an appropriate term to apply to unexamined negative attitudes towards student-athletes in composition classes since its etymology denotes a physical ‘marking’ or ‘branding.’ Here, teachers and other students often ‘brand’ student-athletes as dumb and duplicitous because of their physicality. During one of the introductory rhetoric and writing courses I taught to an all-varsity-athlete class, a student and basketball player recounted to us his inability to convince his non-student-athlete peers that he did not receive answers to exams before the test dates. Instead, these peers demanded that he share with them his ill-gotten inside information. His student-athlete peers in our class all emphatically related to his tale, many recounting their own similar experiences of being negatively branded, despite never offering explicit confirmation of their student-athlete status. People could, they’d say, ‘just tell,’ a phenomenon they gamely laughed off.

Sociologist Julie Cheville exposes the anxieties behind this uncomfortable laughter in Minding the Body, her book-length study of a female college basketball team. She writes, “what student athletes most fear [is] that their athleticism will be appropriated and used against them by those who have the power to deny or devalue their presence” (4). So, while there is a longstanding connection in rhetorical studies between body and mind, the bond between the two has been all but broken in contemporary universities. In Bodily Arts, her study of rhetoric and athletics in ancient Greece, rhetorician Debra Hawhee describes what she calls the “curious syncretism” (195) between athletic training, resulting ‘good bodily disposition’ (euexia), and philosophic training, resulting in virtuosity (arête). Isocrates, in Antidosis, remarks that “These two disciplines are complementary, interconnected, and consistent with each other.” He continues, “They do not separate these two kinds of education but use similar methods of instruction, exercise, and other kinds of practices” (239). For Isocrates and the Greeks, the gymnasium was an entirely appropriate place to practice one’s progymnasmata.

But, for a variety of reasons, varsity athletics and collegiate scholastics are separated in most schools today, often to the detriment of students. Cheville claims that, for many student-athletes, “the conceptual orientation central to knowledge acquisition in sport [is] relatively useless in college classrooms that disassociate[s] cognition from concrete activity and interaction” (8). And, as pointed out in a recent psychological study focusing on the motivational processes of student-athletes by Althea Woodruff and Diane Schallert, most student-athletes “intertwine” (35) their academic and athletic “senses of self” (42, and passim) in complicated and not necessarily beneficial ways, in part because they are not always sure, and rarely asked to articulate, how the mind and body connect.

Many scholars have suggested, however, that there is a space in rhetoric and composition classes where body and mind—the corporeal and compositional selves—do intersect, for students and student-athletes alike. Unlike the historical virtuous associations between mind and body traced by scholars like Hawhee, this current intersection is largely considered oversimplified and overweening, especially in the wake of rigorous debates over author, author-function, and agency. As Susan Miller famously points out in Textual Carnivals, “Writing makes an object of a student’s language.” She continues, “Consequently, the practice of attending to mechanical errors allow[s] written texts to become instruments for examining the ‘body’ of a student . . . This attention allows a teacher . . . to examine the student’s language with the same attitude that controls a clinical medical examination.” Miller concludes, “In the continuing view that a student’s written language reveals personal flaws as readily as his speech, the quality of the student can be identified with the correct or incorrect quality of the student’s texts” (57).

Student work, in other words, is taken as student identity. This identity is taken as the student’s actual and only identity, though it is refracted through the class’s particular rhetorical situations and compositional processes, and unavoidably swayed by teacher assessment. A persona is taken to be the person. The reverse is also possible, particularly with minority and male student-athletes, when the person reflected in the student’s work fails to reflect the expected persona in the eyes of the teacher. Herein lies the bigotry of authenticity: a sort of asymmetric insight whereby many teachers believe they have the power and privilege over their students to discern, even  define, their students’s irreducible selves. Instead of telling students what they are doing, and how they are doing it, teachers attempt to tell students who they are. But, as Lionel Trilling once wrote, “criticism is not gossip.”

Indeed, Rebecca Moore Howard reminds us that “In rhetorical studies, ‘the systems of which one is part’ include subject formation.” “Reflexivity in rhetorical studies has,” she continues, “called attention to subject formation as fundamental precept and project of the discipline.” Moore concludes that, “subject formation might even be seen as a metanarrative for rhetorical and pedagogical studies” (349). I agree with Howard about the considerable significance of subject formation in composition classes, but I think the word ‘reflexive’ is potentially distressing. If ‘reflexive’ connotes the extent to which a student-athlete is expected to reflect a teacher’s a priori expectations, as in the instance with my disbelieving colleague and her basketball playing writer, we risk allowing the molten substance that is student identity to harden into something not just inauthentic but counterproductive, precisely the opposite of what this sort of logic hoped to accomplish. If, however, ‘reflexive’ connotes a student-athlete’s ability to assimilate then activate the missions of the class, trying out with reflection the various rhetorical and compositional strategies taught to them, we are, I think, getting close to the core of why we teach rhetoric and writing to our students. Composition and rhetoric classes, I’d argue, axiomatically ask students to try on new selves in order to expand what constitutes the self. Teachers, at their best, intend to improve their students—as writers, as citizens, as individuals—by improving their abilities to write and argue. But at their worst, teachers sometimes fail to see how such programs for improvement obligate them to give students space to flex and stretch their identities.

What I’m asserting is that, generally speaking, we worry too much about identity, when what we really mean is “identification” in Kenneth Burke’s sense of the concept. In his Rhetoric of Motives, Burke tells us that fundamentally rhetoric is the student’s ability to “persuade a man only insofar as you can talk his language by speech, gesture, tonality, order, image, attitude, idea,” ultimately, “identifying your ways with his” (55). We worry too much about who a student-athlete is, or who we think he or she is, instead of concentrating on more pragmatically useful evaluations, like the student’s success in practicing identification while navigating rhetorical contingency. The tragedy of the bigotry of authenticity, then, is twofold. First, in our emphasis on the authentic, we may limit the opportunities for student-athletes, many of whom are already having a difficult time ‘intertwining’ their various selves, to fully exercise their agency. By agency I mean the microphysical capacity for students to, again quoting from Trimbur, “negotiate their ways of life” using “practical logic” (285). Second, we may fail to recognize that the student-athlete whose essay doesn’t “sound the way she talks” is, in fact, trying in her work to sound and act like us, since that is what most composition and rhetoric classes ask students to do.

Instead of trying to carry such a hefty concept as identity into our classrooms, I offer that a slower, diagnostic discussion of ethos works as a productive replacement. Aristotle, in Book 2 of On Rhetoric, calls ethos “almost … the most authoritative form of persuasion” (1356a.2-4), and conventionally understood components of Aristotelian ethos are useful concrete strategies for composition students. But since my contention is that most civic discourses, including many in the sphere of compositional pedagogy, emphasize rhetor authenticity over more constructive, though contingent, pragmatic characteristics, and since I think this overemphasis stems in part from a highly diluted, highly psychologized take on Aristotle’s conception of ethos, I am interested in reading Aristotelian ethos as drawing a distinction between being ‘ethical,’ and what I want to call being ‘ethotic.’ This distinction can be productively dissected in class.

Ethical carries a moral valence insisting that the students’s identity reflected in their writing be authentic, and made authentically available to audiences. On the other hand, ethotic asks ‘only’ that students present a situationally clear and appropriate identity with which their audience can identify for purposes of building transparent and transactional rhetorical relationships. The ethotic is unconcerned whether or not students’s identities match their authentic selves. Besides, to avoid coyness again, I am skeptical that an essential self even exists, especially in compositional pedagogy, despite beliefs in a stable self by classical philosophers, including Aristotle. The ethotic sidesteps this skepticism anyway because it is transparent about the constructed nature of a rhetor’s ethos. The ethical, conversely, demands of the rhetor a more constitutive identity. The ethotic is method; the ethical category. The ethotic is highly pragmatic, and thus, in my opinion, pedagogically useful, if we understand pragmatic to mean what William James calls an “attitude of looking away from first things, principles, ‘categories,’ [and] supposed necessities,” and “looking towards last things, fruits, consequences, [and] facts” (27). It is too pat to suggest that Aristotle replaces classical conceptions of the sincerely ‘good man’ with an opposed ‘postmodern’ conception of the contingent self.  But it is clear in Book 2 that identity within civic discourse is not necessarily authentic, by which I hope to suggest both not required and not inevitable. Rather, it mostly depends on the situation. As Lester Faigley explains it in Fragments of Rationality, his useful book on subjectivity and composition, “The subject, like judgments of value and validations, has no grounding outside contingent discourses” (227).

So ethos, in the setting of our classes, is best understood as any form of what rhetorician Marshall Alcorn calls “self-structuring” by the student (16). Because he specifically highlights control of identity as a component of rhetoric, Alcorn’s usage opens space for students to practice composition contingently. It also addresses Trimbur’s ‘semiotic dissolution,’ since self-structuring forces rhetors to acknowledge and engage with the specter haunting ethos in the poststructuralist world: “It seems we cannot have at the same time,” Alcorn warns, “both a theory that explains the rhetor’s presence in a text and a theory that fully describes the plural disseminations of textual codes” (17). Alcorn sounds about right, yet despite the seismic effects Foucault’s ‘author-function’ (in “What is an Author?,” 1969) and Barthes’s ‘death of the author’ (in  S/Z, 1974) have had on literary theory, the strictness with which composition and rhetoric classes believe in and operate under these poststructural paradigms is perhaps overstated. While poststructuralism still seeps into the cracks, there is a thick wall of productive disagreement in composition studies over the extant author’s presence and consequence. Again, we accept that the concept of a stable, authentic author is troubled, even as we still want to know who wrote what and why. By engaging these troubling issues in class, the goal is not to draw conclusions, which is probably a fool’s errand. But I believe there is critical value in explicitly discussing with our students the raison d'être of contingency, along with its subsequent underwriting of identification over identity. These discussions are especially commodious for students who conspicuously feel the instability of identity in their day-to-day lives, including most student-athletes, even as they attempt to intertwine their various selves.

In the end, Howard’s claim that subject formation serves as the “metanarrative” for compositional and rhetorical studies provides a practical suggestion for teaching student-athletes. My experience is that student-athletes require and respond to meta-discussions about the obligations, attitudes, and actions towards schooling. Similarly, because of the inherent performative aspects of athletics, student-athletes possess an almost intuitive appreciation for rhetoric as it was originally described by classical rhetoricians like Aristotle and Isocrates: as techne, an art, rather than as episteme, knowledge. Hawhee succinctly characterizes this intuition as “chiasmatic,” the “immediate relationship between training practices and performance” (7).

There are convincing arguments against engaging in this sort of self-conscious meta-discussion with our students: as Amy Robillard points out, unlike compositional studies, “Students of other disciplines do not reflect the nature of the field itself. The discipline of astronomy, for example, studies the heavens; it does not study the students of astronomy” (42). While I appreciate Robillard’s concern, I argue that, even if composition classes are not really, or at least not most productively about identity, they are essentially and inevitably about people doing work. If astronomy students created stars in class instead of observing them, perhaps then we would find it more acceptable to engage in disciplinary conversations about the reflexive relationships between person and pulsar. Undeniably, the students writing in our classes are creating constellations of identifications and cosmologies of selves. For me, then, teaching this conflicted conversation about conflicted self does more than offer to students critical knowledge; it offers to teachers a gentle corrective against the hazard of assuming that, at least when it comes to knowing who our students are, we ‘know best.’