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1 Introduction
Reason, Rhetoric, Writing, and Global Progress
In the summer of 2017, I walked into my advanced writing course at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and I was surprised to discover that virtually all of the students were from China. Although I knew that the university had been increasing the number of high-paying international students to help make up for reductions in state support, I had never encountered so many Chinese students in one course. Moreover, for the first time, some of the students in my class had a very difficult time speaking and writing in English. I really did not know how I would be able to teach and grade these students, and so I started to ask my colleagues what they were seeing, and many also felt confused and conflicted.
To sort things out, I decided to interview students, administrators, faculty, and other concerned parties. I also began to read widely on the topic of teaching writing to international students in regular college composition courses. The results of this research spurred many of the topics of this book, which led me to ask the following questions: (1) Should we use the same standards to assess and grade all students, including the ones from different countries? (2) Do students from other countries have different understandings of academic discourse? (3) As universities and colleges cater to a growing global student body, do they have to change how and what they teach? (4) What role does higher education play in global human rights and justice? (5) Can we teach reason in a world that seems increasingly unreasonable? (6) What are the basic underlying principles of contemporary universities? and (7) How has the field of writing studies reacted to the globalization of the student body?
Composition and Globalization
Within composition studies, discussions of globalization have often been dominated by two opposed perspectives: some argue that globalism in higher education means that we need to promote multiple languages and forms of English in our classrooms, while others see globalization as the imposition of an oppressive standardization. My work steers a middle ground between these two perspectives as I argue for the need to teach all students a shared system of communication and logic based on the modern globalizing ideals of universality, neutrality, and empiricism.1 Although this approach may appear to sound biased and ethnocentric, I intend to show how the best way to help and protect a diverse global student body is to promote a mode of academic discourse dedicated to the impartial judgment of empirical facts communicated in an open and clear manner. As we shall see, a key to global progress, effective education, and universal human rights, especially in a time of global pandemics, is the necessary but impossible ideal of neutral judgment.
From the outset, it is important to stress that my perspective on globalization changed vastly after I read Steven Pinkerâs Enlightenment Now.2 Before encountering this book, I had no idea that the average global lifespans had more than doubled in the last 150 years or that the rate of dire poverty in the world has been reduced by 90% in the last 200 years (53). I also did not know that not only are people living longer, but more people have their human rights protected and live under democratic rule than ever before (203). Pinker argues that driving this global progress are the three modern inventions of reason, science, and humanism, and while there is much that can be disputed in his work, what cannot be denied is that people have never been healthier, freer, and more literate than now.
In terms of teaching writing at contemporary American universities and colleges, it is important to understand how we can continue to promote global progress, which requires understanding what roles education plays in this globalizing process. For Pinker, it is clear that the application of reason to all aspects of human life is the main driving force behind modernity and globalization. Although Pinker never clearly defines reason, we can infer that it involves the impartial universal judgment of neutral facts. For example, in order to have a democratic system of law, all people have to be treated equally in front of the law regardless of their race, creed, or gender, and the judge must rule based on the facts and not prejudice or self-interest. Likewise, scientists have to approach their research without bias as they base their conclusions on the impartial judgment of empirical facts. Of course, justice is never fully impartial, and scientists are never completely neutral, but these ideals must guide their work.
From this perspective, the best way to promote progress and justice in our classes is to teach the application of reason, but this modern ideal has come under attack from many sides. As we shall see, many composition scholars argue that the very idea of scientific reason is a Eurocentric bias and a form of white privilege and white supremacy.3 Instead of viewing neutral reason as essential to democratic law and scientific logic, some argue that this bias against bias is actually a hidden form of bias. In the effort to support students who belong to marginalized and historically exploited groups, many teachers believe that they should focus on recognizing the languages and traditions of diverse groups. Although I will affirm that minority-based social movements are essential in expanding who is covered by democratic law, I do not think classrooms are the best ways to enact social movements; furthermore, the end goal of most of these movements is to expand the law so that excluded groups and individuals are treated on an equal basis. The problem then with many current forms of identity politics is that they become fixated on rallying around their group identity, which can prevent them from making claims for universal respect and protection.
It is important to stress that throughout this book, I use globalization and universality interchangeably because globalization is determined by the universalizing spread of modern democracy, science, and capitalism. Globalism is therefore the culture of the universal, and the universal should be considered to be a human invention that gains prominence in the modern Enlightenment.4 As a necessary but impossible ideal, universality means that everyone should be treated equally in front of the law and that a scientific finding should be true everywhere for anyone. Moreover, with the invention of the World Wide Web, we are witnessing the realization of a globalized system of communication and culture that ideally gives people all over the globe access to the same information. Of course, these ideals of universality and impartiality are never fully attained, but they are the driving forces and principles behind the logic of our most important social institutions.
Surveying the Field
In his article, âGlobalist Scumbags: Compositionâs Global Turn,â Christopher Minnix discusses some of the different ways globalization has been dealt with in the field of composition studies5:
Work in the global turn in rhetoric and composition studies has explored comparative perspectives on the teaching of writing and writing programs (Thaiss et al.), the âinternationalizationâ of composition research (Donahue 213), research on transnational rhetoric (Hesford, Spectacular; Dingo), research in world Englishes, code-meshing, and translingualism (Guerra, Emerging, âLanguageâ; Canagarajah, Place, âTranslingualâ; Horner and Trimbur), research that draws on post-colonialism as a critical framework for composition studies (Lunsford and Ouzgane), and work that explores transnational perspectives on writing program administration (Martins).
A key part of this âglobal turnâ is the notion of translingualism, which stresses the need to promote the combination of different languages and multiple forms of English.6 Throughout this book, I will counter this call by arguing that this new mode of pedagogy makes it very hard to teach and grade students; moreover, the ideology behind this movement often undermines our ability to promote reason, equality, and clear communication, which represent the essential driving forces behind modern global progress and academic discourse.
As Minnix explains, globalization in higher education and composition has also been demonized by a Right-wing ideology that equates globalism with a Left-wing conspiracy to take over the world:
A month before the speech in which President-Elect Trump made his views on global citizenship clear, the New York Times ran an article, âGlobalism: A Far-Right Conspiracy Theory Buoyed by Trump,â that reported alarm by organizations such as the Southern Poverty Law Center over the use of the term âglobalismâ by alt-right media outlets like Breitbart News and InfoWars (Stack). Here, globalism becomes, in its more extreme versions, indicative of a leftist conspiracy to promote a one-world government and, in its more moderate versions, an attempt to sow disloyalty to American values and promote hatred of country. Such arguments are mobilized against both higher education and K-12 education. Looking back at hard-right news sites over the past several years, we see a range of arguments against Common Core as a globalist conspiracy and global higher education as fostering a new world order. In this media, the term globalist is used to signify a progressive plot to indoctrinate American students with anti-American beliefs.
While I do not spend a lot of time in this book countering this conspiracy, I do examine the ways some composition theorists are promoting extreme Left-wing ideas that feed into Right-wing conspiracies.
My book, then, steers away from both the Right-wing and the Left-wing reactions to globalization. In fact, in following Pinker, I posit that globalization has been the greatest achievement of human history, yet, we rarely hear about this global progress, and most people inside and outside of composition studies tend to only see the dark side of globalization. For instance, this negative representation of the role played by globalization in composition can be seen in Christiane Donahueâs ââInternationalizationâ and Composition Studies: Reorienting the Discourseâ7:
In each of these domains, U.S. composition scholarsâ various claims to unique knowledge, expertise, and ownership of writing instruction and writing research in higher education underlie frequent comments about ârapidly expandingâ or âexplodingâ writing research scholarship outside of the United States. At the same time, claims about the absence of writing instructionâand in particular, first-year or introductory writing coursesâin countries outside of the United States are common currency. These claims have had the effect of simultaneously presenting the United States to the world as a homogeneous nation-state with universal courses, sovereign philosophies and pedagogies, and agreed-on language requirements, while âotheringâ countries that have different, complex, but well-established traditions in both writing research and writing instruction, presenting these countries as somehow lacking or behind the times.
The concern expressed here is that globalization really means the dominance of American culture and the debasement of other cultures and traditions. In contrast to this critical argument, I will posit that the values produced by the modern Enlightenment represent a bias against bias and promote the movement towards universal human rights and the ideal of scientific rationalit...
