Exigencies for RSQ: An Afterword

In early pre-industrial, agrarian society, US higher education borrowed its model from Europe with a focus on Greek and Latin and with rhetoric, among other subjects, at the center. This classical education sought to serve pulpit, bar, and politics for those in upper classes - those who earned their class by birthright. The nineteenth-century American education scene was profoundly complex, in no small part because there was virtually no set of standards, nor any formal authority, to determine and enforce distinctions that differentiated one kind of school from another. The constellation of institutional, intellectual, and economic pressures and their effects on rhetoric is apparent in the shifts to what were considered “legitimate” areas of study in higher education. Speech and writing had been gradually separated from one another in many college curricula during the early nineteenth century, although vestiges of rhetoric remained in both.