Abstract
This article continues a series of autobiographical reflections by past presidents of NCA. My intent is to provide a glimpse into particular experiences and events that shaped my life as an academic, my involvement in NCA, my research and teaching practices and interests, and the leadership roles and service responsibilities I carried out over the course of my life as a communication professor. In the process, I hope to contribute to the historical record and future vitality of the discipline of communication and the NCA.
Beginnings
On the first day of my career as a high school teacher, I arrived late. I recall the sickening feeling circulating through me when I cranked the engine of my car and heard the ticking of the battery cells exhausting their last breaths as the blinding snow blanketed the windshield. By the time I had dealt with roadside assistance, I was convinced that the battery was not the only dead thing. Would I even survive my first day as a teacher? Yes, but narrowly.
A couple of weeks later, I was almost fired for conducting a debate in my 9th-grade English class on the proposition: Genesis 1:1 is literally true. I had assigned Inherit the Wind and thought the debate would be a good way to introduce students to what was at stake in the battle over beliefs and ideas. The students loved it, but my supervisor, who had shown up unexpectedly to observe me, hated it. “Consider yourself on notice,” she said. “Also, stop wearing those turtle-neck sweaters. Oh, and please, please get a haircut.” I had no idea what it meant to be “on notice,” but I did grasp the significance of the school dress code. Still, I drew the line at haircuts.
Things went from bad to worse. I had been hired in the middle of the year due to a late resignation. One of my assigned duties was to direct the senior play, but the first two plays I selected were turned down by the school board. The Glass Menagerie was considered too sad and Our Town too existential. “Find a light comedy,” they instructed in a memo. I had not been fired yet, but I was beginning to wonder what I was doing there.
I had participated in protests against the Vietnam War and was grateful to have a deferment that kept me ineligible for the draft. But my teaching career at East High School in Auburn, New York was in free fall, and I could not figure out how to reverse the momentum. Teaching appealed to my desire for invention, creativity, and a touch of risk, but at every turn I felt as if I were being watched and stifled. I had not expected to have to toe the line like this. I was reminded that Socrates was sentenced to death for independent thinking and corrupting youth. My physical well-being was not endangered, but I was becoming demoralized. How was I going to cope with the tacit rule of conformity and submission to authority?
These worries were exacerbated nearly every time I went for a smoke in the Teacher's Lounge. The Lounge was occupied mainly by tenured teachers more than twice my age, passing the time by gossiping about students and playing cribbage. There was no intellectual banter going on in this room; nor was there any exploration of teaching method. Occasionally, I would close my eyes and imagine myself sitting in this room 20 years from now. The images frightened me. I did not want to end up as a dispirited old teacher. But what choice did I have?
The concerns with which I was preoccupied shifted suddenly in the spring of 1968. In April, Martin Luther King was assassinated, and less than two months later, Bobby Kennedy was shot and killed at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Everybody was in a state of shock. We were trying to comprehend something that made no sense, had no reasonable explanation, and could not be excused. A potentially toxic blow had been delivered to our collective psyche and national self-image. The bullets that killed Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy had wounded the nation.
The day after the Kennedy assassination, I phoned the high school principal and volunteered to deliver a eulogy. She arranged for an assembly of the entire school—several hundred students and dozens of teachers and staff. I put everything I had into that short speech. I spoke from my gut and from the source of my grief, expressing a sorrow that was shared by many people whose hearts were aching. When I finished, I felt as if I had finally accomplished something in my first term as a teacher.
As it turned out, my experience that day was an epiphany—a moment at which I was turning away from one path toward another, however uncertain at the time. High school teaching likely was not my calling, but something about being in the middle of a healing moment of connection among people suffering deep loss and grief—teetering on the edge of an abyss of sorrow and anger—felt deeply satisfying, energizing, and significant.
Family Inheritance
After my mother passed away in 2001, I rummaged through boxes of papers, files, and memorabilia she had saved. There, I discovered old report cards and school records of mine she had saved. One would not have predicted a successful academic career based on these records. “Arthur lacks self-control,” wrote one of my fifth grade teachers. “He is not realizing his potential.” Terms such as “hyperactive” or “illnesses” such as attention deficit disorder did not exist at the time, so I was not given a label (other than discipline-problem or day-dreamer). I had scored at the top of my class on the 3rd-grade Iowa Silent Reading Test, which placed me in all the advanced placement courses. But achievement in academic work was not a priority for me. I was content to muddle along, passing by the skin of my teeth. My brother had skipped a grade in school and was a high school valedictorian. I must have figured there was no way to top that. Besides, my love was sports. I wanted to be outside playing ball, having fun, and kibitzing with other kids.
My father emigrated from Eastern Europe in 1920, one of more than two million Jews who came to America in the first quarter of the 20th century. When he arrived with his father at Ellis Island, dad was 11 years old, penniless, and spoke no English. His father—my grandfather—went to work as a huckster, peddling fruits and vegetables by horse and buggy. Already poor in “the old country,” my father's family confronted new forms of cultural and social impoverishment. A childhood of deprivation, humiliation, and discrimination took its toll. I recall stories my father told about being easily deceived and tricked by classmates. “Greenhorn, greenhorn, they would tease, and in the winter they'd throw snowballs and make fun of me,” he told me. “We were considered ignorant, uncultured, and gullible.”
At school, my father felt like an outsider; at home he was pressured to grow up fast. When he turned 16, his father told him to get a job in order to help support their family of seven, who were riddled in poverty. Dropping out of high school after 10th grade, my father started working full time, learning the craft of sign-painting. He also discovered that companies like Heinz and Westinghouse would not hire Jews. To pass as Gentile at work, he had to lie on applications. He lost his job at Westinghouse because he called in sick over the Jewish High Holy Days. When he came back, they fired him for no other reason than being Jewish.
I grew up not knowing where I belonged. A child is supposed to feel at home in his family, but I did not. Quite often, my parents spoke Yiddish around the house, whereas the three of us—my brother, sister and I—never learned more than a few Yiddish words or expressions. I was comfortable identifying myself as Jewish, yet I felt alienated and different from most of the assimilated Jewish children at Taylor Allderdice High School in Pittsburgh. They wore nicer clothes, lived in bigger and more attractive homes, and got driven to and from school in expensive new cars. At school, I felt different from the other kids—poorer, less at ease with myself, more Jewish. At home, I also felt out of sync. My parents belonged to a different time and a different culture. I did not want to be like those other kids at school, but I did not want to be like my parents either.
My father inadvertently passed down the despair of growing up poor, insecure, and out of place. His life revolved around work—hard, tiring, exhausting work. He had experienced the consequences of anti-Semitism and also endured the Great Depression. These were not abstract concepts; they were lived experiences etched on his body and submerged in his unconscious. Growing up in this context, I could not help but internalize the moral principle that work is what gives meaning to life. Though I did not want to live my father's kind of life, I could not help but admire the integrity with which he carried out his work and his extraordinary self-discipline.
Still, I did not want to be a slave to work. As a kid, I loved to play and hated to work. I enjoyed a good belly laugh and took great pleasure at using my wit to make other people laugh. Was there any work that could also be play, fun, or enjoyable? Would work always feel like a form of slavery and coercion or could one love work as much as play. Could work be play? What choices were open to me?
An Existential Awakening
One day, shortly after the start of my senior year in high school, I was browsing books in the library and picked a copy of Albert Camus's The Myth of Sisyphus from the shelf. Turning to the first page of text, I read: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.”Footnote1
Those first two sentences startled me. What makes life worth living? If this was the question fundamental to philosophy, then I wanted to be a philosopher. It was as if Camus had seen through me, uncovering the deepest feelings and fears rumbling beneath the surface of my consciousness. I decided to write my senior thesis on Camus, an audacious choice for a 17-year-old, but one I eagerly embraced.
In my thesis, I claimed that Camus was proposing that the only real thing in life is human experience. All that was real—all that could be known—was what one could feel in his heart or touch through experience in the world. There is no truth beyond experience. Sisyphus accepts the absurdity of his fate without reservations, acknowledging that the experience of living is all that can give life meaning—not some leap of faith designed to relieve him of the burden of his own life. In other words, Sisyphus finds meaning in the struggle itself. His struggle, the one all human beings face, is a defiant battle against meaninglessness. Fifty years later, I would return to Camus as a source of inspiration for my belief that what we create ourselves, what we experience and do in our closest relationships—by virtue of our communicative actions—is what gives meaning to our lives.Footnote2 But I had a long way to go to reach this destination.
Discovering Speech Through Forensics
I did not attend any of the elite universities housing speech or communication departments, though later on I did teach courses at some and gave lectures and seminars at quite a few. While there are only a few elite departments, there are many outstanding and influential teachers. I was fortunate to come in contact with some of the best and most dedicated of these.
“You're an excellent speaker,” a cohort of mine on the student council at California State College in Pennsylvania, said one day after a meeting I had led during my junior year. “Have you ever thought of joining the forensics squad?” “I don't know anything about forensics,” I replied. “How would I go about it?” “Go over to the Speech department and talk with Professor Coles. He's our coach.”
Within a few weeks, I had not only joined forensics but also changed my major from English to Speech and Drama. I competed successfully in debate, especially enjoying the travel to other campuses through the Tri-state area. I placed first in several extemporaneous speaking contests and my debate partner and I made it to the quarterfinals of the state tournament. Not coincidentally, I began to take myself seriously as a student, making the Dean's list my last five semesters. Also, I became active in theatre productions, appearing in several plays, working backstage in several others, and directing a one-act play.
My commitment to these extracurricular activities proved fortuitous. One morning in December 1967, just a few days before I was to graduate, I received a call from the campus placement service informing me that a position in English/Speech had opened in Auburn, New York. “They are particularly interested in someone who can direct the senior play and perhaps organize a debate club,” the employment counselor told me. Five weeks later, I made the eight-hour drive through an early January blizzard to begin my life as a teacher.
A Twist of Fate
“We've decided to renew your contract,” the principal at East High told me at the end of my first semester. “Bernadine was a huge success—very funny—and you've made a nice start with the debate club.” “The students have been wonderful. I enjoyed working with all of them.” “Do you have plans for the summer?” she asked. “No, I guess I'll just enjoy the lakes and get some rest. The last few months have been hectic,” I said. “I have a proposal which may be of interest to you. If you complete a graduate course over the summer at Syracuse University, we'll raise your salary $300. You can enroll as a non-matriculated student.”
Syracuse University was only 22 miles from Auburn, an easy commute, and a superb private university. Did I have what it takes to excel in a graduate course? Itching to answer that question, I enrolled in Great Speakers, with Professor Dan Smith, Chair of the Department and an authority on Lord North and British Public Address.Footnote3 As luck, or fate, would have it, I had nothing else going on that summer, so I threw myself whole hog into the writing of the course term paper. On the last day of class, Dr. Smith returned the papers. I was thrilled to receive an A, but humbled by all the red ink Smith used to edit and rewrite my sentences. His feedback shattered any illusions I had about the quality of my writing. I had a lot to learn. As I stood to leave, he stopped me abruptly. “You put a lot of thought and effort into that paper. You should be proud,” he said. “Have you ever thought about going full-time to graduate school?” “No, I haven't. I teach high school in Auburn,” I replied. “I know. You mentioned that on the first day of class. You also said you had been a college debater and started a debate club at the high school in Auburn.” “That's right.” “Well, I'm looking for someone to coach the debate team here. We would give you an assistantship to support your work on a Master's Degree and your tuition would be waived. It isn't a lot of money, $3000, but it's enough to live on. We also would want you to teach a section of our Public Speaking course.”
Walking across campus to turn in my paperwork the following week, I danced on cloud nine. The graduate assistantship was a novel concept that I had to get straight in my mind. They're going to pay me to read books and pursue a graduate degree. And I'll get to teach and work with college students and take courses from graduate professors. What an opportunity!
The School of Speech at Syracuse was housed in the oldest building on campus. Opened in 1873, the Hall of Languages stood at the top of a steep hill. Each day, I would search for parking and take the long trek up University Avenue, then climb three flights to the office I shared with three other graduate students. The graduate program at Syracuse centered on public address, argumentation, and rhetorical criticism. In addition to the thesis requirement, I took courses in classical rhetoric, medieval and modern rhetoric, rhetorical criticism, historical research methods, British public address, argumentation and debate, and communication education. I also enrolled in a course on the philosophy of language offered in the Newhouse School of Communications that focused on WittgensteinFootnote4 and Ryle,Footnote5 and one in organizational communication offered by Dr. Charles Kelly, who was the newest member of the faculty in Speech. Dr. Kelly had teamed with another member of the faculty, Dr. Joe Miraglia, to form a Center for Organizational Communication, which offered consulting services to local businesses and organizations. Both Kelly and Maraglia had been mentored by Charles Redding at Purdue University. By the late 1960s, Redding had established a reputation as “the father of organizational communication.”Footnote6 At Syracuse, however, the curriculum was organized around a humanities orientation to speech. Thus, Kelly and Miraglia had only a marginal presence in the graduate program.
I had only one brief encounter with Professor Miraglia, which took place in my last semester of coursework. Miraglia had just returned from a leave at the National Training Laboratory in Bethel, Maine, where he had engaged in experiential pedagogy and self-analytic group processes, referred to at the time as sensitivity training. On this day, he was giving a departmental colloquium focusing on what he had learned on his leave.
“Sensitivity training changed my life,” Miraglia stated at the beginning of his talk. “I'm not the same person I was six months ago.” He told us that sensitivity training is about expanding one's consciousness and becoming more aware, that all human beings have pain in need of healing, and we cannot get to the other side of the tunnel, where the light is, unless we are willing to move through the darkness. Miraglia talked in an unreserved manner about how filled with love and acceptance he would become as a result of sensitivity training. “I fell in love with my wife all over again and our love continues to unfold and deepen,” he acknowledged. “We've committed ourselves to treat each other with unconditional positive regard.”
When Miraglia finished, everyone sat in stunned silence. How do you respond to such a personal and emotional statement? I had never heard a professor bare his soul in public. It was appealing and at the same time intimidating. If sensitivity training was even half as good as Miraglia claimed, then I wanted some. What harm could it do?
During the discussion period, Miraglia highlighted his new academic interest in “the human potential movement,” an existential approach to personal growth rooted in Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of human needs,Footnote7 which idealized self-actualization. He also recommended a book entitled On Becoming a Person by Carl Rogers.Footnote8 Miraglia pointed out that Rogers had grounded his development of “client-centered therapy” on the ideal of unconditional positive regard mentioned in his talk. He saw a positive, actualizing urge that makes humans strive to make the most of their lives. “Get a copy of Rogers’ book,” Miraglia urged, staring directly into my eyes as I left the room. “It'll make you think differently about yourself and about your work in the field as well.”
I took Miraglia's advice, and also purchased Maslow's Toward a Psychology of Being, and Rollo May's Man's Search for Himself.Footnote9 These books spoke to me in a deeper and more personal way than anything I had studied in rhetoric and public address. The authors concentrated on subjective experience—our inner lives, feelings and thoughts—but they also brought to light the importance of how humans interact with others and deal with social relationships. They introduced me to terms and ideals that had obvious relevance to human speech but had never come up in my graduate studies—concepts such as compassion, empathy, spontaneity, identity, and relatedness. I felt inspired by their concern for human suffering and healing, spiritual experience, and the “will to meaning.”Footnote10 Dr. Maraglia was right. These writers not only changed how I understood myself but also planted new ideas in my head about what might be possible in my own field, though I hesitated to speak to anybody about them. I already had accepted an offer of an assistantship at Bowling Green State University. In my application, I had emphasized my background in argumentation and debate as well as rhetoric and public address, but now I longed for something different from what these subjects had offered me. Why were interpersonal dimensions of communication not taken up in my coursework? Wasn't the human potential movement and humanistic psychology relevant to human speech?
Doctoral Education
I applied only to one Ph.D. program. In December 1968, I had attended my first national convention, which was held in Chicago only four months after the tense Democratic National Convention, a historic event marked by violence in the streets and a fierce and terrifying battle between thousands of antiwar demonstrators and police, which was witnessed by millions of television viewers. At the time, our discipline's national professional association was called the Speech Association of America (SAA). Rumors circulated that the convention might be moved to another location, or cancelled, but eventually SAA's administrative committee decided to hold it as scheduled in the Chicago Hilton. During the convention, my officemate and good friend, David Kettler, introduced me to Dr. John Rickey, who was Director of Graduate Studies at Bowling Green State University. Rickey had been on the faculty at Ohio State and Purdue University and was active in the American Forensics Association, which I had also joined. He made a strong case to me about the virtues of attending a young and vigorous new Ph.D. program, which was not weighed down by longstanding traditions and extensive requirements. When I returned to campus after the holidays, I received a personal note from Dr. Rickey, which sealed the deal.
One of my cohorts at Syracuse, who was aware of my burgeoning interest in behavioral science, advised me to look up Dr. Raymond Tucker as soon as I got to Bowling Green: “Tucker is the professor you'll want to study with at Bowling Green. His dissertation at Northwestern was directed by Donald Campbell, who coauthored the definitive book on experimental design.Footnote11 Tucker's one of the top empiricists in our field.”
During my first semester, I took two courses from Tucker, one on “Communication Theory” and the other on “Cybernetics and Systems Theory.” Looking over the reading lists—which I still have in my files—I remain thoroughly impressed with the interdisciplinary and cutting-edge quality of the courses. At the time, however, I was utterly terrified. I did not recognize a single author's name on the reading list and the breadth of ideas, authors, and concepts covered in these courses was astonishing.
When it came to the question of how to define the field and establish the boundaries of communication as a discipline, Tucker was the most broad-minded and least parochial scholar I ever met. He was interested in ideas about communication; it did not matter to him where they were situated. In that first semester, Tucker introduced us to the writings of George Herbert Mead, Charles Cooley, Erving Goffman, R.D. Laing, Gregory Bateson, Paul Watzlawick, Harry Stack Sullivan, George Kelly, Eric Berne, Margret Mead, Everett Shostrum, Harold Garfinkel, Anatol Rapoport, Leon Festinger, Carl Hovland, David Berlo, Victor Frankl, Alfred Korzybski, Wendell Johnson, S. I. Hayakawa, Norbert Wiener, and numerous others. He led us through a lush forest of ideas, ideals, and theories of communication and social relations—symbolic interactionism, personal construct theory, cognitive dissonance, game theory, the prisoner's dilemma, general systems theory, phenomenology, attitude change, interpersonal psychiatry, pragmatics, ethnomethodology, and so on. Call it a serious stroke of good luck, serendipity, and/or karma. Whatever it was—I had the good fortunate to be in the right place at the right time. Tucker had just returned from a year's sabbatical at Harvard, and he was prepared to offer graduate students an original and groundbreaking interdisciplinary approach to communication studies. Frankly, most of us had no idea at the time what a remarkable, state-of-the art education we were getting. We assumed this was what was being taught under the banner of behavioral science inquiry on communication in every doctoral program. Later, I realized it most certainly was not.
At Northwestern, Tucker had served as Irving Lee's teaching assistant. Lee was widely regarded as one of the great teachers of his time, a consummate and nimble lecturer whose course on “Language and Thought” achieved a legendary status at Northwestern, drawing hundreds of students each semester from across the campus. I never saw Lee in action, except on film, but what I have read and heard about his “inspirational” manner suggests to me that he had a significant influence on Tucker's pedagogical persona.
The atmosphere in Tucker's graduate courses was electric. His lectures were organized, detailed, and concrete, and he was a masterful storyteller. He conveyed a zeal for living and emphasized practical questions regarding the difficulties of human understanding and happiness. Adept at summoning and acknowledging students’ comments and anecdotes, Tucker would purposely provoke debate among students with differing viewpoints. These debates often continued long after class had ended.
The impression that stands out in my memory is how much Tucker loved his students and believed in them, as well as how much he cherished his life as a professor. He touched my life as no other teacher or mentor before or since. His enthusiasm and passion in the classroom were contagious, and he displayed a humble spirit and intellectual humility that is all too rare in the academic world. From day 1, he convinced me that communication was the most crucial feature of what it means to be human, and a lively, complicated, mysterious, deep, and demanding subject to address. He also insisted that a graduate student was not preparing for a job, but for a way of life.
During the years of my coursework, Tucker offered graduate seminars or units in family communication; rumor, gossip, and scandal; and philosophy of social science, at the time unusual topics in speech departments to say the least. Still, he left no doubt about his commitment to quantitative research and logical positivism. Though he embraced the importance of producing scholarship and contributing to the accumulation of knowledge in one's field, he also cautioned against overproduction. “You can perish by publishing,” he warned, “so never put your name on something that isn't your best work.” Often he used his methods classes to critique published research. “Just because it's published, doesn't make it true,” he proclaimed, and he proved the point by showing us flaws in the research designs of published articles and how frequently researchers applied statistics inappropriately.
Tucker saw communication as infinitely complex and multivariate. He believed it was necessary to master the most advanced statistical procedures of the time—multivariate analysis of variance, multiple regression, canonical correlation, and structural equation modeling—in order to study communication in a fashion that matched its complexity. When I landed my first academic position as an Assistant Professor at Cleveland State University, I felt light years ahead of most of the field in my methodological competence.
Still, working under Tucker's direction, I was pulled in two opposing directions. On the one hand, I had been trained as a hard-boiled empiricist and was determined to produce meticulous empirical studies of interpersonal and group processes. On the other hand, I felt uneasy about the legitimacy of treating communication as an object (in the name of science). Tucker had turned me on to the work of Gregory Bateson and the early family therapists, and I was persuaded by this work that without context there is no communication, no meaning.Footnote12 Family therapy exemplified how communication theory could be applied to everyday life. On a daily basis, these therapists witnessed troubled families collaboratively constructing meanings and realities that were not effective. Their main goal was to alleviate family suffering and help these families change longstanding, but inadequate, patterns of interaction. In this context, the existence of an objective reality was of relatively little importance compared with the significance of different views of reality due to different punctuations or frames of reference. In other words, subjective experience was crucially important to understanding how human relationships work as well as how they change. Which would it be: facts or meanings?
Scholarship and Teaching
At the 1972 SAA Convention in San Francisco, I received a phone call from Herb Simons, a professor at Temple University. He asked to meet with me in his room to discuss a position at Temple, where they were seeking a methodologist. We immediately hit it off—talking face to face for several hours—and ultimately forming a friendship that has lasted a lifetime. Herb struck me as witty and perceptive, a quick study with a keen mind and critical disposition. He did “humanistic” research, but defined himself as a rhetorician with a scientific bent. I figured he would apply his critical acumen to my work, rousing me to seek and reach new heights—and I was right. He also was extremely generous, looking out for my best interests, providing opportunities for me to take risks and be creative. He mentored me through my early years as an Assistant Professor, introducing me to several senior professors in the field who subsequently influenced the direction of my professional life and my service to NCA—John Bowers and Sam Becker at Iowa; Carroll Arnold and Tom Benson at Penn State; Dave Mortenson at Wisconsin; and Rod Hart at Purdue come to mind.
In 1974, I published an essay coauthored with Clifford Kelly on “interpersonal competence” in which we proposed a conceptual framework for interpersonal communication pedagogy that could be used to justify and implement an interpersonal curriculum within speech communication programs.Footnote13 Shortly after the publication of this essay, I learned that Michigan State University was hosting the first SAA Doctoral Honors Conference on interpersonal communication. Not lacking in chutzpah, I wrote to Gerald Miller, sending him a reprint of my article and asking if I could attend the conference. He phoned me as soon as he received my letter and invited me to be one of the speakers at the conference. There I met Barnett Pearce, Michael Burgoon, Charles Berger, and Donald Cushman. The conference sparked a dear friendship between Gerald Miller and me that lasted until his death in 1993. He taught me not to take myself so seriously—work hard, play hard. Though a dyed-in-the-wool empiricist, he was critical of the obsession with method among younger researchers.
The following year, I was elected Chair of the SCA's Interpersonal and Small Group Communication Division, and a year later ICA's Interpersonal Division elected me to the same office. During the mid-1970s, I served on SCA's Legislative Assembly and ICA's Board of Directors, my first official service in professional academic organizations. During the same period, I accepted appointments to the editorial boards of Speech Monographs, Quarterly Journal of Speech, Human Communication Research, Communication Education, and several regional journals, though still an Assistant Professor. Later on, I served on the editorial boards of Text and Performance Quarterly, Communication Theory, and Contemporary Ethnography, a reflection of the intellectual space between social sciences and humanities within which my academic work dwells.
My Chair at Temple, Murray Halfond, gave me free rein to develop the curriculum on close relationships. In 1975, I initiated a two-course undergraduate sequence on marital and family communication and a graduate seminar on close relationships, which I continued to teach for the duration of my employment at Temple. At roughly the same time, Don Cushman invited me to write an introduction to the literature on family communication for Human Communication Research.Footnote14 At the time, only a handful of communication professors were teaching family communication—Kathy Galvin at Northwestern, Merlyn Goldberg at Colorado Community College, Edna Rogers and Janet Yerby at Cleveland StateFootnote15—and my intent was both to legitimate and give a recognizable identity to family communication research and teaching within speech communication. In the aftermath of the 1960s, interest in interpersonal communication was escalating rapidly, but most of the research within speech communication had been confined to initial interactions, which Miller and Steinberg cleverly and correctly deemed “non-interpersonal relationships.”Footnote16
Interpersonal relationships have histories; they have patterns, and they develop rules, however tacitly, that regulate their interactions. To understand the workings of friendships, marriages, and families, one must move out of the laboratory and into the field. By the early 1980s, Bill RawlinsFootnote17 and Mary Ann FitzpatrickFootnote18 had completed dissertations with me at Temple that cleared a path for research on long-term relationships, and the study of “relational communication” had achieved the stature of a legitimate research area within the field due in large part to the studies of Edna Rogers, Mark Knapp, and Leslie Baxter.
In 1978, I was asked to attend a meeting at the SCA convention to discuss plans for the first handbook of rhetoric and communication theory in the field. The meeting was hosted by Carroll Arnold, Sam Becker, and John Bowers. As the youngest and least established person in the room, I felt completely out of my element. I was surrounded by the most distinguished scholars in the field. How in the world did I get here? I did not speak at this meeting. I was too afraid that I would say something foolish and they would ask me to leave. When I departed the convention, I dropped everything else I had been working on and spent the next two years researching and writing my chapter, “The Functions of Communication in Interpersonal Bonding.”Footnote19 This essay attempted to synthesize the best thought about communication in close relationships across the human sciences, focusing especially on the contradictions partners must manage and/or negotiate over the course of their lives together, what other researchers later termed relational dialectics.Footnote20
Several other important turning points in my scholarly commitments and convictions are worth noting. In February 1979, Carol Wilder-Mott organized a conference in honor of Gregory Bateson that was jointly sponsored by SCA, ICA, and San Francisco State University.Footnote21 The conference was held at the Asilomar Conference Grounds in Pacific Grove, California and attended by 100 scholars including Bateson and Kenneth Burke. In my contribution to that conference, “Forming Warm Ideas,” I explored the implications of Bateson's idea of creative subjectivity, that “somewhere between the two (objectivity and subjectivity) is a region where you are partly blown by the winds of reality and partly an artist creating a composite out of the inner and outer events.”Footnote22 Emphasizing that “phenomena cannot speak for themselves,” I highlighted the importance of “catalytic thinking” and expressed serious reservations about the idealization of quantification.Footnote23 For the first time, I was venturing into the domain of the interpretive human sciences.
In 1984, I joined the faculty at the University of South Florida (USF), and a year later I was elected chair of the department. In 1985, Walter Fisher published his foundational essay on the narrative paradigm.Footnote24 Although addressed primarily to scholars of rhetoric and communication ethics, Fisher's article fascinated me. At that time, I had just completed my essay on “Perspectives on Inquiry” for the first Handbook of Interpersonal CommunicationFootnote25 in which I had included a sketch of the hermeneutic perspective on language and communication, underscoring its focus on interpretation and intelligibility. I was in the midst of my own paradigm shift, moving swiftly away from prediction and control and toward meaning and value. Stories carry cultural meanings; they enable us to reclaim our past, heal our wounds, tell what we remember, and connect experiences to the whole, continuous stream of our lives. They are a means of persuasion and seduction as well as coercion and deceit—they run the full gamut of meaning-making and morality in our lives.
Thus, I took the narrative turn—gradually. The first step was developing a Ph.D. program in qualitative, ethnographic, cultural, and critical studies of communication with capable assistance from departmental colleagues at USF, evocative conversations with Dwight Conquergood, and helpful advice from outside consultants, particularly Sam Becker, Bruce Gronbeck, and Mark Knapp. Only a few months before the program was to be initiated, a simple twist of fate altered the course of my future. I met Carolyn Ellis—the rose of my heart. It was one of those chance meetings that give a person pause to contemplate the fateful coincidences by which a life can turn.Footnote26 Though I had been at USF for over six years, our paths had never crossed. Within a few weeks, we realized that we were kindred spirits who had a rare opportunity to build a personal, intimate, and academic life together, which we have done for the past 24 years.Footnote27 In 1996, Carolyn transferred to the communication department and we began editing the first of two book series focusing on autoethnography, personal narrative, and ethnographic storytelling that bridges humanities and social sciences.
NCA Service
“Art, I want your permission to nominate you for 2nd Vice-President of NCA,” Eric Eisenberg says from the other side of the phone. “I'm on the nominating committee and you're the first person who came to mind.”
“Have you lost your mind? I haven't been active in NCA politics for nearly twenty years. I'm too old.”
“Nonsense. You're as outspoken and energetic as ever. Besides, NCA needs someone with historical perspective.”
“Even if I could get elected—which I doubt—I have so many writing commitments. I just wouldn't have the time to do it right.”
“Let me put it another way, Art. You've always talked about how important NCA has been over the length of your life as an academic. Right?”
“Yes.”
“I don't think you've ever missed a convention in the time I've known you.”
“True enough. I've been to every convention since 1968.”
“And most of your best friendships have been formed through NCA.”
“Ok! Ok! I can see where this is leading.”
“The time is now, Art. It's time to give something back.”
“Oh, Eric. You're so strategic. When you say it like that how can I say no?”
Frankly, I did not expect to win the election. I was 59 years old. My research program was largely out of the mainstream of the field. I had continued to give papers at conventions and serve on editorial boards throughout the 1990s, but my last direct service to NCA was on the Research Board in the mid-1980s. Over the preceding two decades, I had appeared before the legislative assembly twice, once in 1988, with Ken Cissna, to advocate NCA's purchase of the Journal of Applied Communication Research from USF; and a second time, in 1997, with Carolyn Ellis, to propose formation of an NCA Ethnography Division.
Moreover, I was running against Pamela Cooper who had served recently as Chair of NCA's Educational Policy Board and on the NCA Executive Committee. Pamela was much younger and she traveled in a much different circle of NCA. She had done excellent work on behalf of teachers of communication competencies in K-12, was well connected to members of the NCA Community College Division, and had more familiarity with staff at NCA's National Office. At one time, NCA was an organization in which everyone seemed to know everyone else (though of course they did not). But those days were gone. NCA had grown by leaps and bounds. The people who knew and admired Pamela—and there were many—did not know me, and the reverse was true as well. We held two quite different visions of NCA and its future. I worried that NCA's Convention had become too big and its content too unimaginative and dispersed. I felt we were losing the feeling of cohesiveness so crucial to building academic community. Pamela was more focused on issues of inclusion and supported a more all-embracing vision of NCA.
I had never met Pamela before we were thrust on the stage of the NCA Presidential Campaign. We had a lot of fun getting to know each other and presenting contrasting images of NCA at the regional meetings at which we spoke and took questions. Certainly, we were competing with each other, but ours was a friendly rivalry that never felt adversarial.
I decided to take a gamble. Instead of writing the traditional, dry and dusty candidate's statement of goals (that only a few people bother to read) for Spectra, I introduced my agenda with a lighthearted story that included dialogue between Carolyn and me at a recent convention and musings about changes in NCA over the years. I was pleased to receive dozens of e-mails in response, some finding it cheeky, others refreshing. Well, at least the membership was talking about it. Near the end of my statement, I underscored NCA's urgent obligation to citizenship and public service, noting that my agenda would be grounded on the notion that our professional integrity rests not only on what we do in the classroom and research lab but also on activism and engagement in the world. Communication is a field that must touch people's lives—from the inner city to the ivory tower. I continued to press this theme and agenda throughout my years on the Executive Committee and with the other officers.
Apparently, the gamble paid off. I was elected. But I had little time to savor the victory. Indeed, I felt lost during the first few meetings of the EC, as if I were a visitor from another planet. As had happened on other occasions over the course of my academic life, though, I was saved by wise mentoring. I had the good fortune of being an understudy to Dan O'Hair and Michael Sproule, who patiently explained the context into which I was entering; and David Zarefsky who could always be counted on to be a voice of intelligence, reason, and evenhandedness.
In 2004, Roger Smitter had replaced James Gaudino as NCA's Executive Director. Gaudino had served as ED for 15 years and, as might be expected, Smitter's more collaborative style of administrative leadership was a shift that required adjustment by staff and EC members alike. Although NCA had achieved financial stability, a sustained period of conservative financial planning in the aftermath of the 2000 fire in Annandale had created an organizational temperament of scarcity. Despite an increase in membership, and convention revenue and attendance, NCA had not made operational modifications that could expand its capacity to better serve its membership both in research and education. Positions at the national office that had been cut during the period of austerity had not been reinstituted. Moreover, NCA had only an outdated strategic plan for the future. In light of the stress placed on the organizational structure and operation during the shift in leadership, the Executive Committee authorized the hiring of outside consultants for the purpose of conducting a systematic audit and assessment of the functioning of the national office and its relation to the Executive Committee and the membership.
The reports of the consultants led to deliberations by officers and the EC that continued for more than a year. Between 2007 and 2009, the following changes were implemented:
A new NCA Mission Statement and 5-year Strategic Plan were approved.
The National Office was restructured to reach levels of staffing unparalleled in the history of NCA, including funding of positions for two new Associate Directors, one for Educational Initiatives and the other for Research Initiatives.
The Executive Committee developed and put into place a systematic assessment process based on measurable criteria for the annual performance review and contract renewal of the Executive Director.
The Executive Committee adopted Task Force recommendations to change the calendar for the nominating process and annual election of the 2nd-Vice President.
Nancy Kidd was appointed Executive Director of NCA.
The Executive Committee gave consent to initiate and fund the NCA-Forum, which would use NCA conventions as a vehicle to display innovations in public conversation, debate, and discussion of controversial issues.
The National Office coordinated the redesign and launching of a new NCA website.
The Legislative Assembly approved the development of new standards for selecting locations to hold the annual convention of NCA.
My promise to bring a platform for innovative forms of public conversation and debate as well as civic engagement was realized through the creation and funding of the NCA-Forum (NCA-F). The inaugural Advisory Board of NCA-F under the capable leadership of Herb Simons and Lisa Keranen developed a mission statement, a set of by-laws, and procedures for authorizing innovative programming at NCA conventions. They have continued to set a high standard by presenting original and creative program formats that depart from the traditions of paper presentations, and encouraging wide participation across the divisions of NCA.
As first-Vice President in 2007, I was charged with developing the theme and special programming for the convention in Chicago. Given my longstanding focus on how communication creates meaning and value, I decided on “Communicating Worldviews: Faith—Intellect—Ethics” as the theme for the convention. My intent was to invite vigorous inquiry, dialogue, and debate on a wide range of questions and issues that can bring to light the ways in which communication creates the webs of belief and meaning to which human beings become attached. I was pleased to be able to invite the distinguished social constructionist, Ken Gergen, as a keynote speaker, and to plan special sessions around the groundbreaking work of Rita Charon, who developed the program on narrative medicine at Columbia University. The convention set an all-time attendance record—more than 6,000 registered—which is likely to stand until the 100th anniversary convention in 2014.
During my presidential year, I used the space allocated to me in Spectra to compose op-ed columns on various institutional practices that rarely get discussed openly. My intent was to invite conversation and controversy about everyday practices of professors and teachers of communication. I had a blast writing these. In “Things That Boggle My Mind,” I lamented the degradation of standards of civility in the classroom due largely to the rapid development of technologies of distance and the absence of rules for their use.Footnote28 In “Resisting Institutional Depression,” I pondered the causes of burn-out and sadness etched on the faces of so many mid-life academics, and the demoralization and demonization that arise as a result of the divide between administration and faculty.Footnote29 “The Case Against the Anonymous Culture of Peer Review” was my attempt to show that the double-blind system of peer review is a socially constructed idea that does not necessarily achieve its intent of quality control due to reviewer fatigue, possible corruptions and delays in process, and the ironic absence of empirical validation of its practices.Footnote30 I never imagined that I would touch such a nerve. These, and other columns, produced dozens of responses over email, and many requests to reprint the columns in college and university newspapers and/or include them in memos to Deans and other academic administrators. One was even reprinted in a refereed journal. This was about the most serious fun I have had as a writer over the course of my academic life. Why don't we do more of this?
This brings me to my presidential address delivered at the 2008 Convention in San Diego.Footnote31 Standing in front of a large audience of members including many women and men I have admired for years, I felt the weight of disciplinary history. In my address, I tried to reframe the question of the legitimacy of our discipline that has been a nagging albatross around our necks since those 17 renegade teachers of public speaking walked away from the National Council of Teachers of English to form their own professional association nearly one hundred years ago.
My argument was that the measure of a disciplinary community is to be found in the importance of the things it cares about and that we communication professors care about important things. I pointed out that as a communication instructor, I have experienced the freedom and opportunity to imagine, create, and carry out teaching and research that would have been impossible in other disciplines. Communication allows, even encourages, instructors to stretch students’ minds by making them rub against the taken-for granted, instilling doubt, decentering cultural stories, deconstructing normative frames of meaning, and offering counternarratives. We communication instructors try to reach students’ hearts by giving them permission to write and tell personal stories of trauma and suffering that have been silenced and can become a source of healing in their lives. Ours is not only a critical, civic-minded, and incisive discipline, but also an appreciative and passionate one that acknowledges the importance of both the whole person and the community. Our students want to know how they should live, a question to which we respond with humility, reserve, and tenderness, urging a righteous determination to keep conversation going. We believe that the ideal of open dialogue is a value worth aspiring to and that the way people talk and listen to each other can make a positive difference in their lives. In Communication we care about important things, and the things we care about make us a community, indeed a discipline, worth caring about.
Conclusion
The home office in which I work in these summer months looks out over a lush garden of specimen trees, day lilies, sunflowers, hydrangea, and rhododendron. In return for our devotion and patience, the garden brings us into intimate connection with a life cycle outside our own. The trees and flowers bring beauty, vitality, and liveliness into our lives; they also remind us that, like theirs, our days are numbered.
Over the course of my academic life, I have been fortunate to come into contact with other people who looked out for me. They unselfishly mentored, nurtured, and inspired me. I have been lucky to find myself in the presence of caring teachers, talented students, charitable colleagues, and stimulating and loving friends who brought out the best in me. Most of these relations were forged within the academic community of NCA or as a product of my association with it. To love somebody or something is to feel at home with it. NCA is my academic home. Without NCA, I could not have blossomed into the academic professional that I became. NCA gave me a source of meaning, and many of the people and ideas I care about were first introduced to me at or through NCA. I hope in at least some small way, I have given something back.
Notes
[1] Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and other Essays (New York, NY: Vintage, 1991 [1955]), 3.
[2] Arthur P. Bochner, Coming to Narrative: A Personal History of Paradigm Change in the Human Sciences (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2014), 29–31.
[3] Charles Daniel Smith, The Early Career of Lord North, the Prime Minister (Plainsboro, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1979).
[4] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (New York, NY: Macmillan, 1953).
[5] Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (London, U.K.: Hutchinson's University Library, 1949).
[6] Jeffrey Kassing, Dissent in Organizations (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2011), xii).
[7] Abraham Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being (New York, NY: Van Nostrand-Reinhold, 1968).
[8] Carl Rogers, On Becoming a Person (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1961).
[9] Rollo May, Man's Search for Himself (New York, NY: W. W. Norton, 1953).
[10] Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1963), 154.
[11] Donald T. Campbell and Julian C. Stanley, Experimental and Quasi-Experimental Designs for Research (Boston, MA: Rand McNally, 1963).
[12] Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (New York, NY: Ballantine Books, 1972).
[13] Arthur P. Bochner and Clifford Kelly, “Interpersonal Competence: Rationale, Philosophy, and Implementation of a Conceptual Framework,” Speech Teacher 23, no. 4 (1974): 279–301.
[14] Arthur P. Bochner, “Conceptual Frontiers in the Study of Communication in Families: An Introduction to the Literature,” Human Communication Research 2, no. 4 (1976): 381–97.
[15] Kathy Galvin, personal correspondence with the author, 2013.
[16] Gerald R. Miller and Mark Steinberg, Between People: A New Analysis of Interpersonal Communication (Chicago, IL: Science Research Associates, 1975).
[17] William K. Rawlins, Friendship as a Communicative Achievement: A Theory and an Interpretive Analysis of Verbal Reports (Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Temple University, Philadelphia, 1980).
[18] Mary Ann Fitzpatrick, An Empirically Derived Taxonomy of Types of Relationships (Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Temple University, Philadelphia, 1976).
[19] Arthur P. Bochner, “The Functions of Communication in Interpersonal Bonding,” in The Handbook of Rhetoric and Communication, eds. Carroll Arnold and John Waite Bowers (Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon, 1984), 544–621.
[20] Leslie A. Baxter and Barbara M. Montgomery. Relating: Dialogues and dialectics. Guilford Press, 1996; William K. Rawlins, “Openness as problematic in ongoing friendships: Two conversational dilemmas.” Communication Monographs, 50, 255–66 (Montgomery and Baxter, 1996; Rawlins, 1983)
[21] C. Wilder-Mott and John Weakland, eds. Rigor and Imagination: Essays from the Legacy of Gregory Bateson (New York, NY: Praeger Publishers, 1981).
[22] Gregory Bateson, Afterword, in About Bateson, ed, John Brockman (New York, NY: Dutton, 1977), 245.
[23] Arthur P. Bochner, “Forming Warm Ideas,” in Wilder-Mott and Weakland, 65–81.
[24] Walter Fisher, “Narration as a human communication paradigm: The case of public moral argument.” Communication Monographs, 51, 1–22.
[25] Arthur P. Bochner, “Perspectives on Inquiry: Representation, Conversation, and Reflection,” in Handbook of Interpersonal Communication, eds. Mark Knapp and Gerald Miller (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1985), 27–58.
[26] Bochner, Coming to Narrative, 251–75.
[27] e.g., Carolyn Ellis and Arthur P. Bochner, ed. Composing Ethnography: Alternative Forms of Qualitative Writing (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 1996); Carolyn Ellis and Arthur P. Bochner, “Autoethnography, Personal Narrative, Reflexivity: Researcher as Subject,” in The Handbook of Qualitative Research, 2nd ed., ed. Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2000), 733–68; Arthur P. Bochner and Carolyn Ellis, Ethnographically Speaking: Autoethnography, Literature & Aesthetics (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2002).
[28] Arthur P. Bochner, “Things That Boggle My Mind,” Spectra 44, no. 7 (August 2008): 3–4.
[29] Arthur P. Bochner, “Resisting Institutional Depression,” Spectra 44, no. 4 (April 2008): 3–4.
[30] Arthur P. Bochner, “The Case Against the Anonymous Culture of Peer Review,” Spectra 44, no. 5 (May 2008): 3–4.
[31] Arthur P. Bochner, “Communication's Calling: The Importance of What We Care About,” Spectra 45, no. 1 (2009): 14–9.