Service-Learning As a Path to Virtue: The Ideal Orator in Professional Communication (Company Overview‪)‬

In a recent article, V. A. Howard, relying on a detailed study by Engell and Dangerfield (1998), decries "the market-model university" and its adverse effects on the humanities. According to Howard (1999), the market-model leads to "pegboard vocationalism," a term he coined to describe a belief held by many students and parents that higher education's primary responsibility is to prepare students to fit into an array of job slots. In Howard's opinion, this view has led to a decline in the enrollment in and a devaluing of the humanities, resulting in coarsening values and a general loss of concern for public service ideals (p. 125). As a professional writing program director in an English department at a major technological, research-oriented university, I read Howard's article with interest. The modifier "professional" is integral to my work: I am responsible for preparing students for "job slots." Yet, while acknowledging that responsibility, I reject the notion that what my colleagues and I teach, despite its clearly practical nature, must be vocational in Howard's pejorative sense. Nor do I believe that, even if a field has a practical approach toward the economy, such a field must, by its nature, devalue the ideals of public service. My beliefs are predicated upon a strong connection between my field and classical rhetoric. Such a connection opens up opportunities for examining the civic values of rhetoric extolled by classical rhetoricians (e.g., Aristotle, Quintilian, Isocrates, Cicero) and integrating them into current pedagogy.