226 CCC 55:2 / DECEMBER 2003 CCC 55:2 / DECEMBER 2003 I David Gold ”Nothing Educates Us Like a Shock”: The Integrated Rhetoric of Melvin B. Tolson This essay examines the pedagogical practices of the poet, civil rights activist, and teacher Melvin B. Tolson who taught at Wiley College from 1923 to 1947. Tolson’s com- plex classroom style, which mixed elements of classical, African American, and cur- rent-traditional rhetoric, produced a pedagogy that was at once conservative, progressive, and radical, inspiring his students to academic achievement and social action. Tolson demonstrates that it is possible to instruct students in the norms of the academy without sacrificing their home voices or identities. t was a bad time to be a liberal academic in 1944 in Austin, Texas. The Uni- versity of Texas Board of Regents, fearing Godless Communism, homosexual- ity, and President Roosevelt in equal measure, waged a bitter campaign against left-leaning faculty, attempting to fire tenured sociology professors who sup- ported the New Deal, firing untenured instructors for their support of federal labor laws, and trying to ban John Dos Passos’s USA from English classes. When President Homer Rainey protested these and other actions, he himself was fired, causing thousands of students to march on the Capitol and earning the university a nine-year censure by the AAUP.