Can an English Teacher Contribute to the Energy Debate?

Abstract

WHAT DO YOU HOPE TO CONTRIBUTE? A professor of economics asked me this when I told him I taught English, mainly rhetoric. Rhetoric? Oh, you mean writing? Yes, I meant writing, but I also meant thinking, analyzing and shaping thoughts into language, and criticizing other people's language. We were having lunch together, not at the university dining hall, but at the Sheraton-Denver Tech Center. We were two of the seventeen college professors from various western universities invited to participate in the Company-Faculty Forum on Energy Use and Development sponsored by the Gulf Oil Corporation. What do you hope to contribute? he asked with something of a sneer on his face, or what I interpreted as such. (In rhetoric, we are fond of interpretation.) But maybe I was projecting onto him my own discomfort. So I replied cheerfully that I was unsure myself what I could contribute. After all, I was somewhat dismayed to learn that the professors sent by the various schools mostly came from departments of economics and political science, and some even taught engineering. Few were so remote from the debate as I. There was one professor of ancient Chinese and one taught religious studies, but most were energy experts in some little way. The Gulf Oil representatives as well as other professors sitting at the table assured me that indeed I had a place at the forum, that I could offer a perspective not often available to the company, that opinions from economists, engineers, and other specialists were a dime a dozen in their field. But who ever heard of an oil company getting advice from a professor of Chinese or ethics or rhetoric? My friend the economist stared vacantly into his chef's salad. I guessed he had dismissed the company-faculty forum as another public relations gimmick like those oil company ads supporting conservation. I also guess that's why my contribution, when measured in the only quantifiable way possible-that is, total number of questions and number of actual words blurted out in the heat of debate-outweighed his contribution by a factor of ten. Of course, our contributions cannot be judged by crass quantification. And I'm