ABSTRACT With higher education in a state of flux, it’s time to more clearly understand what flux—mobility—means for the work of faculty at colleges and universities. With threats to shared governance, tenure, and academic freedom representing one sort of change, what would it mean for faculty to lean into the vulnerability that they are experiencing? Mobility has consequences: one of them is the risk of harm; another is the potential to destabilize concepts and entities. This article is an argument for faculty to lean into vulnerability, with all of the consequences attached to it, in order to change the trajectory of higher education in an era of flux, but recognizing that doing so will require courage and new forms of solidarity.

ABSTRACT Academic freedom is typically understood as a means of protecting faculty rights against the violence—physical or intellectual—of the state or of the institution’s administration. This article argues that academic freedom may be seen as a form of violence, insofar as it is potentially threatening to the methodological and institutional stasis of colleges and universities.

Shared governance, the principle that faculty members have a role in governing the institutions in which they work, in the American university is in crisis. Do the principles that underlie shared governance retain their efficacy in the contemporary, neo-liberal university? In this essay, I examine the commonplaces that underwrite our contemporary understanding of university shared governance and the practices that are animated by them: the idea of the university as a public good, the idea that faculty expertise grants them a governance role, and the assumption that governance provides stability, security, and continuity to the institution. The essay examines the development of shared governance as a (rhetorical) means of providing order through consensus, analyzes recent instances of governance crises in American higher education, and proposes an alternative set of commonplaces with which to address a period in American public higher education characterized by mobility, unsettlement, and vulnerability.

ABSTRACT The tension between freedom of speech and academic freedom results from the contradiction between democracy and expertise, resulting in a rhetorical “gray zone” that stymies faculty appeals to due process and constitutional protection. It’s not so much that certain “uncivil” words and utterances cannot be said in this gray zone; it’s that such words, when said, require one’s ejection from the (academic) demos. In an examination of the case of Steven Salaita, I’ll show how the tyranny of the demos, in the guise of “civility,” “community standards,” or “institutional values,” trumps academic freedom, and how the commonplace of democracy—understood as public opinion—can and does compel faculty silence.

ABSTRACT Pandemics and plagues function rhetorically, by doing violence to the structures of discourse, sociality, hospitality, and mutual engagement that characterize ethical human interaction. They infect us, as rhetorical subjects, and reorient our capacity for engagement. The coronavirus's “novelty” renders it uncertain as to how long it will last or who will be infected next; the near-uniform response to it has been a forced distance of ourselves from others and a displacement from our itineraries and our locations. Through COVID-19 we are learning that pandemic does violence to our sense of place, to how we think of respite, and has highlighted our sense of vulnerability in the midst of others.

ABSTRACTMobility is the engine that makes rhetoric work. It's integral to rhetoric itself and yet is also potentially destabilizing of both human subjectivity and of the institutions—including higher education—in which we reside. This essay defines rhetoric's mobility by considering Burke's action-motion pair, Giorgio Agamben's stasis, and Deleuze and Guattari's nomadism, taking account of how rhetoric moves us, and how we move, rhetorically, in and amid institutions. Rhetorical movement has less to do with movement from here to there and more to do with flux, disturbance, and—potentially—vulnerability and violence. This essay takes up this premise about rhetoric's mobility—as disturbance, potential, “more”—in order to understand what it would mean to deploy rhetoric in discussions about the future of higher education.

Abstract This article examines the extent to which the divine marks the extremity of the address that compels us as subjects. If the call of the divine is what makes us subjects, then the subject's relation to the divine is by definition a relation of violence, a violence that simply is constitutive of the human predicament. After tracing out this displacement, I take up the characteristics of the human-divine relation and what that relation looks like in specifically rhetorical terms by examining Caryl Churchill's play Seven Jewish Children, which illustrates the way that humans are structured by their relation to divine violence. I conclude by suggesting that paying closer attention to the human-divine relation allows us to see writing not as a refuge—a field or locus—but as a means of interrupting fields, orthodoxies, methodologies, and identities.

Rather than function simply as a metonymic, part-to-whole relation, objects on exhibit in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) also function as synecdoches, establishing a part-to-part relation that ultimately defers their connection to the historical past. Potentially, this latter relation undermines the historical authenticity that museum-goers seem to seek, and which the USHMM designers wished to inculcate.

The sacred exceeds our understanding and compels us to respond. I intend to broaden a definition of the sacred so that we can begin to see how it functions in less mystical and more mundane circumstances. The sacred call troubles, rather than easily calls forth, a rhetorical response, a reasonable discourse, or even an autonomous interlocutor or a stable ground from which to speak, and is distinguished from what Michael Hyde and others have described as the “call of conscience.” I then examine the call of the sacred in a Biblical text well known in the Christian, Jewish, and Islamic traditions (the Akedah), and in a contemporary text (Caryl Churchill's very recent and very brief Seven Jewish Children: A Play for Gaza) whose topic—the violence in Israel and Palestine—is decidedly political rather than religious but whose call, I will argue, is excessive, sacred, and unavoidable.

In Madison, Wisconsin, a series of debates occurred about the possible establishment of a sister-city relationship with Rafah, a city in Gaza. The tension and miscommunication within these debates point to the value of taking what the author terms an exilic rhetorical position, a stand that would not be tied to claims of firm identity or territoriality.

The author suggests three ways in which unions-and cantracts-are good for writing programs.

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N n September of 2001, I had just begun teaching an undergraduate course entitled Writing (and) the Holocaust. When my students and I arrived in class on the eleventh, we'd each heard that something was terribly wrong in New York and Washington. By the next class, we all knew, and had seen, the worst: images of the explosions near the top of the World Trade Center towers, images of firefighters and office workers covered in debris from their collapse, and the repeated images of tangled steel while construction workers, police, and firefighters searched for the dead. We didn't directly confront the event the first couple of weeks of the semester; we didn't have to. In trying to understand how to build a knowledge of the events of the Shoah, it was impossible to hold at bay the profoundly disturbing questions about the narratives we build to explain such events, whether of 9/11 or of the Shoah. Those narratives and their alternatives-the narra-

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