Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind elicited a storm of critical discourse regarding the condition of higher education in the United States. This essay performs a retrospective evaluation of the rhetorical modes that animated that body of discourse, suggesting that the polemical responses offered by Bloom's detractors validate his claims about the contradictory ways that openness, tolerance, and diversity are pursued in the university. Revisiting this controversy provides an opportunity for considering the ethics of the academic polemic.

Based on the experiences of three graduate assistant directors working in the Howe Writing Initiative, a joint WAC effort between Miami University's business school and English department, this essay introduces entrepreneurial consulting as a model for implementing WAC initiatives in different disciplines. The entrepreneurial consulting model emphasizes the need to establish an ongoing presence within a discourse community, to continually “sell” writing and rhetoric to both faculty and students, and to strategically use rhetoric to promote rhetoric.