Walter Lucken IV

An adequate summation of Professor Ian Barnard’s career in and out of rhetoric and composition studies would require much more than the space allotted. Suffice it to say that from the early 1990s to the present, Barnard, Professor of Rhetoric and Composition in the English Department at Chapman University, has steadfastly explored the connections between rhetoric, pedagogy, social justice, and the capacity of communication to inhibit or promote human freedom and intellectual inquiry. They have exemplified the best of what composition studies can achieve by demonstrating the vital importance of the writing classroom as a venue for rigorous intellectual growth and the cultivation of a truly humanistic view of the world.

In September of 2025, I had the pleasure of interviewing Professor Barnard about the arc of their career and their thoughts on contemporary and longstanding issues in the discipline. We also touched on their upbringing in apartheid South Africa, the culture wars of the 1990s, today’s campus protests, and the issue of how to respond to the threats against academic freedom and our profession writ large in today’s charged political atmosphere. I was unsurprised to find them to be much the same as an interlocutor as they are in their scholarship: thoughtful, generous, and principled. While I couldn’t help but sneak in a few questions that I have been personally plagued by during my short time as a junior faculty member, I am confident that any reader interested in the teaching of writing will benefit as much from our conversation as I did.

Walter: Generally speaking, we in composition studies find ourselves sort of sideways. There are not a lot of undergraduate programs in rhetoric or writing studies, so our initial scholarly background is often something different (in my case it was history). Your career arc is especially interesting in this regard because you attended undergrad in South Africa during apartheid. I was wondering if you could walk me through the broad strokes of college for you. How did you end up coming to the United States for graduate school, and how did you end up in rhetoric and composition?

Ian: It’s definitely sideways. I love the way that you phrased that. I think that one of the great things about rhet/comp is that it is so much more welcoming than other fields. I’ve been to so many conferences, and I’ve never seen people say, “You don’t belong here” or “This isn’t your area.”

In fact, it’s the opposite. I think that’s often because rhet/comp feels marginalized or downtrodden. Because of the low status of the discipline, it’s more welcoming and more like, “You’re one of us. Join us.”

So I did. I grew up in apartheid South Africa and I was an undergraduate major in English and law. My law professors kept telling me, “We’re not interested in what you think. Just tell us what the law is.” Of course, English is all about, “tell us what you think.” Much to my parents’ disappointment, I decided to go with English rather than law, and my parents thought I’d never get a job.

I came to grad school in the U.S. mainly because I had to get out of apartheid South Africa. My MA was really in literary studies. But by the time I finished, I was tired of reading and writing about literature. My PhD at UC San Diego really was focused on critical theory. Even though that’s not the field that I ended up in, I really think that critical theory has played a big part in my intellectual development and the way I teach in the field of rhetoric and composition. Anyway, I graduated with my PhD and, like so many of us, I couldn’t find a job. I was basically a contingent faculty member for ten years.

During that time, I reinvented myself as a rhet/comp person. It wasn’t really out of necessity, but more so what I fell into. I realized that’s where the jobs were at the time. But also, the work I was doing as a contingent faculty member was mainly teaching composition, so that’s where my passion grew in terms of teaching, but also in research.

Finally, after all those years on the contingent track, I got a tenure-track job in rhet/comp at California State University, Northridge, which, like CUNY, is one of the largest public education systems in the United States. I loved Cal State Northridge. I loved the students. I loved the fact that we were unionized. We even had a great administration and a great provost. I loved the faculty. But the workload was difficult. It was hard to have work-life balance, and it was really difficult to get any writing done because of the high teaching load and the service expectations. There’s very strong faculty governance at the California State University system, which is great, but it means that faculty have to do everything.

When I was offered the job at Chapman University, people at California State University told me not to go. The narrative was, “Chapman University is this conservative private university full of rich kids, you’re going to hate it.” So, I took a leave of absence from Cal State Northridge just in case I hated Chapman. And of course, the students were great. The students are great. And I think that’s the story of our field, it’s the story of academia. Wherever you go, the students are great. And yes, I have some very privileged students at Chapman. But I also have others who aren’t. Even the privileged students are mostly kind and want to do the right thing.

When I first started teaching, I had students spitting on me. I had students writing homophobic comments in my course evaluations. I was walking on campus one day and I heard one student saying to another, referring to me, saying, “Oh, my professor’s a ******.” Students aren’t doing this now. It’s a complete shift. That to me has been amazing, and I think it’s totally generational.

If you look at Gaza, it’s the students’ parents who are for Israel, not the students. The same is the case with trans issues. All these issues that are causing so many problems in the culture wars in this country are, I think, very generational. So, I’m very happy to be working with the young people I’m working with. That’s been true everywhere I’ve gone. Your colleagues may get you down, the administration definitely gets you down, but it’s the students that keep you going.

Walter: What would you say is the most significant difference between the 1990s and today? For instance, what’s something that your students today wouldn’t understand about that time?

Ian: In addition to generational differences, we also have to think about regional differences. Within a U.S. context, I do think that my students may have a sheltered idea of what’s available for queer people in this country. When I connect with people in other parts of the country, they don’t have the same rosy view that my students have. That’s the first thing I would say. The second thing is that when I started working as a scholar, composition wasn’t doing anything queer. There were maybe three publications. The field has come a bit late to the table, and that’s true of almost everything.

Rhet/comp has a way of being late to everything, which is also weird because it’s such a student-centered discipline. That’s also one of the things that really drove me to rhet/comp—it has such a close connection to pedagogy, which other fields don’t have, especially other areas of English. But there are also lots of contradictions. For instance, so many professors in rhet/comp are using the banking model of education. One of the areas that I work in is thinking about issues around plagiarism and intellectual property. Why is it that so many progressive professors, who are otherwise quite sympathetic to students, have these punitive plagiarism policies on their syllabi? Why are they so obsessed with student plagiarists?

The thing that I find also interesting is the way that that crosses political divisions. You can’t map these dispositions towards students easily onto other political affiliations, and I know plenty of professors who have fantastic politics who are abusive towards students. Contrarily, I know professors who don’t have very good politics but who are really kind to students. When students consult with me over who they should work with, I always tell them that they have to find somebody who’s going to let them do what they want to do and be kind to them rather than find somebody who necessarily is working in the same area that they’re working in. That’s contrary to the advice that they often receive.

There’s a lot of toxic behavior in our field. There’s a lot of misconduct. I’ve been on so many personnel committees where outside reviewers, famous professors in our field, write really mean things about people coming up for tenure and promotion. I know when people are submitting things for peer review to journals, they often get really mean-spirited reviews. The point I’m trying to make is that it’s complicated to track where our alliances and allegiances are in our field because we are so student-centered. So many of the big revolutions in composition studies in the 1960s had to do with student agency and student equity. Even now, some of the big revolutions happening in our field around linguistic justice and labor-based grading are also about inequities and social justice. So how do we map those onto our relationships with students and our dispositions towards students?

When I wrote The Ruse of Clarity for College Composition and Communication, which subsequently became a chapter in my book, Upsetting Composition Commonplaces, I got attacked by some well-known, I would say “vulgar Marxist,” peers who didn’t like my postmodern take on clarity. They were like, “If a student writes something that’s not clear, they should be punished.” It’s a very sort of punitive mentality. We don’t give students the same leeway in terms of thinking about complex and contradictory writing that we give professional writers. That’s another contradiction in our field. We have students read these interesting things in the classes we teach, but then we make them write five-paragraph essays responding to these interesting things.

One piece of scholarship that really influenced me more than any other is Min-Zhan Lu’s article Professing Multiculturalism: The Politics of Style in the Contact Zone, where she talks about having students read writers like Gertrude Stein and Joseph Conrad, writers who used language in interesting ways. When we assign those texts, we say, “Well, isn’t this an interesting use of language?” But if our students do the same thing, we read that as an error. We’re not really affording our student texts the same respect in terms of thinking of interest and complexity that we do other kinds of texts.

Walter: That’s absolutely true. I like that you framed this in terms of contradictions because I think that is the most useful framework for thinking through a lot of these thought problems in composition studies. I’ve always felt like there’s a somewhat limited value to having an entirely negative or paranoid reading of composition studies itself as an intellectual project just because so much of what we do is based on reflecting on an actual sort of activity that we’re really engaged in. Do you think that people’s relationship to these questions tells us something about their politics?

Ian: I absolutely figure it tells us something about their politics as well. And that’s what we’ve learned from feminism. The personal is the political. I don’t think that that’s something separable at all. But you know, there are contradictions, and you can’t necessarily reconcile them.

In the 1990s, Yale had a big drive for unionizing the grad students, and it was opposed by some supposedly progressive intellectuals in English and other departments (e.g., Sara Suleri Goodyear). They didn’t want their grad students organizing. I’m sort of thinking about your question and I’m not sure we should just leave it as a contradiction or does that mean that the politics is somehow compromised? Does it mean the politics are something different from the way they’re being articulated? We’re all full of contradictions. That’s why teaching is so powerful, because people learn, even subconsciously, from their teachers, both good and bad.

I was on a personnel committee a few years ago where we were looking at somebody’s file who was applying for promotion and tenure. One of the other people on the personnel committee said, “I’m voting against this person.” When I asked why, they said, “Well, they have X many publications, and that’s how many I have, and I was denied.” So just because you were treated in a horrible way, does that mean that you should be reproducing this kind of behavior with other people?

In another instance, one of the most incredible professors I had in my PhD program was Page duBois. I went to a PhD dissertation defense where she was on the committee, and she was this world-renowned classics scholar. Lots of books, well-loved teacher. The first thing she said at the dissertation defense was, “Thank you so much for your dissertation, I’ve learned so much from it.”

What an empowering moment for that student! Now when I go to thesis defenses, I say, “I’ve learned so much from your thesis.” I say that right off the bat. And that’s something that I learned from one of my mentors.

Walter: Do you think that there’s anything about South African campus protests that people paying attention to campus protests and speech in the United States today should pay attention to especially?

Ian: Oh, there’s a lot in that question.

You have to look at history and material power relations. The scary thing about the U.S. right now is that I feel like I’m back in apartheid South Africa. The same kind of mechanisms that I saw happening to shore up apartheid are happening here right now: censorship of the press, attempts to restrict education, banning of books, attempts to control the media. When I was an undergraduate in South Africa, we were supposed to read Richard Wright’s Black Boy for one of my courses. And the censors just banned the book. We weren’t able to get it. We weren’t allowed to read it.

I’m seeing a lot of parallels in student protests and the Gaza encampments. Students were teaching each other, which is what happened in the student protests in South Africa. If you realize that your education is going to be an education for oppression, then you have to find your own stuff. Students in South Africa were doing their own Marxist reading groups that they created on their own. And we saw students in the Gaza encampments reading work about Palestine and reading work by Palestinian authors and watching movies about Palestine.

Another thing that reminds me of apartheid in South Africa is that what these dictatorial regimes haven’t realized is that the more you try to suppress people, the more you’re going to produce resistance. It doesn’t work. It’s never worked. It certainly didn’t work in South Africa. One of the more progressive newspapers in apartheid South Africa had a blank front page to indicate all the things that they were not allowed to publish. Then the government made it illegal to publish blank pages. The following week, the newspaper had a little box saying we are not allowed to tell you what we aren’t allowed to publish. And so it goes. You’re never going to stop this kind of resistance, and, in fact, the more violent your tactics, the more the resistance you’re going to produce. Antonio Gramsci was right—if you’re clever, you use less violent tactics. Trump hasn’t figured that out, and the South African government certainly didn’t figure that out.

Walter: Do you think that that is also a contradiction where so much of the anti-Trump protests are about free speech and civil liberties or the independence of the university from external political pressures. Does that create its own sort of contradiction for us in a similar way, would you say?

Ian: I see what you’re getting at. I can even bring this back to writing studies, because, to me, one of the problematic commonplaces in our field, and I think it’s still a dominant one, is the focus on form over content. The idea that we’re going to help students write well. As the story goes, it doesn’t matter what students say as long as they say it well. And we’re going to help them to say it. Technically, if somebody wants to defend colonialism or racism, then your job as a teacher is not to deter them but to help them make a really good argument.

I think that that notion really has not come under sufficient critique in composition studies. It certainly has in creative writing, but not in composition studies. A lot of people still have this idea, focusing on a very selective reading of the Aristotelian tradition, that we’re going to help you make the best argument you can and then evacuate ethics, politics, and morality from the picture.

I’ve had plenty of arguments with people about this, even people who I normally agree with, who really do think that your job as a teacher should be to help students write well. But what is writing well in that context? Can you even be writing well if you’re making an immoral argument?

That’s why I think the rhetoric is so interesting to think of in terms of these things because it’s about how these terms shift. The project I’m working on right now is about genocide rhetorics. South Africa is interesting because, in all other cases, countries that get accused of committing genocide have committed genocide and deny that they committed genocide. They have always denied it. Various recent Guatemalan governments and presidents, for instance, have equivocated over whether to endorse the 1996 Guatemala Peace Accords following the decades-long civil war, and some have even denied that the Maya genocide took place. But South Africa doesn’t fit with that model because, in the case of contemporary South Africa, Trump is making this false accusation of genocide. So, it’s a little bit different—the term itself shapeshifts. That’s also what has happened to DEI.

Carmen Kynard talked about this at the Conference of the Rhetoric Society of America, saying that we mustn’t forget that ten years ago we were all protesting DEI because we talked about DEI as being nothing more than a kind of liberal performativity. And now suddenly we find ourselves in this position where we have to defend DEI. I was at a protest on my campus, and all my wonderful cool students were marching around campus, going, “DEI, DEI, I will die for DEI.” And I was like, what the fuck? Ten years ago, I was writing these articles critiquing DEI. Now, DEI has come to stand for something else.

The other thing I see underlying your question—which I think is an ongoing issue in this country—is the problem that most people, and this includes most academics who are not able to imagine a politics outside of the Republican/Democrat binary, think that, well, Trump is doing these terrible things and we need to get back to the way Biden was doing terrible things. As you say, there’s no sort of systemic critique. It’s just the critique about these particular policies and that’s why talking about Israel really helps to clarify this. Biden was doing no better with Israel than Trump is doing with Israel, and both of my Democratic senators in California voted against Bernie Sanders’s resolution to stop aid to Israel.

Thinking that we need to go back to how it was last year is really problematic because that gets us into this spiral of thinking that this binary is only what’s available. And it’s very tempting. I was asked to join a forum at my university on politics in the classroom, and the person organizing had invited some right-wing participants to create this nice binary (with me on the liberal side). And I said, “No, I’m not a liberal. I can’t stand liberalism.” The organizer was really confused. They thought, “OK, you’re not on the right, so you have to be the liberal.” Just thinking about politics beyond that simple binary is really important, and people do think that way outside the U.S.

In South Africa, people are walking around talking about Marxism and capitalism in the streets. That’s sort of unthinkable here. This is a strategy to keep corporate power in place by thinking that the only imaginable options are Democrats versus Republicans, when, in the larger scheme of things, they are both doing the same thing. People get tempted by the possibility of these options, when, in fact, they are really not options at all. When people talk about the U.S. as being a democracy, there are some things that are profoundly undemocratic about this country.

In my congressional district in California, I have a Congressperson who has received lots of money from AIPAC and votes consistently to send money to Israel. And his challenger in the primary was really against sending aid to Israel but has no money because the Democratic establishment is pouring money into this other guy. The incumbent’s platform isn’t, “I support Israel.” That’s nowhere in his literature because he knows that won’t be supported. But the other person doesn’t have the means to be able to tell people that the incumbent’s pro-Israel and they’re not. So those are just ways in which we really live in something that is more complex than a true democracy. And that’s not new.

Walter: What do you think the teacher of writing is called to do at this moment?

Ian: The way you phrased this question really sets up the answer. It’s maybe not the one you want to hear, but everybody is on their own journey. They have to figure out what they’re going to do and what they need to do. I recently spoke with a colleague who was sort of critical about somebody else’s slowly evolving stance on Palestine, and I said, “You know this person is on their journey.” I think we need to welcome people along all stages of the journey.

There are some folks who are fearful. Fearful for their jobs. I have another friend who told me that she can’t say anything about Palestine because she would be ostracized from her social circle. So, we have people who are afraid in that way. But then we have others who aren’t. If you look at the “Rhet/Comp for Palestine: A Gathering of Spirit” issue of the Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics, most of the contributors are not tenured professors.

Then there are some people who have brought up bullshit about objectivity into this, which is ridiculous. Our professional organizations say they can’t make a statement about Palestine because they don’t want to take sides, but they made all these other statements. You have to ask them, “This is Palestine exceptionalism, right?” And then there are some writing teachers who are going to see addressing this issue as being part of the job.

The result is often a matter of luck. Right now, we’re living in such precarious times in academia that you don’t really know. Ten years ago, if you would have asked me this question, I would have said, “If you have tenure, go for it.” But we’re seeing tenure being eroded. We’re seeing some states now that are getting rid of tenure altogether. We’re also seeing tenured professors all over the place being fired for saying things about Palestine. We can’t even talk anymore about the security of tenure. It’s sort of interesting to see who decides what they’re going to do. I’m trying not to be judgmental because I think people are on their own journey and have all kinds of different exigencies in their lives, material, emotional, psychological.

But eventually you have to take a stand.