Book Review 

INFORMAL LOGIC 

XV.3, Fall 1993 

The Vocation of a Teacher: Rhetorical Occasions 1967-1988 
by Wayne C. Booth 

KENNETH A. BRUFFEE Brooklyn College, CUNY 

Booth, Wayne C. (1988). The Vocation of a 
Teacher: Rhetorical Occasions 1967-1988. 
Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 
Pp. xviii, 1-353. ISBN 0-226-06582-0 
(paper). US $14.95. 

This book is a collection of addresses 
(and one or two previously published arti-
cles) written for diverse audiences during a 
period of twenty years. Booth fans, what-
ever their disciplinary interest, will find the 
book an entertaining, even at moments per-
haps a thrilling read. The response of oth-
ers is likely to differ according to their 
degree of interest in the history and nature 
of recent American college and university 
education and their commitment to the 
teaching of rhetoric in those institutions. 
Booth's professional role changed a good 
deal in the course of twenty years, as did 
American academic life and its social con-
text. What Booth had to say did not. Some 
fifteen years Booth's junior, however, all 
my professional life I have learned from 
him. I'm still learning. For example, as a 
sometime speaker myself on the academic 
circuit, I have learned a lot about that craft 
from this anthology of masterful speeches. 

The book's title is somewhat mislead-
ing. The topic is the vocation of a particu-
lar kind of teacher: an English teacher and 
literary scholar turned academic statesman 
who achieved well-deserved professional 
renown in all three capacities. The topic is 
also the vocation of an academic dean. 

Except for passages that discuss the place 
of rhetoric in higher education, the book 
mainly addresses issues of critical, long-
standing importance that academic admin-
istrators tend to think a lot about but that 
we college and university teachers ordinar-
ily don't, although, Booth believes, we 
should. The most serious public issues he 
treats that remain unresolved today are the 
responsibility of graduate schools for the 
scandalously depressed academic job mar-
ket and the failure of the American public 
to support education adequately-primary 
and secondary schools as well as colleges 
and universities. 

In short, in this book Booth is a secular 
preacher. His sermons instruct us thought-
fully and often engagingly about what the 
goals of the academic profession ought to 
be and how we ought to achieve those goals: 
"The [American] public," he told an audi-
ence of Time magazine editors and report-
ers in 1971 for example, "is grossly in need 
of re-education about the very nature of life 
itself, about life in political society, about 
the necessities and limits of human institu-
tions, and finally about the grounds for our 
various faiths for resolution of conflict." 

I have no doubt, on the evidence of 
statements made in later years, that Booth 
would stand by this recommendation to-
day. Booth is in favor of demanding more 
respect and better pay for undergraduate 
teachers, teaching undergraduates to think 
critically, and refining college education as 
an instrument of cultural uplift. He's 



238 Kenneth A. Bruffee 

against dry-as-dust scholarship, the 
commercial exploitation of academics (the 
scandal of high paid stars riding the backs 
of impoverished, overworked part-time 
instructors), and intellectual vacuity. 

Every serious academic can learn 
something from Booth's conception of true 
scholarship. The chapter entitled "The 
Scholar in Society" (1981) is Booth's re-
sponse to an invitation by the Modern 
Language Association to contribute to a 
"volume of advice to beginning scholars in 
the humanities." Booth defends the auton-
omy of scholarship against those who 
maintain that scholarship cannot be auton-
omous because scholars are inevitably bi-
ased in cultural, political, and other ways. 
Then he explores the implications of what 
he calls the five "virtues required for schol-
arship (and thus taught by scholarship)." 

These virtues are Honesty ("we must 
suppress our commitments in the service 
of what we know"), Courage ("the scholar 
is the only person charged by society to 
carry the burden of thought to its extremes, 
even when thought hits back"), Persistence 
("ask any scholar whose book or article 
has made a difference for you how long 
she worked on it. For most books the an-
swer will be 'from five to ten years,' often 
it is 'all my life'''), Consideration (scholars 
consider '''the state of the question' as oth-
ers have considered if' and make their "re-
sults as intelligible to other scholars as the 
inherent difficulties of the subject allow"), 
and Humility (scholars test "their powers 
for discovering truth and [discover] instead 
vaster and vaster domains of ignorance"). 

Booth is aware that, as this list of "vir-
tues" (or "powers" or "habits" or "traits") 
suggests, the book may strike some readers 
as a collection of tracts. It may also strike 
some readers as a book that could only 
have been written by a long-standing 
member (as graduate student, professor, 
dean, and distinguished service professor) 
of the University of Chicago community. It 
has Chicago's high mindedness. Not for 
nothing has Booth been a member of the 

Committee on Ideas and Methods there. It 
has its share of Chicago's country-cousin 
petulance ("We too often saw some 
second-rater from Princeton or Columbia 
consulted, while our bevy of Nobel laure-
ates was ignored"). And it has a good deal 
of Chicago's traditional, quixotic obses-
sion with unifying higher education. If one 
were to point to a single theme that runs 
throughout the book, that would be it. 

The parts of the book that Informal 
Logic's readers are likely to find of great-
est interest are the sections on the nature of 
rhetoric and, in Booth's view, its potential 
as a force for unifying college and univer-
sity education. To apply "rhetoric" as a 
cover term for all intelligent human activi-
ty as Booth does, however, may strike 
some readers as extravagant. The book's 
two most densely argued chapters focus on 
this issue. "Mere Rhetoric, Rhetorology, 
and the Search for a Common Learning" 
(1981) is addressed "to those who do not 
teach English, but who believe that some-
thing called 'English' should be taught." 
Its thesis is that most academics are skilled 
"in the arts of reasoning in our specialties" 
but are "totally unskilled ... in the art of 
reasoning together about shared concerns" 
such as institutional goals and curriculum 
design. Booth calls that art of communal 
reasoning "rhetoric" and defends the term 
against its common prefix "mere." 

To do so, he subdivides rhetoric into 
two types. "Rhetoric B" is not the art of 
persuasion but Aristotle's more general no-
tion of a capacity for discovering possible 
means of persuasion. It is necessary, Booth 
says, "where simple appeals to obvious 
facts or unquestioned logical proofs are not 
available." Somewhat disappointingly, he 
does not examine here how to enlarge this 
capacity in students except to recommend 
close study of Aristotle and Cicero. 

"Rhetoric A," in contrast, is "the art not 
just of discovering, but also of appraising the 
values we share." It is therefore a "supreme 
art of inquiry through symbols." Defining 
it more precisely then as "appraising the 



warrants for assent in any symbolic ex-
change," Booth discusses each operative 
term in the definition. In this context once 
again he does not explore how to enlarge 
this capacity in students, but he does argue 
that the art of inquiry is the appropriate 
universal basis of education for good citi-
zenship, good scholarship, good academic 
professionalism, and the good life. 

Good scholarship and academic pro-
fessionalism in particular are the subject of 
the book's last chapter, "The Idea of a 
University-as Seen by a Rhetorician" 
(1987), which is addressed to "all who care 
about the survival of institutions that pre-
serve teaching and learning" (1987). What 
concerns Booth here is the means of rea-
soning by which we judge each other's work 
when we cannot possibly share each other's 
disciplinary-or even subdisciplinary-
languages. Again the topic is "rhetoric A" 
(in this chapter called rhetoric-3), which 
Booth defends for the most part in terms 
laid down by Michael Polanyi and Rom 
Harre. It is a matter, Booth says, of "inde-
terminately large networks of critical trust" 
and "the topics common to all rational dis-
course." All of this, together with a potential 
or ideal "rhetorology"- "the intertransla-
tion of rhetorics"-should in Booth's view 
form the core of a "university" education. 

It is a noble goal. But this reviewer felt 
that the argument supporting it is some-
what dated. At the risk of revealing myself 
as one of the "morons" who, Booth says 
genially, tend to review his books, it seems 
to me worthwhile pointing out that his un-
derstanding of the nature and goals of 
American higher education is a comfortably 
traditional, foundational one confined to 
the likes of a University of Chicago campus, 
and hardly a street beyond. The book ranges 
not far from ideas that most academics were 
perfectly comfortable with a quarter-century 
ago when Booth delivered the earliest ad-
dress compiled here. The challenge of 
feminism, post-colonialism, and multicul-
turalism, the needs of non- and semi-assim-
ilated new Americans, the gradual attrition 

Review of Wayne C. Booth 239 

of essentialist notions of selfhood-about 
such late twentieth-century concerns as 
these Booth has little to say. 

Booth's understanding of rhetoric, fur-
thermore, however vast and scholarly, is 
unadventurous. He seems only marginally 
acquainted with the implications that fol-
lowers of Thomas Kuhn (not indexed in 
this book}--scholars such as Bloor, 
Geertz, Rorty, Latour, Knorr-Cetina, and 
CalIon-have been teasing out of the the-
sis Kuhn enunciated thirty years ago: that 
knowledge is not the property of individu-
als but rather "intrinsically the common 
property of a group or else nothing at all." 
Booth would of course acknowledge that 
when we speak or write we play the "lan-
guage games" of the communities (or "net-
works of critical trust") that we and, we 
assume, our readers belong to and that 
constitute those communities, languages 
that are neither a private means of expres-
sion nor a transparent, objective medium 
of exchange, but community constructs. 

What does not appear in the book for 
either acceptance or rejection is the propo-
sition that maybe we do not read, write, 
listen, and speak primarily to persuade, 
inquire, or appraise warrants for assent. We 
may do so instead to gain acceptance by 
communities we don't yet belong to or to 
confirm and maintain our membership in 
the communities to which we already be-
long. Only in worrying informally about 
what he feels is an excessive tendency to 
"want to be loved" by colleagues and stu-
dents alike does Booth begin to consider the 
possibility that his own goal in speaking and 
writing-perhaps in this book above all-
may be to celebrate his own acculturation. 
The same goes for his great, curmudgeonly 
teachers, Crane and McKeon, whom Booth 
tenderly eulogizes. And it goes also, of 
course, for those who review Booth's books. 

KENNETHA.BRUFFEE 
DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH 
BROOKLYN COLLEGE, CUNY 
BROOKLYN, NY 11210 o