The Journal of Public Deliberation (which posts of all its articles online for free) recently posted a special issue on higher education. An article on communication as a discipline in U.S. colleges, “Communication studies and Deliberative Democracy: Current Contributions and Future Possibilities,” by Martín Carcasson, Laura W. Black, and Elizabeth S. Sink, makes an argument common to many other authors in this issue, and one that is probably an inherent belief with scholars of the concept of deliberative democracy:

“It is clear that one of the major barriers to a more deliberative democracy is the lack of quality interaction, and thus understanding and mutual respect across perspectives” (2010: 13).

These authors focus their analysis on communication studies, as well as on other classes such as rhetoric, group communication, and interpersonal communication.

“Perhaps most emblematic of the connection between communication education and democracy are the public speaking courses required for thousands of students each semester. This course has an inherent to skills relevant to democracy, as students are typically asked to research public issues and persuade their fellow student-citizens of particular points of view” (7).

However, the authors remark, “unfortunately” these classes often focus more on “individual achievement, needs of marketplace, and professional presentation skills.”

They see these skills as suitable to an “adversarial” kind of democracy, rather than a deliberative one. I think adversarial democracy more aptly describes what we’ve got, actually. But the question of which values, what system of beliefs, undergirds the way we teach communication is one I was really happy to see grappled with, out in the (relative) open of a free, scholarly journal.

If there are communicative values behind what we teach when we teach Com 1010, they don’t seem to be foregrounded, made available for critique. When I was assigned two sections of this class as a new grad student, I partly compensated for my lack of teaching experience by approaching the class as if it was a thesis project. I grabbed on to a few oblique references to democracy and public speaking in The Art of Public Speaking textbook—democratic values like respect and inclusion. This ended up taking over my own research interest, and really influencing the way I taught the class.

I saw these norms in the way not only public speaking but also composition is taught: including and respecting the other side, representing others’ arguments with compassion as well as accuracy, crediting others’ work. But I wonder if this method of communicating will be fairly unique to college. As my students leave college and advance through adulthood, I imagine them sifting themselves into communities of cultural and political taste, and looking over to the other side from across a wider divide, often apoplectic. That’s been my experience. Political conversations in my observation mostly seem about heightening our own beliefs, more thoroughly dismissing the opposition. Where outside of class do we practice this method of empathy, reciprocity, and inquiry with those whose beliefs most distinctly contrast with our own?

“Deliberative scholars and practitioners” according to the article, “strive to create spaces where multiple voices can not only be heard, but truly listened to, even in communities that have marked power imbalances.”

“Yet despite the numerous links between the fields and exemplary democratic practice, teaching and scholarship too often remains indirect, dispersed, secondary, rather than at the forefront of disciplinary concerns” (1).

The article is a call for what Charles Taylor described as “liberalism as a fighting creed,” rather than a procedural fallback, and rather than a negative freedom to be left alone, to do your own thing. I really like this article, it’s comprehensive and clear, with a nice overview of communication studies in its various versions in higher ed. But I think rather than put this belief system at the forefront of concerns, it should also be discussed, made available for critique, rather than tucked into a textbook like The Art of Public Speaking, an assumed, unexamined, scattered belief system.

My favorite defacement of an ad in a subway station began as an image of the New York skyline in a hazy sunset. I don’t remember what the ad was for, but I don’t think the designers had figured that it was too soon after 9/11 to depict a reddish, smokey skyline without evoking dread and sadness in the commuters who rushed by, barely taking in the image and definitely not noticing the brand. It was great to see how the contributions to this poster added up over a week or so. First, yes, there was a magic marker drawing of an airplane headed towards the top of a building. Then, few days later a cartoon in ballpoint pen of a little alien appeared, hovering in a spaceship over the East River. A smiling Martian, with cute curling antennae. Bit by bit, other drawings started to fill up the sky, drawn with different pens, in different styles. There was a flying alligators, and even a yelling George Bush stick figure. I would pass this poster in its many phases, and feel really happy about my fellow New Yorkers for collectively and creatively remaking what had maybe been a disturbing and insensitive ad agency’s miscalculation. I thought of this graffiti as a great way to respond to the impolite media that was too quick to jump on the event and fictionalize it.

I can tend to read too much into things, but this year I began to feel like the way some subway posters were defaced was asking for attention beyond the usual idle tearing or tagging. An ad for the movie “Leap Year,” suddenly seemed to actually look like the strangling weed the romantic comedy about a desperate single woman actually is. Someone had either tested under the top layer of the poster to see what was underneath, or had remembered the previous ad for a horror movie (“Wolfman”) in the same place. Someone sliced pieces of the first layer of the bright green “Leap Year” to show twisted dark vines beneath it. The heroine of the romantic comedy now looked threatened by the clutches of a monster, and it was the encircling grasp of another movie. Was it a feminist cut-up, or a coincidence? And was I over-interpreting? I took a picture, and showed it to a friend. He said, “Hm. Maybe. It’s hard to tell.”

Later, a sad face appeared inside the poster for the “Tori and Dean: Home Sweet Hollywood” show.

And, soon after that, a knife and the same tangled vines from “Wolfman” appeared between Jennifer Lopez and some actor guy in the ad for “Back Up Plan.”

My favorite one (sadly, I didn’t get a photo) was of two morning talk show hosts. After their hyper-groomed and hugely smiling faces had been up for a week or so, the subway razor artist peeled around their heads to reveal much bigger heads beneath them. Now it looked as if huge monster heads were surging out of the perfectly suited morning show host bodies.

Eventually, I put my question to Google and turned up a video and an article in the Greenpoint Gazette about an artist who goes by Poster Boy.

At the Schwartz Institute Symposium last week, keynote speaker Clay Shirky described how the internet allows people to critique and adapt systems and institutions. What had previously been one-way communication (television, print ads, etc) has become two-way and multiple-way (Amazon, Facebook). Sharkey succinctly and compelling theorized what he calls a revolution in communication behavior that comes from adapting to these new technologies. I’ve been thinking of how Shirky’s explanations of the effects and significance of new technologies could also be useful towards theorizing older technologies and behaviors. I’ve thought of public art that did a kind of political, public critique of being a 90’s phenomenon, but at that time it was associated with singular artists. I like not being able to tell when subway ad defacement is intentional, when it is the work of someone who considers himself an artist, and when it is more random. It makes me look at these images differently.

For other examples of subway art (and better photography) see this article in New York S8#%ty.

Once, a student told me that he couldn’t present his final assignment for my public speaking class because he had to take the CPA exam. It was understood that the exam would take precedence as a kind of gateway to gainful employment, but I was still a little surprised at how compelled I felt to step aside. As an adjunct, I’ve been made aware of the connection between public speaking and employment for Baruch students. Several teachers work in public relations firms or as corporate consultants outside the college, and students seem to respect and learn from they way they both model and teach the conventions of business professional comportment and conventions.

I’ve told my students that public speaking assignments should prepare them for the corporate world in terms of how to coherently present their work, and how to be poised, authoritative, and collegial doing it. I’d like to have more to say than this, but less to say than the broad justification of humanities that I’ve heard before (and largely believe). While I haven’t had any interest in the business world before, after teaching at Baruch for a few years, I’ve become more and more aware of how much I don’t know about it. I feel kind of hampered in my ability to figure out how what I am trying to offer (my own work research is in democracy and culture) might connect to their lives outside college. And hampered from connecting what I’m doing to what I guess makes up the majority of their classtime. I looked up ‘what can the humanities do for business’ and found a Stanford webpage from early this year, in which several people respond to Stanley Fish’s (he’s like academia’s Joe Liberman!). John Bender says, “Not too long ago, the New York Times reported interviews with a number of CEOs who connected their ability as managers to their long-term engagement with books of all kinds, including fiction and poetry.” Bryan Wolf responds that Fish is “trying to save the humanities from instrumentalization.” But I’m actually curious about what, in terms of business, that instrumentalization might be.

The Robert Zicklin Center for Corporate Integrity has hosted some interesting panels, one on corporate failures that may have led to the current crisis called, “Did we get what we deserve?” And another one I wish I’d seen that featured alumni Edward Zinbarg, who wrote a book called Faith, Morals, and Money. So, I vow in 2010 to go to this center’s events, and meanwhile I’m working on a list of my favorite novels and plays, and the different ways they address money. So far, I’ve got: Aristophanes, The Acharnians, which stars a merchant who argues against an idealistic warmonger; anything by Charles Dickens; Easter, a play about debt and Christianity by Strindberg; Jerry McGuire (money and success is love); and Slumdog Millionaire. The more I read, the more leftward I seem to drift. And, while I refuse to read anymore Ayn Rand, I’m interested in literature that views neoliberalism and capitalism critically as well as positively. So far, Jerry McGuire is all I can think of. I’d like to find some writing on connection between literature and economics. So far, all I can think of is the passage in Capital when Marx talks about the lace-maker’s death notice, and how much it reminded me of Dickens. I’d like to read some fiction over winter break, even though I should be working and working. And I would like a booklist of fiction on money.