JAC Volume 12 Issue 2

A rumor that the essay had been written (true)—and that Sandy and another employee planned to publish it or something like it outside the classroom (false)—reached some of the patrons of the establishment where Sandy worked as a waiter and shift leader. Near the State Capitol of Arkansas, the restaurant and lounge was frequented by lobbyists and legislators. Although neither the legislators and lobbyists nor Sandy's boss ever read the written text, Sandy was fired.

Both of us were disturbed deeply by what happened to Sandy—for different reasons. Thus, we offer the following "Fugue" for two voices, a counterpoint that has helped us come to an understanding of the ethical problems Sandy's experience poses for writing students and teachers. We conclude with a "Coda" that considers how the experience affected the composition of our own essay.

Fugue

The tabs were large and my tips were good, but I was physically tired of making forty trips to the bar for this group over a two-hour period each night I worked. I was emotionally exhausted from holding my tongue after the nightly barrage of "Honeys," "Sugars," "Sweethearts," and drunken statements such as "Woman, fetch me another drink." I didn't like strange men's hands rubbing my leg, and I was offended by the cruel racist and sexist jokes I overheard at each table. One night a lobbyist was verbally abusive to me in front of the group because I would not date him. After three double scotches, he whined that I "didn't have time" for him. My employer would not have supported me if I had suggested that sexual harassment was taking place; he would have asked what I was doing to provoke the customer. I knew a public statement would put my job at risk, so I wrote a paper for a class as an outlet for my frustration; and I wrote it in a university writing situation, one I believed to be safe and benign.

When my paper was returned, I filed it with other writings I probably wouldn't read again. One month later the assistant manager at work called to inform me I had been suspended from my job; I was accused of planning to write a free-lance article for the Arkansas Gazette or Arkansas Democrat about the "goings on" of the legislators and lobbyists at the restaurant.

I admitted a paper existed, and my employer asked to see it. I refused. No one had seen it outside the classroom, and publication for a general audience was not my intent. I naively thought that my job was secure because I was a shift leader and the trainer at work, had been employed over two years, was always on time and rarely sick, and had told the truth. It never entered my mind that I could lose my job over a false rumor. Apparently, a co-worker had mentioned my paper and her own writing aspirations—possibly in the same sentence—at a private party for one of the senators. Within two days rumors were circulating that we planned to write a free-lance article for a local paper and that we were leaking conversations we overheard to the press.

I remember the owner's words two days later: "I cannot let you come back to work. After talking with numerous legislators and lobbyists it [the paper] has done some damage and has been a detriment to the business. You are fired because this paper that you have written . . . and some of the conversations that you had with [a female lobbyist], the lobbyists, and others about the goings on of their business has [sic] become a detriment to their business." The owner explained that my co-worker was fired because of what "could have or may have been written."

The co-worker and I had never discussed collaborating on anything beyond lunch. My accusers didn't even know what my paper said, and none of them had confronted me directly. I thought that people with power, money, and influence only preyed on other people with power, money, and influence. What did they have to fear from a writing student?

The ACLU couldn't help. Because I did not have an employment contract, I was employed "at will," and I could be fired for any reason. Two civil rights attorneys told me I had no legal recourse; my civil rights had not been violated. (In order for me to have any recourse in a civil suit, I needed proof that one of the legislators had made threats involving the publication of my paper.) I talked with an attorney friend who was willing to file a cause of action based on the tort of Outrage, but the restaurant filed for Chapter Eleven Bankruptcy the week after I was fired, listing the IRS as a creditor. My friend felt the chances of getting a judgment against my employer in a bankruptcy court were unlikely, and a bankruptcy judge would never give my claim priority over a claim by the federal government.

I talked to newspaper reporters. I collected articles related to my situation and did volunteer work for the ACLU. I learned how to use the law-school library as I investigated the legality of the action taken against me. I wrote summaries of law journal articles for a technical writing class I was taking. I warned my fellow creative-writing students to guard their papers. I wrote thirty letters to government officials, twenty-six of which remain unanswered. I tried to understand what had happened and blamed myself. I wrote again and again, wanting someone, anyone, to tell me they were sorry. I had been humiliated and abused. I didn't have a job. I had no money. I was in pain and no one seemed to care.

I conferenced with students in the writing center at my university, where I worked as an intern, about the content of their papers. I wondered if I needed to tell them not to name names, to be careful. Did I need to invite them to censor themselves because of my own fear? Never before had I worried about the content of school papers; I had believed that my academic writing was somehow protected. I thought I was safe so long as I chose not to take my writing outside the university. I was naive to think I could mention a paper about my workplace to a fellow employee. So, in a sense, it was my choice to take my paper out of the context of the persuasive writing class.

The week immediately after I was fired, I went out, rented movies, watched the television I rarely turn on, and did everything except write. The first time I did pick up my pen, I censored myself. I backtracked and read over my writing to make sure I didn't say anything that could be used against me. I added disclaimers to charged or questionable statements. I was miserable.

In retrospect, to say I lost my job because I wrote a paper for a class now seems too simplistic. There are several questions I must ask now:

• Is freedom of speech a right given by the Constitution, or is it a basic human right that should be protected by the Constitution? Currently, the First Amendment only protects us against governmental interference. Should private citizens, specifically employers, be allowed to encroach on the freedoms of private-sector employees as they desire? Should government employees be able to rob me of my civil rights when they are backed by a powerful lobby who will lie on their behalf?
• The Employment at Will Doctrine, which has been upheld by the courts since late in the nineteenth century, states that absent a fixed-term contract of employment, employers "may dismiss their employees at will . . . for good cause, for no cause or even for cause morally wrong" (Payne v. Western A.R.R., 81 Tenn. 507, 519-20, 1884). As long as states lack Wrongful Discharge Legislation, will at-will employees continue to risk the loss of their civil rights?
• The courts have carved out a few protections by ruling that employers cannot discriminate for reasons based on race, religion, gender, disability, or for a reason that goes against public policy. (The public policy exception is vague, differs from state to state, and is decided on a case-by-case basis.) If the physical differences and belief systems of employees are protected, why isn't the freedom to express an opinion protected?
• Does a waiter break an implied confidence if he or she discusses a customer's purchases or actions? Would public consumers lose their right to privacy if an employee's free speech were protected from the employer?
• Is my situation a sign of a politically corrupt system, one in which a coercive lobby enjoys the right to squelch individual liberty in order to preserve its own special interest? Should lobbyists be made more accountable? According to Arkansas Law, a lobbyist is not required to name a recipient of a favor unless more than $24.99 is spent. If the host's group is large, the average spent on each individual might be less than the maximum allowed by law, but the total might be far more than $24.99. This loophole allows many legislators to go unnamed in the lobbyist's reports to the Secretary of State.
• Was the action the legislators, the lobbyists, and my employer took against me consistent with the action they would have taken against a man? My situation might be one that rarely occurs, but it seems to represent an abuse of power that my own political representatives are at least capable of.
• Is freedom of speech in jeopardy in the university as well as in the workplace? Should universities be allowed or forced to control a student's oral or written expression? Or should the university protect students from "outside" interference? Freedom of speech is fundamental in a free society. Without it, students and millions of at-will employees are not free to speak. We have a Constitutional amendment that guarantees our right to express ourselves, but we are not necessarily protected against the consequences of exercising that right if someone is offended by our actions, even if we tell the truth and, sometimes, especially if we do.

Throughout my life I have been told not to break rules, that I am somehow responsible if others are bad or mean or if things go wrong. I felt I had broken a rule—one I was not aware existed—and my hand was slapped. Now I realize that when I went to work I did not take any kind of loyalty oath or vow of secrecy. I am not responsible for the public actions of the men and women about whom I wrote. I wrote about adults who are responsible for their own actions, and it cost me dearly. I did not write with spite or malice. I expressed an opinion, an expression that is my Constitutional right. I have the right to write. I do not have the right to slander or abuse, but I have the right to express my opinion in writing. I also have the right to feel secure in my job and the right to due process.

It was not just that I wrote critically about patrons of my workplace; it was that I wrote about the wrong people—people lacking in principle. I was honest, and now I believe my subjects feared that the average person, their constituents, would be appalled at the behavior I observed. I got too close to the truth, and I was expendable. The legislators' and lobbyists' right to privacy in a public place was more important than my right to earn a living.

When I lost my job, I lost my seniority, and, for awhile, my self-esteem and my belief in my ability to make sound decisions. Now when I look in the mirror each morning I see an intelligent, strong, and independent thirty-six-year-old woman who has the right to demand that she not be referred to as "girl" or "honey." I am not afraid to be called a "bitch" because I show my outrage and ask that I be treated with courtesy and respect. My belief in the fairness and intelligence of Arkansas' legislators is lost forever. Much of the lobbying effort is corrupt. Although I have no recourse through the courts, and no way to recover my financial losses, I am determined to be heard. I will continue to seek recourse through my writing. Employers should not be allowed to fire someone indiscriminately, nor should legislators be allowed to infringe on the rights of their constituents. Legislators should not be allowed to abuse the system they themselves created. I have a responsibility to my fellow students and at-will employees to speak out against such abuses of power.

Four pieces of unseen typewritten paper, filled with the words of a student, created havoc among powerful lobbyists and legislators in Arkansas. Clearly, writing is powerful, and a voice keeps screaming in my ear, "Don't stop. Keep writing. Become their greatest nightmare!"

Like many contemporary writing teachers, the belief system underlying my pedagogical theory and practice was influenced from early on by the work of people like James Britton and Peter Elbow, compositionists who advise us to tap the expressive energy of our students and to encourage students to write without fear, to play the "believing game." Although my later reading of ethnographers and social activists—people like Shirley Brice Heath and Paulo Freire—may have caused me to shift my perspective and language (from a focus on developing the "voice" and "confidence" of the individual writer to a focus on empowering the writer in various "discourses," "communities," and "ideologies"), my teaching goals have remained relatively constant. I want written discourse to be available and meaningful to my students. I want them to make a personal commitment to their written expression, to write freely about their experiences, their visions of reality, their reading. Most of all, I want them to be empowered to participate in the construction of knowledge and the shaping of the world.

For the past twenty years or so, I have done my best to celebrate empowered writing with my students and with other writing teachers across the country. Because I encourage students to import their own discourses into my writing class and to shape those discourses there, I count myself participant in a pedagogy of "liberation" and permission, an advocate of free speech in writing. In technical writing courses, I have asked students to address problems from their workplaces and institutional worlds, to use the class as a place to practice acts of proposing and reporting that might in fact make a difference in those places and worlds. In persuasive writing courses, I have always directed students to write to "real audiences" about "real-world problems," and I have always encouraged them to find their own personal space in persuasive discourse.

But now I reread the two paragraphs above and discover that linguistically they embarrass themselves—and me. I notice the repetition of "I want" and the avoidance of "they want." I notice that words like "liberation," "permission," and "free" are mixed with words like "asked" and "directed"—that the notion of empowerment is problematized by the fact that it is more or less required by an agent of power, by the teacher, by me. My written celebration of empowered writing deconstructs. In the context of what happened to Sandy, it rings false—or at least oxymoronic: I celebrate "mandated empowerment"; I contradict myself.

When Sandy was fired, I was forced to confront the rationalizations that had enabled me to celebrate the freedom I had imposed on my students. Because I never forced students to disclose expressively when they were uncomfortable, never forced them to submit proposals and reports they wrote in class to supervisors at their workplaces, never forced them to publish the persuasive pieces they wrote outside the classroom, I felt rather smug. In that smugness, I believed that I had helped create a kind of sanctuary, a safe writing context where one could more or less import external contexts and write freely, not having to worry about the repercussions of external publication. I believed that my students were protected from the outside, that they could take risks with their writing, that they could experience the power of writing without having to deal with the possibility that power flows two ways: that it is capable of flowing outward and changing the world, but that it is also capable of flowing back toward the writer and doing harm.

What happened to Sandy changed everything for me, destroyed my pedagogical illusions and forced me to come to terms with my own power, my own responsibility. There is no sanctuary, no protected context. Writing is potentially harmful, both to the world and to the writer. Teaching writing is more problematical than I ever knew: when we give a writing assignment, we do more than ask students to take linguistic risks; we may in fact be asking them to take personal risks and job risks. Indeed, the more we ask students to invest in writing about non-academic contexts, the greater the risk we ask them to take.

Shortly after Sandy's phone call, I asked her whether she would like to discuss what had happened with the rest of the class. I assumed that the class, which was comprised of many older and non-traditional students, would be sympathetic and supportive. Sandy thought the same thing and agreed to lead a discussion of what happened to her because of the paper she had written. Although some of the students shared our outrage, others, especially several older male students, sympathized with the employer who fired Sandy. Some believed that a kind of implicit contract between employer and employee had been violated when Sandy decided to write about her place of work. Even though her writing was not read in final form by anyone besides me, and not at all by her accusers, they argued that Sandy had entered into a fiduciary relationship with the employer when she accepted money for her work, and that outside disclosure of insider conversation and activity constituted a breach of such a relationship. Others questioned the protected status of discourse within the university and even between teacher and student. They argued that a text, once written, can easily be dislocated from its context, and that once it is dislocated it can become a kind of unguided missile, capable of exploding and doing damage wherever it lands.

I will never forget a story that one of the students told me after class. She had written a report for a technical writing course concerning a problem at her workplace. She said that she wrote the report with full knowledge that if it had been read accidentally by the "wrong people" (meaning the ostensible audience for the report) she herself would have been fired. She went on to explain that at one point she had been writing part of the report at her word processor at work when she was called away from her desk. When she returned to her desk and reread on her screen what she had just written, she came to a dark realization: even though she was writing the report for class, the text itself, if read in the workplace, might lead to her dismissal. I asked her how a report written with the intention of improving the workplace might lead to her dismissal. She said, "Oh, it wouldn't be because I was writing a report about work, but because I was writing a report about work for somebody who didn't work there: my teacher."

The classroom discussion surprised me. Apparently some of my students had known all along that what writing teachers want for them and request of them may not be safe. Especially those students who had experienced the politics of workplace writing understood that certain contexts and subjects are best avoided—even in the "freedom" of the classroom. Before Sandy's experience and the classroom discussion of it, I probably would have rationalized most of my writing assignments in this way: "I ask students to bring their own worlds of experience and feeling, their own discourses, into the classroom, and there we work on translating those discourses into writing that would be effective if it were read by audiences outside of the classroom." Now, in my darker moments, I want to say, "I pay students with grades to import and disclose discourses that are none of my business and in so doing force them to betray the private discourse communities of friends, families, workplaces, and various institutions."

I asked myself why Sandy's experience surprised me so much. In order to come to terms with this question, I was forced to meditate on my own status as a tenured academic writer—a privileged status, I understand now, that had led me to believe in the university as a sanctuary, as a protector of free speech. Before I was tenured, I probably was just as wary of speaking freely about my own workplace, the university, as any other untenured assistant professor. Aware of the political realities of a multi-leveled tenuring process, I believed I was free to talk and write about ideas without fear of job retaliation, but only insofar as those ideas were safely dislocated from the interests and ideologies of those who had the power to judge my case after six years of speaking softly.

However, as I approached tenure time several years before Sandy was fired, I coauthored a risky article with a colleague about problems with corporate writing. The article was published and later read by executives at a local corporation. Although my colleague and I had not identified the specific corporation we had studied in order to write the article (we had called it "Corporation X"), some of the corporate executives suspected that their corporation was the subject of the article. They telephoned us several times, first to express their anger and then to persuade us to disclose the true identity of the corporation we had studied. Not knowing why the corporation wanted us to make such a disclosure, we refused. The executives then complained to the university and requested that our administrators pressure us to disclose the corporation's true identity. I was up for tenure at exactly this time and, needless to say, worried that the university might apply such pressure and deny me tenure. But administrators at my university politely refused to comply with the corporation's request and explained that such compliance would undermine academic freedom. I was later given tenure. In other words, I was not fired and to this day I receive a paycheck from the university.

In part because of my experience, I came to trust the university as a force of protection, as a kind of sanctuary. After all, it had risked alienating a powerful local corporation to protect the academic freedom of two of its professors. And because the university had protected me and my job, I over-generalized that it functioned as a protector of the academic freedom of all within, of each member of the "academic community." Although I still believe that the university should strive to protect the speech and writing of those within, at least from its own institutional power, Sandy's experience now forces me to question my belief that the university is capable of protecting the discourse of faculty and students equally. It is true that the university is capable of protecting the discourse that transpires therein from itself, from its own power to monitor, control, and retaliate. And it is also true that the university is capable of protecting the jobs of its employees, its professors, when they speak or write freely. However, Sandy's experience demonstrates clearly that despite such capability, students are inevitably vulnerable—that their jobs and personal lives are at risk every time they write for us: even if a professor doesn't retaliate powerfully and harmfully for a student's expression of value, belief, or knowledge, some outside force might retaliate. Thus, student discourse is in no way protected. For students, the university is not a sanctuary.

I see, now, that I am situated in an institution that both empowers me and expects me, because I am a writing specialist, to require that students express themselves in writing. Ironically, it is my effort to erase my own institutional position and power that puts students most at risk in external institutions and constructions of power. When they cease speaking and writing the discourse of the classroom and begin importing the discourses of "outside," they are no longer securely situated in either discourse. What they write within the university context, if discovered outside of that context, might be perceived as a kind of disclosure, or even betrayal, of a private discourse. In fact, my power is never really erased. Indeed, it now seems a kind of originating power, a force of exigence, that requires students to speak and write and that potentially complicates their relationships with other forces of power.

Perhaps my inability to connect with the experience of writing as a student in the 1990s can be explained further by reflecting on what it was like to write as a student in the 1960s. The rhetorical situation within the university was different back then—for me and, I suspect, for many others who now teach courses that focus on writing. Back then I did not take "writing courses." Most of the papers I wrote concerned dead literary figures and anthologized literary texts. The audience was clearly the professor. In fact, few of my papers were read by my peers. As long as I gave the professor what he wanted, writing was safe.

<b>Since the Vietnam era, the writing revolution has resulted in a scrutiny of the school-writing rhetorical situation and a critique of a pedagogy that establishes the teacher as only audience and rewards the replication and perpetuation of a static academic discourse. Specialized writing courses require students to experiment with non-academic discourses. As they complete an English major at my university, upper-division students write literary nonfiction, technical and professional proposals and reports, expository pieces about themselves and their non-academic areas of knowledge, and persuasive pieces that aim to change the world outside the university. They are constantly encouraged to write for non-academic audiences, either to find or construct audiences other than the teacher. Thus, my own students experience a complicated rhetorical situation that I never had to face myself, a situation in which they must negotiate a text in and for two totally different worlds. Neither world, the classroom world or the one outside the classroom, is safe. Both worlds are capable of a response that may seem retaliatory to students. In my class, I tend to promote writing that evokes an external audience. If students do what I ask them to do, especially in a persuasive writing class, then they run the risk of offending the external audiences they evoke. What, then, am I to do?

In my own classroom I must reiterate the tale told above. I must make space for honest discussion of the complex rhetorical situation that students face when they write to and for external audiences while at the same time they contend with the demands of the classroom context. Such discussion should not only help the students understand what they face, but it should also help me understand what it is I ask them to do when I request suasive writing, when I ask them to take rhetorical risks, when I encourage them to import discourses external to the classroom.

I will no doubt continue to encourage students to experiment with a variety of rhetorical contexts, but never again without warning and never again without vigilant protection of work in progress and of completed texts. Such protection would involve considering, with the student, the consequences of an actual reading by the intended audience. If such a reading would result in harm to the student, then I would need to suggest that any collaborative activity within the classroom be safeguarded. A student facing potential rhetorical risk should be allowed to decide whether to share his or her writing with a peer group. Upon request, I would need to pledge to the student that I would not show any given piece of writing to anyone else, including trusted colleagues.

Finally, I must problematize in this essay and in my classroom the notion of free speech and free writing. Writing students and teachers alike need to come to terms with the myth that free speech is protected as a right that can be exercised without fear of retaliation. Indeed, our speech is only protected by our government from the government itself. The government does not protect us from each other when we speak freely. Thus, free speech is not a given for the speaker or writer: it is more a process that begins in the knowledge that its use, its exercise, might bring harm to the user; at the same time, the exercise of free speech in the face of possible harm asserts the value of such exercise and works to promote that value universally.

It saddens me that my own future teaching of writing may involve not only the rhetorical action of encouraging free speech in writing, but also of warning about the possible consequences of such speech. Nevertheless, what happened to Sandy has persuaded me that such a warning is ethically requisite. At the same time, it seems ethically requisite that writing teachers encourage free speech among students and freely speak, ourselves, a discourse that celebrates its value.

Perhaps it is time for all of us who assign and supervise writing from positions of power to move away from the kind of "objective research" that tends to erase our presence and our ethical responsibility. If we told stories about ourselves and the consequences of what we do, and if we encouraged students to tell us stories about what happens to them because of what we do, then we could engage in a dialogue on the ethics of teaching writing, a dialogue that perhaps has been deferred for too long.

Coda

We wanted to write this "Coda" to make sense of our own writing, of our collaboration. But as I reread my part of the "Coda," I fear that it makes us seem paranoid. And this fear makes me want to gloss the gloss. The writing above is not only erasure. It is also iteration in writing of a story we both want to tell. In publishing the story, we want to change things, to make things better. At the same time, both of us have come to understand the necessity of self-protection. And so we engage in a rhetoric of cautious blame, of simultaneous iteration and erasure. Every future act of writing will seem to be an act of free expression and, at the same time, an act of discretion.

After countless re-writes and hours of meditating on this piece, I realize that, again, my intentions do not match the reality of the writing situation. All writing is discretionary and potentially harmful, from papers I write for class to the journals that lay haphazardly around my house. I must protect what I put on paper, and, by doing so, perhaps I can protect myself. Outcomes, however, are unpredictable, and I do not have control over the reactions of unexpected audiences. Unless I intend to publish what I have written, I will guard my work with great care. Never again will I write a paper for a class without first changing names and places. Nor will I discuss my ideas about work in progress.

I can honestly say that by naming my accusers in this paper I would intend to inflict harm. By censoring myself, I do not absolve them of responsibility for their actions. I believe that the individuals involved should be exposed to their constituents, but I will attempt to do that by writing to a different audience through another vehicle.

For now I must be satisfied with sharing my story in the hope that others will be aware of the risk involved in writing about real-life situations, even if that writing is done in the classroom. I also hope that this piece might stir up just a little trouble for the Employment-At-Will Doctrine and promote an awareness of the need for Wrongful Discharge Legislation to protect all citizens.

My sense of being a victim is slowly being replaced by the return of my sense of humor. Sometimes I sit back and think, "Hmmm. Isn't writing fun?"

University of Arkansas
Little Rock, Arkansas