Jim Berlin had little patience with complacency, and his classrooms, like all the professional forums in which he participated, were arenas for critically examining sites of the discursive processes of consumption and production. As his students, we represented such sites, and as our teacher, so did he. It’s true that in some ways Jim might have seemed dogmatic. In every sense the challenging teacher, Jim insisted that we interrogate discursive formations of all kinds and the ideological underpinnings they entail, including those involved in the formations of our own subjectivites. Jim allowed us our views, but he wanted us to be more fully aware of the conditions and practices that shape them. He believed such an awareness to be a necessary condition for change. This dedication to fostering conditions for change through a responsive process of critical inquiry ultimately precludes dogmatism.

A colleague of Jim’s once commented that whether one agreed or disagreed with Jim’s views, they represented ideas that virtually everyone in the field must eventually come to terms with. I believe this serves as apt testimony to Jim’s prominence and to the provocative nature of his work. Jim’s commitment to advancing his positions, in the classroom or otherwise, revealed his own willingness to accept critical interrogation and to change. His work was not intended to pronounce the final word on an issue but to contribute to what he saw as ongoing conversations in the field. Shortly after “Rhetoric and Ideology” appeared in College English (1988), Jim became dissatisfied with his term “social-epistemic,” a dissatisfaction that continued to bother him even though the term became widely accepted. Changes in his views of heuristics paralleled developments he made in his graduate practicum, a course for which he designed and modified compositional strategies for writing instructors to teach to their students in order to help the students discern and critically explore cultural and social codes. A reconfiguring of his position on subjectivity that to a greater extent emphasized writers as agents gradually emerged as he examined the relationship between cultural studies and rhetoric and composition within a postmodernist framework.

Jim walked his talk, and this made him a wonderful role model. I would guess, however, that he was not altogether comfortable in that role, for Jim related to his students as colleagues, as peers. At least once that I know of, Jim was quite literally a classmate of some of his students. During the fall of 1988, Jim sat in on a course in contemporary literary theory that I was taking. He listened to the lectures attentively and kept a journal of notes and responses. I know this because he sat next tome. Often, Jim would pull a stick of gum up from a pack so that the foil wrapper protruded out from the paper one, and he would gesture to me to take it. This is a particularly fond memory I have of Jim because, during those moments, we were classmates—"chums." Of course, that I even regarded those incidents as special indicates that Jim was someone I looked up to, for he was my teacher. In his classes, Jim made every effort to balance the power between him and his students. He had students take turns as discussion leaders, and he signed up for his own turn as well. He joined small group workshops, not as a teacher/facilitator, but as a group member. His students, however, still deferred to him as the authority in the classroom, a perhaps inescapable aspect of teacher/student relationships that Jim acknowledged.

Jim highly valued teaching, and he delighted in his students’ accomplish­ments. Yet he took no credit for those accomplishments even though it was greatly merited. After I had accepted a position at the University of South Florida last year, a friend of mine overheard Jim talking to someone in his office about how happy he was for me. When I thanked Jim for his guidance, influence, and support, all of which helped me on the job market, Jim assured me that the credit was all mine. I knew otherwise. I listened to Jim’s expressions of praise for Susan Brown Carlton, a former student of Jim’s who had won the CCCC Outstanding Dissertation Award, and for Bill Covey, who, having been mentored in the first graduate practicum Jim taught at Purdue, won two consecutive Excellence in Teaching Awards the first two years he taught there. When Lisa Langstraat was given her own graduate practicum after co-teaching Jim’s with him, Lisa thanked Jim for the experience with him that made the opportunity possible. Jim assured Lisa that the credit was all hers. Lisa knew otherwise. Whenever any of Jim’s students excelled, like Bruce McComisky’s being awarded a research grant under Jim’s sponsorship or Kris Blair’s being accepted to present a paper on cultural studies and professional communication at the MLA, Jim was always extremely proud of them. And he often told them so, as he did Kris by seeking her out in her office after he heard the news.

If Jim didn’t realize the full measure of his influence, it was because he was such an unassuming person. Jim’s perpetually tousled hair, his light blue oxford shirts, dark blue corduroy jeans, white socks and jogging shoes were trademarks of a man who, though dignified and elegant, was far too down to earth to take himself too seriously. His healthy sense of humor gave him perspective and helped him to take the kind of risks that sometimes led to criticisms, or even to aggressive personal attacks. Once while Jim was participating in a protest for an environmental cause, a man from the opposing side got right up in Jim’s face to yell insults at him, including one that asserted, in so many words, that he found nothing about Jim particularly pleasing. Jim just shoved his hands in his pockets, shrugged his shoulders, and, with a smile, said, “That’s okay. My wife loves me.” Ever the rhetorician, Jim threw the guy off by disclosing himself as another human being with family values at stake in the issue at hand.

Of course, Jim’s ethos as husband and father was always being disclosed. The only times Jim was too busy to stop in the hall to chat were when he was rushing off to attend his sons’ sports practices and games or other important family activities. As a highschooler in Michigan, Jim had been All-State in basketball and football. In full keeping with Jim’s modesty, not even his sons knew this until recently. Evidently, Dan and Christopher inherited Jim’s love of sports, but their father didn’t want them to feel the pressure of thinking they had to live up to some kind of “standard.” (Maybe this goes along with the reasons Jim once gave me for being a little down on baseball. He said that although he could still enjoy it, baseball didn’t sit well with him politically. To his mind, it depended too much on the individual and not enough on the team.) Clearly, Jim’s family was the greatest source of his strength, and I admired this about him most of all.

Jim acted on his convictions, which serves as the greatest lesson he taught me that I have tried to incorporate into my life. lam deeply grateful that I had the privilege of being one of Jim’s students. As one of our field’s most eminent scholars, an excellent teacher, a supportive colleague, and a wonder­ful human being, Jim has been a profound influence in my life, an influence that will continue, as it will in the field.

 

University of South Florida
Tampa, Florida