Introduction

The professionalisation of scholarly careers privileges metrics of success such as published outputs, grant outcomes, citations, teaching evaluation survey results, and rankings, while devaluing human-centred activities such as engaging peers in conversations about research and theory, building collegial and critical networks, and caring for and supporting colleagues. The testimonies presented in this chapter, which use methods of storytelling and cultural rhetorics to recall the impact of Bruce Gardiner’s academic career, speak to those forms of scholarly work that are silenced under the dehumanised metrics of neoliberal governance. In the garishly titled How to be an Academic Superhero, Iain Hay astutely observes that, within the neoliberalised higher education sector, there is a “rhetoric of success” that measures “success” by focusing “first on research, then on teaching, and then, to a lesser degree, [on] community engagement and service”. For Hay, “less attention, if any, is given to other estimations and components of academic success”,1 as he admirably creates a handbook on academic career development that is mindful of the need for collegiality, networking and mentoring, alongside chapters on publishing books, teaching well, and securing funding. In this chapter, we seek to amplify “other estimations” of academic success, both to point to the extraordinary career of Bruce and to highlight the potential for meaningful academic work that does not abandon the best values underpinning the humanities to appease cruel managerialism.

The harsh reality of neoliberal management was on full display in 2011, when the University of Sydney attempted to force Bruce into an “education-focused role” that would strip research time from his workload and replace it with additional teaching. The attempt was based on a crude metric: the number of published articles over a designated period of time. Bruce argued audaciously that his lectures reflected the same intellectual rigour as other colleagues’ research outputs, and that his research allocation was necessary to maintain the exceptional quality of his teaching. While meetings were held to discuss Bruce’s “value” to the university, rallies, demonstrations, letters and petitions were organised by current and former students and local and international colleagues. The “Save Bruce” campaign ultimately worked, but Bruce faced a similar challenge from management in 2014, again successfully resisting demands to compartmentalise teaching, research and service, and remaining on the standard “40/40/20” academic contract until he retired. This chapter considers the connectedness of teaching, research and mentorship in the exemplary career of Bruce Gardiner.

Context, Method and Outline

The modern university exists under conditions of neoliberalism that increase pressure on staff and drive a sense of hopelessness that the humanities is not marketable and, therefore, has a limited future. While David Shumway cautions that neoliberalism is not the root of all problems in higher education, it simply exacerbates pre-existing problems,2 many academics see the prevailing practices of neoliberal management – casualisation, workload intensification, increased job precarity (undermining tenure, for example), and economic “value-based” assessment of programs and individuals – simultaneously as the source of workplace anxiety and the catalyst for a modern crisis in the humanities. Zoe Hope Bulaitis describes the shift in university culture under neoliberalism as a change from social service to production:

For staff, the change entails a shift from a vision of academic teachers and researchers as guides, mentors and critics who improve the lives of individuals and communities to an expectation that teachers and researchers produce marketable education and research and attract external funding. Shumway articulates the dire effect on humanities as follows: “Because neoliberalism rejects the very idea of ‘not-for-profit’ and insists that all values must be measured by the market, the humanities appear valueless.”4 Obviously, when we speak of the humanities, we speak both of the range of disciplines, knowledge and methods for investigation and of the people who practise in and develop these fields of study; when the humanities are devalued, so are humanities academics.

While it is difficult to ascribe motivations to widespread economic, political and managerial trends, there is a sense that diminishing the value of research and teaching in the humanities preserves neoliberal ideology. Judith Butler, for example, suggests that:

For Butler, the ability of humanities research and scholarship to foster creative thinking is vital for an innovative, free society, and the antithesis of neoliberal management of education. Of course, Butler is not the first to suggest that neoliberalism opposes the kinds of creative thinking fostered by a study of the humanities. In fact, others argue that the style of creativity and analysis encouraged by research and teaching in the humanities can undermine neoliberalism. As Bulaitis recommends, “humanities scholars should be attentive to alternative indicators that might open up new possibilities in the articulation of value”.6 Taken together, the ideas of Butler and Bulaitis suggest that the development of creative approaches to questions of knowledge and value might be, at the same time, the reason neoliberal management strangles the humanities and the saving grace of the humanities.

Any attempt to challenge neoliberal tendencies in the valuation of the humanities – its disciplines and its people – confronts a dominant and powerful ideology. Fortunately, the field of Rhetoric and Writing Studies has for some time been developing and mapping methods for communication that stand against dominant systems. Malea Powell and her colleagues, for example, in a formative article “Constellating Cultural Rhetorics”, articulate a new methodology that decentres dominant status quo discourses. As a methodology, cultural rhetorics led to the creation of a dedicated journal, Constellations, and encompasses a range of multimodal, creative, cross-disciplinary, story- and autobiography-based analyses and reflections that question how value is articulated within specific cultures. In the words of Powell and colleagues, cultural rhetorics reveal and recontextualise “power relationships” by identifying how “practices – ways of thinking, ways of problem solving, ways of being in the world – are valued (or not) within specific cultural systems and/or communities”.7 In the context of an analysis of the influence of neoliberalism on how a scholar’s career is remembered, the notion that value can be articulated differently in different cultural contexts is particularly pertinent. Further, the use of personal story and critical reflection can decentre traditional ways of writing about scholarly research, teaching and collegiality, thereby articulating the overlapping and intertwined nature of different aspects of academic life.

Key to the method of cultural rhetorics is storytelling. According to Powell and colleagues, “the practice of story is integral to doing cultural rhetorics [...] if you’re not practicing story, you’re doing it wrong”.8 Storytelling contributes to cultural rhetorics’ objectives in many ways. In academic cultural rhetorics research, for example, storytelling techniques can introduce sources (anecdotes, experiences, conversations, sightings, sites, emotions), lines of reasoning (creative, contradictory, allegorical), and affects that are not usually validated in traditional academic writing. This can create space for writers working from various cultural backgrounds where the styles of communication and foundations for knowledge are different from those taught and practised as traditional forms of academic argument (see also Wood 2006 and Knoblauch 2001).9 Put another way, writing and research through a cultural rhetorics method provides equal privilege to authors from backgrounds that align with dominant values in academic culture and authors whose experiences are not typically valued in academic culture. Breaking with academic conventions through the use of story can also reveal the rules and norms that university culture relies on, revealing them to be subjective, biased and blinkered, despite the appearance of objectivity and universality. In this chapter, the authors will use storytelling as a method to several ends: to decentre typically neoliberal ways of valuing academic work, to value unrecognised academic labour, to give voice to different cultures within higher education, and to add to the chorus of work that seeks to extend academic conversations beyond traditional forms of communication.

Storytelling in scholarly writing is not necessarily new, nor is it restricted to cultural rhetorics work. The genre of autoethnography, for example, has been an important method for anthropologists, feminists, cultural studies scholars and others to document, explore and share the challenges to emotional wellbeing and career advancement. Ellis, Adams and Bochner define autoethnography as follows:

Adams, Jones and Ellis add that autoethnography “shows people in the process of figuring out what to do, how to live, and the meaning of their struggles”.11 One powerful outcome of autoethnography is that it creates space for the personal – the subjective – in knowledge making, not only highlighting the subjectivity of all knowledge creation but opening up the possibility of new knowledge based on lived experience.

Storytelling, on the other hand, can refer to a broader kind of alternative rhetoric. For Arthur Frank, story is the product of an inquiry that invites the reader into itself to engage at both emotional and rational levels with the narrator’s experience.12 The researcher-as-storyteller understands the story itself as containing analytical techniques, theory, and dialogical structures13 which can speak for themselves:

Similarly, Laura J. Shepherd admonishes us to “bring the wholeness of [our] humanity into [our] work”.15

It is well known that Bruce Gardiner is a teacher and scholar extraordinaire. It is less well known that he is a master storyteller, with each of his narratives serving as a portal to discovery – of knowledge, yes, but just as often as a vehicle for self-discovery, for finding some personal aspect of ourselves that informs our scholarly practice. By evoking and bearing witness to situations, Bruce invites his participants into a relationship, enticing them to think and feel with the story being told as opposed to thinking about it. The authors of this chapter, therefore, find the method of storytelling an appropriate way to honour Bruce while critiquing the prevailing academic culture that tends to devalue much of what made Bruce so influential for his students and peers.

As scholars of Rhetoric, Writing Studies, and allied fields, we are choosing a less iconised path in using a storytelling methodology, built on narrative reflection, rather than a deductive approach to argumentation. One justification can be found in Bruce’s own pedagogical approach to modern and contemporary rhetoric (to which each of us has borne witness through his masterful lectures), which relies on storytelling as well as argumentation and exegesis. Another can be seen in the rhetorical theory of Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, on whose work Bruce is expert. Since our purpose here is epideictic (that is, pertaining to the present negotiation and assignation of value), we follow the lead of New Rhetoric scholars who value a broader range of argumentative techniques. As Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca suggest, in epideictic rhetoric, “every device of literary art is appropriate”.16 Yet, we cannot take these isolated points of reference – however authoritative – as our only cues.

One way to frame the narratives each of the authors contributes is as story-based texts that invite contemplation and consideration of the way we, as peers and colleagues, value academic work in the humanities. In inviting contemplation, we follow Bruce’s own theories of analysis, prompting our readers to enter into the “maze” of textual interpretation and analysis. To posit a text as a “maze” might seem a misleading analogy given the assumed linear unfolding of text or speech before reader or audience. Yet Bruce’s own suggestive choice, in an early published review,17 of just this term illuminates something important about his own methodology as a scholar of language and literature, as well as an entry point for our own reflections as scholars of Rhetoric and Writing Studies. Bruce’s choice of “maze” and not “labyrinth” suggests a pointed difference with certain other approaches to literary and rhetorical criticism, a methodological decision which we appreciate and whose implications we seek to follow. While these words are often used interchangeably, there is a persistent, if fine, distinction: a labyrinth, although sometimes disorienting, traces a single path; a maze implies multiplicity. Because the labyrinth combines a unicursal path with turns and counter-turns, repetition with development, critics have often found in it a useful figure to associate with narrative text. Ruskin, for example, affirms this in Fors Clavigera, noting that Daedalus’ labyrinth “has set the pattern of almost everything linear and complex”.18 Later, J. Hillis Miller links this “oxymoronic” idea of linear complexity – “the line which is not simply linear” – to realist narrative.19

Bruce, by contrast, wants to entertain a fuller set of possibilities for reading, scholarship, and the negotiation of meaning in general. In this, his work anticipates a wider shift towards methods of storytelling, since these methods assume a maze-like proliferation of texts and complex, situated experiences of textual practice.20 For Bruce, these are constitutive features of communication, even if the individual reader or scholar must be more decisive about textual meaning. Indeed, in his own more direct contribution to Rhetoric and Writing Studies scholarship (an important essay on digital rhetoric from 2007), he would go on to argue that any text “is intrinsically a network of many orders”21 and that our mental experience of this “vexed”22 object is one variously of “play” and “assemblage”. More recent innovations in digital delivery would seem to change our relationship to textuality, but these merely make more visible what was already the case (though they do, he notes, affect the material economies of text production and reception). The text, then, is more maze-like than labyrinthine; the role of the scholar or critic is more demanding than simply following a single thread, however often or sharply it turns. This also suggests a paradoxical freedom: while it is certainly possible to take numerous wrong turns and lose one’s way, there is likely more than one path into and through the network. In this chapter we suggest at least three by offering three different stories of our own. The first, by Adam Gall, extends the maze (and minotaur) metaphor to examine Bruce’s approaches to textual scholarship more broadly. The second, by Benjamin Miller, considers Bruce’s commitment to collaborative pedagogies and guiding colleagues through the maze of professional networks. The third, by Susan Thomas, recounts Bruce’s unwavering commitment to mentoring colleagues and students and helping them negotiate international and interdisciplinary mazes. Taken together, these stories work against standard discourses of academic value to amplify the alternative and powerful ways of being in academia, with their myriad, divergent pathways.

Stories about Bruce Gardiner

Adam’s Reflection

As a serial contract teacher and non-career researcher, my encounter with the Gardinerian method (and with Bruce’s personal generosity) came later than my co-authors’. By the time I was able to work with Bruce, I had traversed several institutions and disciplines, arriving in Rhetoric and Writing Studies as a place where my interests in textual scholarship, contemporary public and popular culture, and representations of history could be brought together productively for a few semesters. After witnessing a single lecture for undergraduates, I found Bruce’s perspective compelling enough to immediately want to learn more. Attending as many of his lectures as collegial decorum would allow, I also read back into Bruce’s published work, which, while telling only part of his story, added a desirable bibliographic dimension to my burgeoning fandom. An early reference to the role of theory in textual inquiry (also mentioned in our introduction) frames my reflection. I will explore some dimensions of Bruce’s meta-theory for textual scholarship – his approach to theory and theorising – and what it has meant for my practice as a scholar and writer.

The reference in question comes from a review of Slinn’s Browning and the Fictions of Identity, in which Bruce firmly cautions against the resistance to theory. His reminder to Slinn (and to us): “But theory, left untended, doesn’t depart. It remains as the minotaur in the maze, an ideology which will announce itself as close to the end as it can.”23 When one finds oneself in the maze of textual research (something akin, perhaps, to being alone in a dark wood at night, but somehow more urbane) it is theory that will appear as the minotaur: theory is inevitable and has a dramatic role that can’t – and should not – be denied. This role in the textual drama evinces a narrative logic (“as close to the end as possible”), a logic of suspense that sets theory in an anticipatable place in the work of the scholarly reader of texts, though not in a definitely known place (that is, not “at the end”). At the same time, this narrative positioning points to theory as a likely source of pleasure – both narrative pleasure and, perhaps, other kinds of textual pleasure as well. Although a minotaur is not generally a figure of fun, the generic quality of the encounter, its structured anticipatory (yet somewhat uncertain) quality, point in this direction. Finding theory “close to” the end of the maze ensures it preserves its awful necessity, but it also guarantees complex pleasures in the encounter. Like Barthes’ reader in The Pleasure of the Text, the minotaur of theory must be sought (maybe even “cruised”) in our scholarly practice; one is driven inward and through the maze to find him.

Bearing witness to such encounters is another source of pleasure, another form of encounter, and a model for participation. As mentioned, my own first opportunity to see Bruce in this light came very late: he gave a lecture to senior undergraduates in a course on contemporary rhetoric in which I was a lecturer and seminar leader; his topics were the rhetorical kinds and his theory of intellectual property. Bruce began by outlining his interpretation of Aristotle’s Rhetoric contra the normative emphasis of contemporary philosophical interpretations. Characteristically, Bruce offered students (and other fortunate witnesses) a key insight in the paratext by referring students to a digital copy of Eugene Garver’s “Deliberative Rhetoric and Ethical Deliberation” (2013) with the comment that his own view on Aristotle’s rhetorical kinds is contrary to the dominant one among scholars (as represented by Garver). For Garver (as for other contemporary Aristotelian scholars), only those speeches which reach a certain threshold of quality may be seen as belonging to the kinds (or genres). Garver suggests that while “the art of rhetoric can be used to get someone to take his medicine, or in courtship and seduction [...] the art operates fully in its three genres”.24 In other words, for Garver, Aristotle’s kinds only fully apply to communication that meets some threshold of quality. Further, Garver argues that Aristotle “makes deliberation the centre of the art of rhetoric”,25 confirming the secondariness of the epideictic among modern critics.

Bruce vigorously denied both points, exhibiting a tolerance for certainty that is rare among contemporary scholars, especially in a pedagogical mode. His lecture script reads: “I will argue that all verbal communication is of only three kinds, which Aristotle names deliberative, forensic and epideictic rhetoric.”26 Following Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, Bruce also treats the epideictic as the prevalent form; as a proponent of modern psychology27 he gives a developmental account to explain this: “at first our entire experience of communication is exclusively epideictic”.28 He then refreshes our views of the deliberative and forensic branches by sharing a wide array of examples and linking them to theories of textuality in Barthes (deliberative: what matter who’s speaking?) and Heidegger (forensic: the interrogation of what is spoken, by whom). Bruce’s astute distinction of his own ideas of intellectual property29 and his decision against scholarly consensus in this matter were together accompanied by a pedagogical gesture towards the best representative of that consensus. There is perhaps some irony in promoting the view that all texts could be worthy of attention (contra Garver) when every text of Bruce’s is of such high quality. There is an intellectual generosity that is, in some important way, lacking in self-regard.

I am interested here not so much in the finer points of Aristotelianism in rhetorical theory – nor necessarily the theories of intellectual property (or of gossip – though I am very interested in that, in general) – but in their metatheoretical underpinnings. To a one-time student of Cultural Studies, this theoretical undertaking was impressive (it has been noted by McKenzie Wark and others that contemporary scholars, in a kind of venerational scholasticism, don’t tend to do theory: Bruce’s account of epideictic rhetoric is indisputably a theory – he encounters the minotaur). Bruce’s metatheoretical confidence, a willingness to be certain (or almost certain) on some questions, is also the product of labour sometimes invisible to his students and colleagues (and to university administrators); yet it is also a promise. What commended this explication to me, and still does, is Bruce’s confidence in disagreement. In Garver and Gardiner are two models of careful, practised scholarship; yet the latter more determinedly advances a commitment to theorising as a creative encounter. At the same time, this was never a lecture as would-be conference paper: Bruce’s whole approach really did help students (and me) to better understand the rhetorical kinds.

My second anecdote is more concise; it also hinges on well-earned theoretical confidence and generosity sui generis. Bruce and I were at lunch at the quietly excellent Rubyos on King Street in Newtown (his shout), talking about, yes, cultural theory. Over diverse tapas, the conversation turned to Bourdieu, about whom I enthused a connection to Heidegger. I proffered that connection in the kind of loose and fuzzy way that some speculative humanities scholarship might around concepts such as embodiment or ethos.30 Bruce firmly, yet without a hint of disparagement, pointed out that the two theories – and theorists – were not at all alike. There was no glibness, nor was this a whimsical dismissal: Bruce took (and takes) Bourdieu at his word;31 I took (and take) Bruce at his word. His is neither a “toolkit” model of theory, nor a hazy historicism that can justify almost any connection via nebulous lines of influence and connection. Bruce’s other students and colleagues (are we not always already both?) will recognise this form of encounter: a dead end in the maze, as firm as it is reassuring, as pleasurable in its way as finding the minotaur.

Ben’s Reflection

I came to the University of Sydney as somewhat of an outsider – I had completed a PhD and taught elsewhere in Sydney before becoming the second academic hired to develop and teach in a new program in Rhetoric and Writing Studies at the University of Sydney. As a new academic in a new faculty-based program of teaching and research at the university, I was isolated from the usual onboarding, induction and introductions that staff in established schools and departments might receive. But I did receive one warm and generous welcoming email – from Bruce Gardiner. As an outsider, I interpreted the email without a sense of its author’s reputation. Had I known then what I know now, I would have recognised Bruce immediately as an opinionated and generous literary critic (as Adam’s story highlights), as a wide and considerate reader, and a demanding and good-humoured teacher. Had I been aware of Bruce’s reputation among students, I would not have been surprised by his care and support for someone new to the university. But my ignorance of these things did not prevent a favourable reading of the email. Bruce welcomed me to the university (something senior managers and administrators had not done beyond a template letter from the HR department) and invited me to present at an upcoming forum he had organised on approaches to Indigenous literature. I knew immediately that Bruce was an open-minded and innovative academic with a mind as much intrigued by the latest trends in cross-cultural textual analysis as by traditional literary theories.

Upon my arrival at the forum, as guests and participants were making tea and registering for the day’s events, Bruce made a beeline for me and swiftly began introducing me to people: “Here’s Professor Giles – you and he share an interest in … And you should meet Dr Minter – you both work on … and let’s chat to Professor Teuton, the scholar I’m hosting from UBC …” This was more than polite networking. There was the sense that Bruce had taken the time to know our research areas and that he cared about our ability to share ideas and connect. The plenary speaker at the forum was Chris Teuton, whose book Deep Waters: The Textual Continuum in American Indian Literature had recently been published, and Bruce was clearly a fan. In the following years, as I taught alongside Bruce in the university’s Rhetoric and Writing Studies curriculum, his enjoyment of Teuton’s work became obvious to me. Teuton argues that Native American literature has three main drives: the oral impulse, the graphic impulse, and the critical impulse.32 For Teuton, literature by Native American writers continues and innovates long traditions of speaking, writing and theorising. Although Bruce, who presented a paper on “Tribal Intellectual Property” that began with a photo of his five-year-old self dressed as an “Indian”, his brother as a cowboy (see Figure 4.1), before masterfully unpacking a range of ethical considerations of property ownership and frontier representations, was extremely mindful of the politics of appropriation, his own scholarly commitment to something akin to Teuton’s triumvirate was renowned. Bruce’s lectures were a demonstration of expert oratory, creating a strong sense of occasion in the classroom; his writing was full of wisdom and wit; and he was, in all things, critical. This is not to confuse criticism with pessimism or derision, but to say that Bruce was critical in the classical scholarly sense in that he was committed to testing and refining ideas, knowledge, and the limits of our communication. And, as with Teuton’s theory of Native American literature, nothing is to be achieved by isolating and separating these strands of work.

A few years later, when I first coordinated a senior-level undergraduate course, I asked Bruce to come and speak about rhetorical traditions. Early on a Thursday morning he arrived for his first guest lecture, removed his famous hat, and pulled out the course textbook, George Pullman’s Persuasion: History, Theory, Practice. “Who is George Pullman?”, he asked as if he had never encountered the author before. Students were immediately hooked on the mystery, or perhaps they were intrigued by the idea of a lecturer who had not read the course textbook. Over the next hour, Bruce dissected the textbook – he had clearly done his homework – tracing and mapping the citations, interpreting the index, and painting a picture of Pullman’s critical network. Pullman, to Bruce, was an Aristotelian with an interest in the new rhetoric who had less time for Cicero and the Romans and no time for critical theory that, to Bruce’s mind, was deeply rhetorical. Needless to say, students and teachers who witnessed the lecture were elevated beyond the local concerns of a particular chapter or concept and found themselves with a transhistorical and worldly view of the context for their learning. And perhaps more importantly, students began to consider how their own scholarly connections – flagged in citations, references, quotes and mentions – might signify their own identity. I think of this as early work in the study of what has become known as “the politics of citation”, which is increasingly present in feminist, critical race, and Indigenous studies (see Mott and Cockayne for a discussion in feminist studies, Somerville or Ohri for a consideration of Indigenous studies, Chakravartty et al. for an application in critical race studies, and Kim for a more general overview).

In reflecting on these anecdotes, the care and attention to networking is interwoven throughout Bruce’s teaching, research and collegiality. In all of these areas of work, Bruce connected students to their fields of study, fostered collaborations among peers, mapped the relationship between ideas, and helped people understand themselves as a vital point in a constellation of knowledge. In fact, a relational understanding and practice of rhetoric, such as Bruce’s, is a revolutionary concept. According to Rodriguez: “A relational worldview gives us the beginnings of a new rhetoric that can help us remove the violence that is destroying and disfiguring the world, and, ultimately, destroying and disfiguring so much of us.”33 Rodriguez is talking here about a new rhetoric for a decolonial world, where connectivity between people should be prioritised in everyday and academic communication, and where generosity, even for those we strongly disagree with, is necessary to stop the continuation of colonial violence. For Bruce, decolonisation was important – clearly, as he supported scholars like Teuton and theorised about Indigenous intellectual property rights. But Bruce’s relational practice in academic culture also stood firm against an academic culture that increasingly attempts to isolate teaching, research and leadership into separate and quantifiable categories. Stories such as those in this collection, at a minimum, reveal a different kind of value for a career such as Bruce’s, and, more optimistically, continue to prompt our own institutions to better recognise the importance of unquantifiable aspects of academic work. For example, how can we possibly (or should we even) define or categorise the impact of a form of collegiality that so authentically springs from caring and respectful scholarship, teaching and mentoring?

Susan’s Reflection

In January 2004, I reported for my first day of work in the English department. With the ink barely dry on my American thesis (and passport stamp), I was still acclimating to life in Australia and wondering how my expertise in Rhetoric and Writing Studies would be received in a literature-centric department. I nervously expected a crowd of unfamiliar faces, not knowing then about the scarcity of academics in the Woolley building in January. As I powered up my computer, a slight well-dressed gentleman, seemingly from a bygone, more genteel era, appeared in my doorway. Expecting to have to explain myself as a “rhetoric specialist” (distinct from “bullshit artist”) to an audience unfamiliar with the mostly-American discipline of Rhetoric, I took a deep breath and prepared to deliver my spiel. But no sooner than I’d said Aristotle, Bruce launched into an impromptu lecture on Aristotle’s influence on modern theorists, particularly Heidegger, as well as his own philosophy of teaching. It became clear quickly that I would never need to explain anything to Bruce Gardiner.

Over the next twenty years, these exchanges became pleasantly routine, leading to professional mentoring, teaching collaborations, and a steadfast friendship. Like most who’ve been lucky enough to have Bruce for a colleague, I soon realised that he knew something about practically everything – and that he knew far more about my own discipline than I did. He is, undoubtedly “a part of all that [he has] met”.34 However, as both Adam and Ben attest in their reflections, Bruce’s kindness, magnanimity and gentleness meant that I never felt intimidated. On the contrary, I felt encouraged and eager to learn more, and would soon come to realise that this was precisely the effect Bruce had on his students.

In thoughtful preparation for my arrival in the English department, Bruce had read not only my staff profile, but my entire thesis, and, foreseeing the struggles I would face in having writing units accredited by the English department, had some ideas on how I could contribute to the department beyond the writing curriculum I’d been hired to develop. Upon Bruce’s suggestion, inspired by his stories of English department colleagues interested in Rhetoric, I hosted the “What is the New Rhetoric” conference in Sydney in 2005. The call for papers invited contributors to ponder how rhetorical study has influenced their own work. Not only did Bruce assist in reviewing conference proposals and editing subsequent submissions for the eponymous collection of conference papers, including his own, he taught my classes for two weeks so that I could attend to conference administration. I note this occurred long before the implementation of the university’s eventual workload policy, and despite being on a 40/40/20 contract, I was (like other colleagues) teaching upwards of twelve face-to-face hours per week in those days, which Bruce happily assumed, on top of his own staggering teaching load.

Thanks to Bruce’s generosity, the conference was a resounding success, as affirmed by the appreciative and congratulatory notes received afterwards. Whether from postgraduate students or distinguished professors, including keynote speaker Andrea Lunsford from Stanford University, each reflection bore a common thread: admiration for Bruce as “the most impressive” figure at the conference. He had made a particularly favourable impression on tentative undergraduate presenters, attending their sessions, asking questions, and chatting with them during the tea breaks, offering advice and assistance. Epitomising simultaneously Aristotle’s ideals of ethos and aretê, Quintilian’s “good man [sic] skilled in speaking” and Cicero’s “citizen orator”, Bruce’s best lessons were taught by personal example, and they were not lost on two outstanding undergraduate conference presenters who went on to successful careers in academia and journalism, respectively. This calls to mind the lesson in Christ’s parable of the sower, which Bruce cited often in his own research and teaching:

Shortly after the conference, Bruce was the victim of a random hate crime, being senselessly bashed as he walked a city street. When news reached the Department of English, Bruce’s condition and prognosis were unclear. In a state of shock and disbelief, I left my assembled class and caught a cab to St. Vincent’s Hospital. Nothing could have prepared me for what I was about to witness, and the image of my beloved colleague’s swollen, bloodied and bruised face will no doubt remain with me forever. Still young and somewhat naive to the propensity of human beings to inflict such brazen acts of cruelty and intolerance upon each other, I stood by Bruce’s bedside in disbelief. How could anyone wittingly inflict pain and suffering on such a gentle soul? But in true Bruce fashion, even lying in a hospital bed in the critical care unit, his thoughts were for others rather than himself. He calmly assured me he would be okay and that I shouldn’t worry – but that I should get back to my students.

When I think of all I have learned from Bruce, one admonishment rings truer than the rest: “Nothing matters more than students”. Bruce said this to me on the first day we met and reiterated it on many occasions. Even when barely conscious and breathing through a tube, his first thought was for the students I’d abandoned in my mad dash to the hospital. It is because of Bruce that I am more generous with student feedback and more patient with students in general. It is because of Bruce that I take a more scholarly approach to my teaching, aiming to deliver, as Bruce did, what educational theorist George Kuh calls “seamless learning”.36 And it is because of Bruce that I encourage my students to ask more questions, be more observant, find humour in unlikely places, and take more risks, both in their arguments and their lives.

I used to lament having missed out on being Bruce’s student, but have since realised that I have benefited from his instruction for the past twenty years. In that time, institutional trends and agendas have come and gone, but Bruce has remained a steadfast presence in a kaleidoscopic higher education sector. Even without one of those trendy “WWJD” (What would Jesus do?) neon bracelets to remind me, I often ask myself “What would Bruce do?” And while it’s impossible to know exactly what he would do in particular situations, his rationale is ever-clear: nothing is more important than students.

Conclusion

Bruce’s methodological cues are not limited to the maze analogy outlined at the outset of this discussion, ramifying as it does the paradoxes of narrative (or argument), and the networked quality of text. They extend to intellectual networks and intertextual connections. His dissertation establishes a method of contributing to social and intellectual history by modelling a “simple procedure” for identifying “certain ideals and tactics” among his chosen milieu (The Rhymers’ Club) and their “undercurrents of agreement”,37 discovered by examining their works and correspondence. Bruce thus gestures towards an argument in a network of texts. His understated representation of the (probably) intense labour of his own scholarship is elaborated with a diagrammatic “embryology of prior associations”. That diagram, maze-like, represents Bruce’s networked method for conducting the intellectual and social history of texts, developed and refined across his career. It also gives visual form to Bruce’s tolerance for both certainty (or near-certainty) and uncertainty through its deployment of solid and broken lines marking connections between participants (a tolerance also evident in Bruce’s approach to the problematic of theory, as we have seen).

As far as we are able to present an argument about the significance and importance of a career such as Bruce’s, we have sought to use storytelling and critical reflection to reveal a maze-like network of influence. Throughout the narratives presented here, it is clear Bruce’s impact cannot be reduced to a number of publications or numerical scores on a teaching survey when his pastoral support for students and colleagues continues to influence academics working in student support and teaching, or when his research-informed teaching has provided a model for others. Further, it speaks to the authenticity of Bruce’s approach to academic life that his own research into maze-like networks of textuality provides a more appropriate way to understand the influence of his scholarly life. Our own approach is admittedly less ambitious than Bruce’s in “The Rhymers’ Club”, or even in his important essay on digital rhetoric. However, we share his interest in networks of real and possible connections among texts, writers and readers, and in noticing some points of adhesion along the way.

As we reflect now on Bruce’s career, it is remarkable that he was able to withstand the harsh measurements of the neoliberal university. His career perhaps speaks to the kind of arguments that need to be made time and again as the value of the humanities comes into question, or as professional managers try to replace research time with teaching hours. Bruce might respond by arguing for the value of research-informed teaching, or for the importance of our teaching-informed scholarly networks. Larger questions appear in such a consideration of Bruce’s career, such as how a neoliberal university can continue its traditional purpose – to produce research, to improve society, or to engage students in the process of testing and creating knowledge – under modern conditions, or how tools of measurement might erode collegiality, research potential, or teaching quality. For Bruce, we believe, navigating the modern university requires us to be networked – connected to one another in a consideration of how ideas are related and interwoven. And it is our scholarly networks that will nurture and sustain us through predictable, but no less devastating, attacks on the humanities. For the authors of this chapter, Bruce Gardiner is an exemplary academic, whose impact and significance will continue to be understood in the many favourable stories that abound, as the seeds he has sown continue to bear fruit.

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