JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory, Volume 21, Number 4, Spring 2001 Page: 822
733-962 p. : ill. (some col.), ports. ; 22 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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jac
be unnecessary. We may generally value practice over theorizing and we
do concern ourselves with ethical issues, but we have not made normative
concerns central to practices of doctoral education and the formation of
composition studies. Nonetheless, graduate students do already implic-
itly learn a stance toward the world through their acquisition of theoreti-
cal knowledge. But this is not the same as teaching students to use
theoretical knowledge to take a stance toward the world and toward the
people who inhabit it. Nor is it the same as preparing students to take
stances supported by theoretical knowledge and encouraged by the ethics
of the profession. We need to consider more explicitly the connections of
knowledge and stance so that we might better understand, and so act on,
doctoral education and the reproduction of composition studies as some-
how oriented to the world ethically and normatively as well as cognitively.
My claim is that we best consider the connections of knowledge and
stance and best evaluate doctoral education in composition studies by
thinking through Bellah's notion of the true scholar.
Bellah's argument turns on the opposition between the cognitive and
the ethical that are givens in his definition of a true scholar. He develops
this opposition on the familiar ground that scholars who debate disciplin-
ary knowledge and ways of knowing solely within their discipline have
lost sight of why those debates matter to anyone else and so have largely
lost the ability to make those debates matter to anyone else. According to
Bellah, "We claim devotion to pure cognitive inquiry without any other
intent, and we argue that the only normative basis for our inquiry is
freedom; we do not take conscious responsibility for the fact that freedom
without judgment would lead to self-destruction" (20). What begins in
the abstract as an opposition between cognition and ethics becomes in
practice the struggle between freedom and judgment, a struggle between
an openness to all ideas and a commitment to specifiable ways of
knowing, a struggle that Bellah describes in language drawn from the
debate in political theory between liberalism and communitarianism. The
overlap of abstractions, practices, and debates in Bellah's argument can
help compositionists clarify our own abstractions, practices, and debates
about freedom and judgment, knowing and doing, so that we may better
consider the goals of doctoral education in composition studies. The
terms of Bellah's argument enrich our discussion by enabling us to
express a wide variety of issues and positions. Many compositionists who
would initially agree with Bellah's definition ofthe true scholar might not
agree with the commitments to the communitarian position that support
the definition. And those compositionists who would go so far as to agree822
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Association of Teachers of Advanced Composition (U.S.). JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory, Volume 21, Number 4, Spring 2001, periodical, 2001; (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc28634/m1/98/: accessed April 24, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; .