Applied Public Rhetoric and Resultant Policy Revision: The Case of the Common Rule

Johanna Phelps

The “Common Rule” was implemented in 1991. Drawn into existence and placed as a sort of guardrail for federally funded research with human participants, it was formalized in the early 90s by 15 federal regulatory bodies, including the Department of Health and Human Services, the FDA, and the EPA. As of January 21, 2019, for the first time in nearly three decades, a revised rule was implemented to guide research with human participants in the US. Today, the rule is co-signed by 19 agencies and applied by 20; much has changed since 1991.

Since the policy’s inception, the ways the public, scholars, and researchers who work with human participants perceive and enact research with human participants have shifted significantly. Multidisciplinary scholarly critiques regarding how institutionalized federal policy quite directly and concretely shapes the treatment of bodies (Childress and Thomas, 2018; Ruof, 2004) have exploded in recent years. In rhetoric, movement towards (re)distributing agency (e.g. Shirley and Colton, 2016, Hallenbeck, 2012, and Rivers, 2014) and transferring power are increasingly represented in our public projects (Ackerman and Coogan, 2013; Cagle, 2017; Alexander and Jarratt, 2014). As this scholarship evolved, the Common Rule concurrently underwent considerable serious revision.

These revisions matter to public rhetoric scholars and teachers for two significant reasons. First, regardless of our paradigmatic approach and associated ontological and epistemological commitments or our selected methods, research we do with living human participants is moderated by IRB review. Second, by examining the policy revisions process related to matters of agency and bodies, we can learn to amplify our voices in the policy process. Especially in high stakes environments, when policy impacts the treatment of bodies, we can learn, and thereby teach, effective public rhetoric practices.

I will focus on one update to the Common Rule in this presentation: the removal of some formerly defining characteristics of “vulnerable” populations in the Final Rule (the revised Common Rule), which was published in 2017 and implemented January 2019. I first offer an overview of revisions of the terms “vulnerability” and “vulnerable populations.” After a brief detailing of how the public intervened in the policy revision, and a description of the final, updated regulation, I flesh out the two implications for public rhetorics scholarship and teaching.

Ultimately, these regulatory updates fundamentally change the infrastructures that frame our work. These revisions illustrate is how publicly engaged rhetoricians can negotiate the policy process and help undo decades of systematic marginalization—marginalization that has occurred as a direct result of language.

The Epideictic Production of Campus Free Speech: An Analysis of the Chicago Statement

Matthew Sharp

According to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE, n.d.), a campus speech code is “any university regulation or policy that prohibits expression that would be protected by the First Amendment in society at large.” And, FIRE’sSpotlight on Speech Codes 2019 indicates that the percentage of colleges and universities whose speech codes “clearly and substantially” restrict the freedom of speech has gone down for eleven years in a row, but more than a quarter of universities in their database still receive a “red light” rating, indicating that at least one policy at that university significantly impacts student freedom of speech. Progress has clearly been made in the past decade, but FIRE continues its efforts to encourage universities‚ even in an increasingly politically hostile and divided atmosphere‚Äîto change their speech codes to adopt more open speech policies. In fact, much of FIRE’s materials refers to the Chicago Statement‚Äîthe statement on free speech written by the Committee on Freedom of Expression at the University of Chicago (2014)‚ as a clear model of the values and policies that they endorse.

This presentation will analyze the Chicago Statement as well as some of FIRE’s resources that encourage adoption of the Chicago Statement through a lens of epideictic rhetoric as a way of encouraging action within an audience. By praising or emphasizing particular aspects of the Chicago Statement, FIRE works to shape or reinforce the value systems and perceptions of their audience’s shared identity as colleges and universities. Sheard (1996) claims that through this type of identification, epideictic discourse becomes “a vehicle through which communities can imagine and bring about change” (p. 771). By (re)producing these values, Lauer (2015) claims that epideictic rhetoric can be so connected to particular actions that “advocating values becomes tantamount to advocating action” (p. 14). Therefore, by praising certain values and identities, the Chicago Statement and FIRE’s materials work to encourage other colleges and universities to adopt similar policies. This presentation will identify those values and identities as well as the particular strategies involved in that epideictic praise in order to discuss how others can use epideictic rhetoric to help bring about organizational, institutional, and cultural change.

References

Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. (n.d.). What are speech codes. Retrieved from https://www.thefire.org/spotlight/what-are-speech-codes/

Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. (2019). Spotlight on speech codes 2019. Retrieved from https://www.thefire.org/spotlight/reports/spotlight-on-speech-codes-2019/

Lauer, I. (2015). Epideictic rhetoric. Communication Research Trends, 34, 4‚ 18.

Sheard, C. M. (1996). The public value of epideictic rhetoric. College English, 58, 765–794. doi:10.2307/378414

University of Chicago. (2014). Report of the Committee on Freedom of Expression. Retrieved from https://provost.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/documents/reports/FOECommitteeReport.pdf