The Legacy of Dr. Karlyn Kohrs Campbell

About Dr. Karlyn Kohrs Campbell

Dr. Karlyn Kohrs Campbell's financial gifts to the University of Minnesota express her lifetime commitment to social justice, rigorous scholarship, and robust intellectual exchange. She devoted her extraordinary teaching career to educating students about African Americans' rhetorical and political history, the civil rights and women's rights movements, and the U.S. presidency. Her passion for teaching these subjects was matched only by her commitment to researching and publishing exemplary scholarship in the same areas.

Dr. Campbell was one of the most distinguished and decorated scholars in the field of Rhetoric and Communication Studies. She received every major award given by the National Communication Association, including the Distinguished Scholar Award (1992), the Endowed Arnold Lectureship (2002), the Francine Merritt Award (1996), the Ehninger Research Award (1991), and the Winans-Wichelns Book Award (1990). Her many professional contributions have also been recognized by multiple institutions. For example, she received the Distinguished Woman Scholar Award from the University of Minnesota (2002), an Honorary Doctor of Humanities from Michigan State University (2004), the Elizabeth Andersch Award from the University of Ohio (2004), the Mortar Board Outstanding Educator Award from the University of Kansas (1976 and 1981), and the Distinguished Citizen Alumni Award from Macalester College (2008).

Despite such impressive accolades, Dr. Campbell never lost connection with her Minnesota roots, crediting her professional success to the valuable lessons that she learned growing up among the hardships and deprivations of farming during wartime. Her bright and restless mind soon set her on a journey to places far from Blomkest, the small Minnesota town near her family's farm. Upon graduating with her BA from Macalester College in 1958, she pursued an MA at the University of Minnesota. After building some teaching experience as an instructor of speech, drama, and debate at Macalester College and S.U.N.Y. Brockport and undergoing further education and formative experiences in Perugia, Italy, and Salzburg, Austria, she returned to the University of Minnesota, where she earned her doctoral degree in 1968. That was just the beginning of her extraordinary career.

Despite an academic job market defined by advertisements stating that "women need not apply," Dr. Campbell soon made her mark as an astute, engaged, and rigorous scholar who brought critical and historical perspectives to the key political struggles of her time. Her distinctive voice began to take shape with her 1970 original scripted series of analyses, "The Rhetoric of Black Power," for KPFK (Pacifica Radio), Los Angeles. The series was nominated for the Peabody Award.

In the years that followed, Professor Campbell's career as a teacher and scholar developed at institutions such as California State University, Los Angeles (1966-71); S.U.N.Y Binghamton (1971-73); City College, S.U.N.Y (1973-74); the University of Wisconsin (1983); and the University of Kansas (1974-86). In 1986, she returned to her alma mater, the University of Minnesota, where she served as a professor and a three-term chair of the Department of Speech Communication, which was ultimately renamed the Department of Communication Studies.

Over the course of her career, Dr. Campbell emerged as one of the most important scholars in Rhetoric. She shaped the field and carved new intellectual pathways where none had previously existed. Dr. Campbell's research on the rhetoric of the suffrage movements in the U.S. virtually single-handedly founded the field of feminist rhetorical studies. Her published work empowered generations of scholars to look to the experiences and struggles of women and other marginalized groups as a source of political resilience, possibility, and critical imagination. For example, she authored a series of now canonical essays on the rhetoric of women's liberation, compiled two bio-critical sourcebooks of women orators (Women Public Speakers in the United States, 1800-1925 and Women Public Speakers in the United States, 1925-1993), and published her book-length study of the distinctive strategies women speakers used in facing (sometimes violent) opposition in U.S. history (Man Cannot Speak for Her, vol. 1 and 2).

Dr. Campbell's keen interest and insight into the political significance of public speech is also reflected in her distinguished scholarship on the rhetorical dimensions of the U.S. presidency. Her long collaboration with Kathleen Hall Jamieson, former Dean of the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication, resulted in two books on the genres of presidential oratory (Deeds Done in Words and Presidents Creating the Presidency). These texts have withstood the test of time and continue to fuel the study of U.S. presidential power. Dr. Campbell's subsequent solo publication in 2014 of The Great Silent Majority: Nixon's 1969 Speech on Vietnamization cemented her reputation as a critical scholar of the U.S. presidency. By her own admission, her approach to Nixon's war rhetoric was formed through her experiences teaching in 1969 at a predominantly non-white school in Los Angeles. There, she taught and interacted with African American war recruits and veterans who struggled to negotiate their military service abroad with their fight for civil rights at home. Her experiences amidst the civil rights movements of the 1960s shaped both Dr. Campbell's scholarship and her pedagogy.

By authoring The Rhetorical Act and Critiques of Contemporary Rhetoric, two of the most widely assigned primers in the method of rhetorical criticism, Dr. Campbell excited generations of rhetorical scholars and demonstrated the critical possibilities of textual analysis. Her unique influence charged the field of Rhetorical Studies to be ever vigilant, responsive, and creative in our engagement with the power of discourse.

Dr. Campbell's financial gifts to the University of Minnesota reflect her commitment to social justice and grow out of her ethos as a scholar and teacher. The scholarships she endowed illustrate her desire to help bright undergraduate students who otherwise would be unable to attend the University of Minnesota. And the speaker's series she endowed calls us to embrace rigorous scholarship, to share ideas freely, to learn from each other, to take lessons from the past as we shape our futures, and to embrace both the "promiscuous and protean" dimensions of our agency. For, as she put it, agency is "communal and participatory, continually invented, crafted, effected through form, and transient and reversible."

Each article and book that she wrote, each thesis and dissertation that she directed, and each gesture of support that she extended to students and colleagues throughout her career manifests what Karlyn Kohrs Campbell termed "the phoenix of female agency."