Sensitive Rhetorics: Academic Freedom and Campus Activism

Kendall Gerdes, Associate Professor in the Department of Writing and Rhetoric Studies, has published a book with timely relevance.

Professor Gerdes explains, “Sensitive Rhetorics: Academic Freedom and Campus Activism (University of Pittsburgh, 2024) is a work of rhetorical theory that analyzes and engages ongoing public conversations about the scope of academic freedom in the context of controversial student activism. While many scholars from a variety of disciplines have addressed “free speech” controversies on campus, few have done so from the grounding of their disciplinary expertise. Sensitive Rhetorics analyzes several of these controversies as rhetorical events that can tell us both about the pursuit of justice in higher education and about the open structure of rhetoric itself. Using rhetorical analysis, Sensitive Rhetorics advances the conversation in our field about the uses of rhetorical theory in ordinary public debate and decision making, and in everyday life.

Sensitive Rhetorics also speaks to ongoing scholarly conversations about the (mis)representation and politicization of campus issues in the wider public (e.g., Bradford Vivian's Campus Misinformation), and invites future scholars to contribute by taking student activism as serious rhetorical intervention in campus cultural and institutional life—and even in wider national and international politics. 

Further, Sensitive Rhetorics deeply engages with issues of concern to historically marginalized constituencies, exploring the relationship between teaching, trauma, and disability; between sexual harassment and institutional procedure; and between Black students’ experience of racial injury and representations of campuses as safe spaces. Drawing on the relevant scholarship ranging from disability studies to feminist legal studies to research in higher education, Sensitive Rhetorics demonstrates how rhetorical scholarship can effectively integrate insights from other disciplines to build informed perspectives on rhetorical issues.

Sensitive Rhetorics argues that rhetorical theory is not simply an esoteric academic subfield but an accessible, influential, and important part of our ordinary, everyday work as teachers and scholars. Presenting cases of campus activism that span the last decade, Sensitive Rhetorics will help scholars to contextualize and more effectively respond to the increasingly explosive public debates about contemporary college students and their role as intellectuals and changemakers in higher education and the world at large.”