Transcending our conception of argument in light of feminist critiques.

• Author: Fulkerson, Richard
• Position: Special Issue: Argumentation and Feminisms

Let me begin with the story of an argument, or more precisely, a story of argumentation. It concerns a relatively minor matter of university policy, namely my university's definition of "good academic standing." The operative policy, which had been written by committee and approved by all relevant parties two years earlier, said simply that a student with a 2.0 average (c) was in good standing. Otherwise not. A student with less than a 2.0 gpa was either on probation or suspended.

In an illustration of the law of unintended consequences, it turned out that the policy was not only more rigid than any other school's in our athletic conference, but it also prevented several first-year athletes from participating in their spring scholarship sports. The NCAA requires that a student be in good standing under the local college policy to participate, so even though these students had acceptable grades under NCAA standards, they would not have been able to play, had the university President not overruled the policy for the students in question, and then asked a faculty-staff committee to study the policy.

When the committee of four women and five men met, a representative of the athletic programs laid out the arguments against the policy: not only was it harsher than any of our conference opponents' rules, but it put a special duty on athletes since there was no rule to prevent students from participating in other university activities if they were not in "good standing." As she put it, our athletes were not on a "level playing field," either with athletes from other schools or with non-athletes on campus.

Several of the committee members responded with counter arguments - including the idea that it was self-contradictory to say that a student was both "on probation" and "in good standing." Others noted that we do not make our policies based on what other conference schools do; we have higher admissions requirements than other conference schools, and had no objection to having a higher good standing policy as well. As one member argued, "If an athlete can't make a 2.0 gpa, then he/she has no business spending all that time on the sport anyway."

And there seemed to be no compromise. Either we stayed with the 2.0 policy and maintained our standards, or we could level the playing field by declaring that any student who was enrolled was in "good standing," which was precisely the policy at our conference institutions - and at most universities in the nation.

After several hours of discussion during two meetings, we took a vote on whether to support the current policy or to recommend a major alteration to make it consistent with the conference. The current policy won on a vote of 4 to 3 with the chair abstaining. (One member was absent, and she would have voted with the minority, making the vote 4 to 4, in which case the chair would have voted to preserve the current 2.0 gpa policy.) Such a close vote on the matter reflected deep and well-thought-out conflicting positions, but it did not seem a good basis for a university policy, since having one different committee member might have changed it.

The committee then decided to meet again and to invite the President to come explain his concerns about the policy. By this time the central issue had emerged: the committee was not terribly concerned about the university's having a different standard from the conference, or with the question of whether probation and "good standing" are opposites. The issue became "Is it better for a first-year athlete who makes less than a 2.0 in the fall semester to be kept from participating in sports in the spring while he/she works to improve the grades, or to be allowed to continue to participate, thus benefitting from the motivation of remaining a part of the team and from the mentoring of the coaches?"

Phrasing the issue this way, and discussing it with the President, allowed the committee to figure out a compromise policy, one that would be in the best academic interests of first-year athletes. The suggested policy was that first-year students be defined as in "good standing" for two semesters, thus allowing a one-time-only cushion for a student overwhelmed with the academic demands of the first semester of college. That compromise proposal received unanimous support from the committee.

I tell this story to illustrate several principles about what I regard as effective argumentation. Let me enumerate them:

1. The long-term goal is not to "win" by "defending" one's initial position, but to reach a rational decision. In the sense of "defending" or "attacking" the current policy, neither "side" "won" in this case.

2. Epistemic progress is made. As the committee argued various positions and collected relevant data, we all learned that the issues were more complicated than we at first thought, and that more options were available than it seemed.

3. Even when the level of discourse becomes tense, the participants respect each other's contributions. Those who disagreed did so in good faith. Mostly, they disagreed without becoming disagreeable.

4. Relatively simplistic initial arguments give way to more sophisticated arguments using more sophisticated warrants, in this case warrants more central to the mission of the university. Initially one view assumed the warrant that "if a student is on probation, he/she just can't also be in 'good standing.'" A contrary position rested on the warrant "we must have a level playing field in order to compete with other members of the conference." By the end of the argumentation, both warrants were rejected, and a more complex one concerning the academic well-being of the first-year athlete replaced them.

   I want to use that experience as a Burkean representative anecdote, a model (in both descriptive and normative senses of the word) of good argumentation. I could contrast it with other argumentative situations that were not so effective, but I assume that academic readers are more than able to supply their own negative illustrations. So what does all this have to do with feminist critiques of argument? I suggest that examining this instance of argumentation, and a host of similar dialectical interactions, indicates that one increasingly common feminist critique of "argument/argumentation," while raising insightful questions, is misdirected in significant ways.

   In the rest of this essay (an argument), I intend first to describe two lines of feminist critique of argument/argumentation, to assess the critiques, partly by showing that they draw unnecessarily strong conclusions by beginning with a single conceptual metaphor, argument-as-war. I will end by suggesting that we should do what we can to alter our own metaphors (and thus our images) of argument and by discussing some classroom approaches to teaching argumentation that build on alternate conceptions and thus avoid the extreme conclusions advocated by several writers in both communication and composition.

   I write this as a self-professed WHIMM, a white, heterosexual, insider, middle-aged male (Kramarae and Spender 8). And being a WHIMM immediately makes me suspect when addressing a topic that contains in the title the word "feminist." I am doubly suspect on the topic of feminism and argument, since intercollegiate debate in the 1960's was a formative experience in my life, and I thus may be expected to have a strong bias against any "critique of argument." I am so aware of that suspect status that it has conditioned much of my reading, thinking, and writing ever since I first considered writing this paper two years ago. I intend, therefore, to make a very cautious argument myself. My claim is relatively simple: despite some feminist critiques that argument is a suspect mode of patriarchal discourse, college teachers of speech and composition need to stress it, at the same time that we need to work toward a broader and less agonistic conception of argument than is frequently held.

   Feminist Critiques of Argument

   My reading suggests that there are two main feminist critiques of argument, the equity critique, which says that argumentation in general is an unjust patriarchal attempt to dominate another, and the cognitive/epistemic critique, which says broadly that females are acculturated to think and interact differently from males (cooperatively rather than competitively) in ways that disadvantage them in argumentative discourse. It is relatively simple to keep the two lines of critique apart in principle: the first deals with the morality of arguing itself, while the second concerns whether one gender is socialized to be more comfortable doing it. However, in feminist scholarship, the two critiques often operate together: both share a conception of argument as agonistic, and part of what is sometimes claimed to make argumentation morally questionable (its attempt to control another person's beliefs) is also what is asserted to make it less congenial to females.

   Equity: The equity critique, which grows from radical feminism (as defined by Elizabeth Flynn in "Feminist Theories/Feminist Composition" 202), is quite direct, but my reading suggests that it is currently only a small tributary to mainstream feminist analysis of discursive power relationships; so far it has been most strongly advocated by speech rhetoricians, but it has been picked up by both literary theorists and some composition instructors. This viewpoint asserts that, by nature, argumentative discourse attempts to change an auditor's viewpoint.(1) Such an attempt to shape another's beliefs violates that person's rights, by enacting a patriarchal attempt to dominate, and thus denies equity. An excellent article by Susan Jarratt first called my attention to this line of feminist thought. She cites speech rhetorician Sally Gearhart, who in "The Womanization of Rhetoric" says, "any intent to persuade is an act of violence" (195). Gearhart goes further to maintain that "our teaching...