All Roads Lead to Purdue

I arrived in West Lafayette in the summer of 2001, in that thick Indiana heat that settles over the corn and does not lift, a young man with a freshly minted PhD and the cadences of Kharagpur still wet in his mouth. The land was flat to the horizon. The Wabash moved slowly past the campus, brown and patient, the way rivers move when they have decided there is nowhere urgent to be. I had come from a different geography of the mind, from May Day marches and street theatre, from a Bengali left that taught me to read the world as a fight over who gets to speak, then north into the harshest winters of Fargo, then into the snowbound empirical registers of Minnesota, where the University of Minnesota had trained me to measure the world before I had learned to question the measure. Now I stood in the heartland of the American Midwest, in a department whose name carried, in our discipline, the weight of scripture.

They say all roads lead to Purdue. In communication this is close to literal. So many of the threads we follow back to their source begin here, in this unglamorous town between Indianapolis and Chicago, where the founders of fields did their thinking. Organizational communication as we know it carries the fingerprints of Charles Redding, who is buried in the citations of nearly every scholar who came after him, whether they know it or not. This was the place of Redding, of Linda Putnam, of Teri Thompson, who helped birth health communication into a field with a name and a history of its own. To walk those corridors in 2001 was to walk among the people whose names sat in the textbooks I had only just stopped being a student of. Steve Wilson. Patrice Buzzanell. Robin Clair. Cynthia Stohl. Brant Burleson. Bill Rawlins. Dennis Mumby. John Greene. Glenn Sparks. Scholars who had something to say and who had spent their lives saying it well, who had given the discipline more than most of us will give in three lifetimes.

I will be honest about the fear, because the gratitude means nothing without it. I carried the ordinary anxieties of the newly hired, and Purdue sharpened them into something with an edge. Would I make tenure. That question followed me down the hallways, sat with me in the long evenings, woke before I did. A thriving intellectual culture is a hard place to be young and uncertain. The department did not coddle. It argued. People did not always get along, and the disagreements were real, and they were loud, and they were about things that mattered. You could not drift through. You had to find the ground you would stand on, plant your feet, and defend it, and if you could not defend it you had no business standing there.

And I was, in those years, in the middle of my own quiet emergency. I had been trained in a hard post-positivist tradition, drilled in variables and measurement and the cool grammar of prediction. Somewhere in the cornfields of Indiana, that grammar began to fail me. I was turning toward critical theory, toward the questions of power and structure that my Kharagpur formation had always pressed against my ribs, and the turn was disorienting, like learning to write again with the other hand. I was becoming a different kind of scholar inside a building full of people who could tell, immediately, when an argument had not been earned. There was nowhere to hide an unexamined claim. That terrified me. It also saved me.

Because this is the thing about that culture of argument. It nurtured me precisely by refusing to be gentle. It taught me to debate. It taught me to make the inconvenient claim and then stay in the room while it was tested. It taught me that an epistemology is a commitment you have to be willing to bleed for, that ontology is not decoration, that you owe your position the labour of a real defence. Purdue taught me to ask the question, to go to the empirical and let it talk back, to hold a conviction and a doubt in the same hand. The rigour was not cruelty. The rigour was a form of respect, the respect of people who assumed you were serious and would be disappointed if you proved otherwise.

I know how this reads now. In the vocabulary the academy has built for itself in recent years, someone would call that culture unsafe. And I want to reflect on that honestly, because there were broader questions of culture in those rooms that deserve to be grappled with and not waved away, questions about who the heat fell hardest on and who could afford to be wrong out loud. Those questions are real. I will not pretend they are not. 

But I also will not let the comfortable language of our moment erase what that place gave me, which was a spine. It forged in me the capacity to speak truth to power, to refuse to back down when the truth was unwelcome, to be passionate about a claim because the claim was true and not because it was safe. The work I have spent twenty-five years on, the centring of the subaltern voice, the long argument against neoliberal and settler-colonial structures of silence, the building of voice infrastructures with communities the powerful would rather not hear, all of it stands on the ground I learned to plant my feet in beside the Wabash.

I am a long way from West Lafayette now. I write this from Palmerston North, in Aotearoa, in a multigenerational house, having travelled through Singapore and the years to get here. The discipline I practice would be unrecognisable to the assistant professor sweating through his first Indiana summer, frightened of tenure, mid-turn between two ways of knowing. And yet he is the one who learned, in that demanding and difficult and generous place, how to argue for something that mattered.

When I look back over these twenty-five years, I do not think first of the books or the citations. I think of the corridors, and the arguments, and the people who took me seriously enough to push back. I owe that place more than I can repay.

All roads lead to Purdue. Mine did too.