Chronicle of Higher Education Written by Deborah

¶ … Chronicle of Higher Education written by Deborah Tannen, who thereby successfully decries the stealth negative impact that agonism has on society at large, with special emphasis on its presence in the educational environment.

The audience of Deborah Tannen's article appears to be the entirety of the academic world, meaning faculty staff and students alike. These two categories of people would be interested in the information conveyed, because it concerns the effects of agonism particularly within their setting. For some of the scholars or students, the ideas which are presented in this article may even be new, challenging, and surprising.

The article's focus is on signaling the drawbacks of perpetuating the blind practice of agonism, particularly in the academia. It is possible that the author tackled this issue for the purpose of raising awareness about a colossal misconception which has been accepted and endorsed in the Western culture for centuries. On exposing its negative effects, she expects that others will comprehend their reality, and stop perpetuating the practice of thinking in terms of attack when analyzing other people's ideas which are new to themselves.

Tannen links some of the illustrative examples for the identification and consequences of agonism from her past work, The Argument Culture, which treated the same subject in the larger social context of journalism, politics, law, and education. In fact, some of the passages in the article are directly extracted from the book. Therefore, it can be stated that her interest in the matter at hand is profound, and that her research has been conducted thoroughly.

In order to denounce agonism effectively, Deborah Tannen makes use of metaphors, analogies, real life examples, and quotes from other experts. In this sense, she correlates the culture of agonism with a battle-oriented mindset, which every person is educated into adopting and encouraged to perpetrate throughout all lifetime. Apart from the battle, some other metaphors employed for the same purpose are those of a gun shootout and a public execution.

Moreover, she introduces and supports the metaphor of building a structure, to supplant that of the attacks, in which case the person facing a new idea would direct his/her efforts at understanding and then adding to it, instead of investing that energy into looking for the theory's weak points to criticize. In addition, the author enlists the words of sociologist Kerry Daly in proposing an analogy between theories and bread dough. Specifically, it is suggested that new theories are to be used as foundations for further research, as opposed to attacking them with every ounce of energy.

The credibility of her arguments is ensured by the frequent quotation and paraphrasing of specialists who have reached the same conclusions about the agonistic ideology. For instance, the account of Jane Tompkins' confession, namely that she had registered great professional success only after discrediting another scholar's research, serves to enforce the idea that society wrongfully favors this type of confrontational onsets on a regular basis.