The Cornell school of rhetoric: Idiom and institution

Abstract

The revival of rhetorical studies in early twentieth‐century higher education was based largely in emerging departments of public speaking, speech, and speech & drama. The founding generation of the discipline that now identifies itself as speech communication ‐ and increasingly as communication ‐ established regional and national associations, such as those now called the Eastern Communication Association and the National Communication Association, and they created departments and graduate programs across the country. At Cornell University, a group of young scholars founded a department and developed what came to be known as the Cornell School of Rhetoric, a geographically dispersed and intellectually diverse group of rhetorical scholars. The institutional base of the Cornell School of Rhetoric was the Cornell University Department of Speech and Drama, which flourished until the middle 1960s, when the university abolished the Speech half of the department and closed its graduate program in rhetoric and public address.