Critical race theory has long relied on metaphors of perception to further its critiques of white hegemonic power. However, such criticism often depends on a paradoxical logic that silences white students in classroom discussions of race. This essay suggests the dominant pedagogical approach to whiteness is obsolete, calling for new inclusive strategies to break the rhetorical stalemate.

Scholars across the disciplines find much dysfunction in public apologies because they assume that these statements pursue the reconciliatory end of forgiveness. In contrast, this essay argues that public apologies do not enable forgiveness, but rather operate as ritualistic public punishment and humiliation in order to enforce certain ethical standards for public speech. These punishments are achieved by coercing offenders to offer apologies that embody metanoia, a rhetorical and religious concept that denotes a sudden change of heart or personal conversion. Through a rhetorical analysis of the performance of metanoia in public apologies from Don Imus, Michael Richards, and Mel Gibson, this essay demonstrates the punitive function of apologetic discourse and examines its ethical implications.

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.

The publication of E. D. Hirsch's Cultural Literacy and Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind in 1987 represented an exceptional moment, an opportunity for disciplinary and institutional reflection about the role and function of English studies, rhetoric and composition, the humanities and the academy writ large. The crucial moment demanded not only that we consider the merits of a variety of curricular ideals but also that we question the assumptions driving higher education in the United States. In Symposium: Revisiting the Work of Allan Bloom and E. D. Hirsch Jr., four articles and a response by Hirsch make an opportunity for self-reflection: if we can agree that a liberal education should be a liberating one, what do we mean by liberation and what sorts of people might that particular vision of freedom produce?