Although graduate students in rhetoric at Penn State have organized under various aspects since the 1990s, the Arnold-Ebbitt Interdisciplinary Rhetoricians (AEIR) took shape in its current form in the early 2000s. Our founding advisor, Rosa Eberly, registered us with the Rhetoric Society of America on October 24th, 2005. We were among the first of their graduate student chapters. About five years later, on September 1st, 2010, AEIR gained official recognition as a Penn State student organization.

One of the core goals of AEIR is to increase working relationships between students and faculty in the Communication Arts and Sciences (CAS) department and the English department. To this end we selected our group’s name to honor two faculty, one from each department, who made a lasting impact on rhetorical studies at Penn State.

Who were Arnold and Ebbitt?

Carroll Arnold joined the Penn State CAS faculty in 1963, after a long and successful career at Cornell. Along with philosopher Henry Johnstone, Arnold co-founded the journal Philosophy and Rhetoric which printed its first issue in 1968 and continues publication by Penn State University Press to this day. Arnold’s former student and colleague, Thomas Benson, Penn State CAS professor emeritus, writes that Arnold represented “the high-water mark of what one of his students, Edwin Black, later called neo-Aristotelian criticism,” and calls him “one of the great figures of midcentury rhetorical studies in speech communication” (Twentieth-Century Roots of Rhetorical Studies, Praeger 2001). Benson also praises Arnold for his ability to blend the values of “teaching, writing, editing, and preparation for citizenship.”

In his 1974 book Criticism of Oral Rhetoric Arnold isolates those special cases of “speaking in which informing and persuading are prominent goals” (7). To submit these cases to a meaningful criticism, Arnold insists that one “must focus centrally upon how ideas are adapted to rhetorical situations” (9), in which the response of listeners matters decisively to one’s interpretation of the speech. Such criticism depicts history as a perpetuating series of spoken acts, and the adaptation or mis-adaptation of those acts to their intended goals. Benson notes Arnold’s influential criticisms of British statesmen Benjamin Disraeli and Thomas Erskine; American lecturer George William Curtis; the Senate Committee of Thirteen who in 1860 attempted compromise to avert the American Civil War; and the early debates surrounding the Pennsylvania Constitution.

Wilma Ebbitt began her career at the University of Chicago, receiving a PhD from Brown for a dissertation on Margaret Fuller. At Chicago she knew and worked with Richard McKeon, Wayne Booth, Richard Weaver, and Philip Roth, among others, teaching writing and publishing on Composition pedagogy. In 1974 she joined the Penn State English faculty and in 1975 became the first Composition Director, in charge of reforming the writing program not only at Penn State’s University Park campus, but of all the Commonwealth campuses as well. According to Brent Henze, Jack Selzer, and Wendy Sharer (in 1977: A Cultural Moment in Composition, Parlor Press 2007), the Penn State English department by the mid-‘70s had entered a “crisis mode” (105). Deeply informed especially by the work of Richard Weaver, Ebbitt imposed a regular curriculum on what had become perceived as a loose and haphazard assortment of teaching methods that were not obtaining desirable results. She also instituted regular meetings of faculty and graduate students to discuss writing pedagogy, and opened the way for Penn State to become receptive to a rising field of academic research into Composition.

During the 1950s Penn State had had two separate departments for “English” (the study of literature) and “English Composition” (teaching of many kinds of writing). Over time the two departments merged, but undergraduates majoring in English could either study literature or choose the Writing Option, each track with its own faculty. Henze, Selzer, and Sharer emphasize that not all of Ebbitt’s reforms to the Composition pedagogy at Penn State were popular, even though they stuck and for the most part hold fast today. In particular, some faculty associated once with English Composition and later the Writing Option—whose legacy to some extent lingers in Penn State’s programs in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction—felt that, in the words of Tom Rogers, a fiction writer, “Rhetoric has triumphed…but creative writing has faltered” as a result. Still, even Rogers acknowledged that while he had a different “agenda” from Ebbitt, he “grew to like and admire her more and more” over the years (1977 135-36). Yet many praised Ebbitt unequivocally, and there is no doubt that the force of her personality and institutional presence remain strong at Penn State.

Rhetoric at Penn State in the 21^st Century

Rosa Eberly, who began her rhetorical study at Penn State in the early 1980s, recalls that both Carroll Arnold and Wilma Ebbitt were “two remarkably and rigorously kind teacher-scholars who shared many values and practices…but who never met each other, despite the fact that they worked in mirror image buildings separated by a narrow, grassy mall.” Incidentally, Eberly also made the initial recommendation for our fledgling graduate student organization to name itself after the two of them, in the hopes that it could “symbolize a remedy—as well as the vast potential of interdisciplinary rhetoric at Penn State.”

AEIR is committed not only to collaboration among self-identified rhetoricians, but also to those in CAS and English who do not associate their work with rhetoric; and by extension, graduate students and faculty in every discipline. AEIR finds itself, like every organization, in a situation which bears historical marks of conflict as well as of harmony. If rhetoricians occupy a specific niche within the academic domain, we gingerly offer an olive branch to any who might receive it. Most of us believe in rhetoric because we believe in communication, the idea that if no common ground exists, or seems to exist, we can build one starting now by speaking, writing, listening, and never stinting to discover “the available means of persuasion.”