by James A. Bacon
In the fall of 2023, 54 new professors joined the faculty of the University of Virginia College of Arts & Sciences. Dean Christa Acampora hailed the “extraordinary talent” of the new wave of scholars.
One of the new hires was Sethunya Mokoko, a native of the southern Africa country of Lesotho and professor of rhetoric and communications in the English Department.
Two days ago, according to The College Fix, Mokoko posted to X (formerly Twitter) that the Saturday assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump was “staged theatrics” performed by Secret Service to garner “idiots’ vote.” Trump’s secret service, he theorized, purposefully “ignored” eyewitnesses who informed police of an armed man on a roof before the shooting took place.
I could not verify the accuracy of College Fix’s article — Mokoko’s X account no longer has the post — but I have no grounds to question it.
The Secret Service’s failure to stop the assassination attempt does raise legitimate questions. Many witnesses spotted the shooter and tried to draw the attention of law-enforcement authorities. But the idea that the Secret Service stage-managed the shooting is beyond absurd. Did someone orchestrate the bullet passing within an inch of blowing Trump’s brains out of his head? Did the conspirators recruit a 20-year-old local with minimal training in marksmanship to execute a shot demanding incredible precision? Was Trump willing to place his life at risk to garner a few votes?
The only “idiots” in this picture are those who gave Mokoko’s post the slightest credence.
If this is the quality of thinking typical of the new wave of faculty at UVA, then the institution is in major trouble. One can only hope that the hiring of Mokoko was an aberration. (See the list of 54 hires here.) The biographies of many of the new hires show no indication of extreme political/ideological bias. Some, however, do.
What should prove worrisome to anyone concerned about the quality of education at UVA is the intellectual framework that Mokoko has constructed around the “rhetoric of storytelling” — social justice storytelling.
From the UVA biography:
Mokoko’s work specializes in teaching students to appreciate and value social justice rhetorics across media; to become rhetorically listening writers, readers, and viewers; and to understand how global rhetorics shape and define agency and identification. His research and teaching commitments involve rhetorical theory, composition studies, cultural rhetorics, business writing and creative writing.
His dissertation project, Storytelling in Motion: Rhetorical Approaches to Autoethnography, Critical Pedagogy, and African Filmmaking, and other publications expose the marginalization in the education systems of his country, Lesotho, in Southern Africa, which still survives long after the plague of Apartheid, intending to eradicate the residue of colonization. Mokoko’s work draws on the values in the African epistemologies of storytelling, describing and illustrating these principles by showing how storytelling can transform composition pedagogy.
By employing the “epistemology of storytelling,” the storyteller is free to spin narratives free from the rigorous application of fact and logic. Reality is whatever one’s personal or communal “lived experience” says it is. People have license to believe whatever they want to believe.
The rhetoric of storytelling, in other words, is the perfect breeding ground for conspiratorial thinking. And this is how students are being taught to think at UVA today.