Rebecca Knight, writing on modern philanthropy in the Weekend Financial Times, highlights Gilbert Maurer, the former Hearst Corporation COO who noticed something odd about bright college graduates he encountered:

They could write okay, but they couldn’t articulate,” he recalls. “If ever they had to give a presentation, it was ‘like’ this, and ‘you know’ that. I called it verbal landfill.

His response was to fund the Maurer Professorship, an endowed chair of speech and rhetoric, at his alma mater, St Lawrence University, a small, private liberal arts college in upstate New York.

“Even if a St Lawrence graduate – whether an economics major, a biologist or a philosopher – is able to express himself just 10 per cent better [than his peers] it will be a worthwhile endeavour,” he says.

The St. Lawrence School for Communication Arts offers classes in Advanced Public Speaking; Argumentation and Debate; Interpersonal Communication; Gender and Communication; Communication Theory; Native American Oral Traditions; American Public Address; Rhetoric of Social Movements; Ritual Studies and Presidential Campaign Rhetoric. (There’s no apparent connection between the last two courses - although Presidential campaigns are as filled with ritual as any shamanic rite.)

Specific course descriptions show the depth of the studies:

211. Advanced Public Speaking.
Intensive study of the principles and practices of researching, organizing, writing, delivering and criticizing persuasive speeches. Students employ contemporary theories of persuasion to analyze a variety of rhetorical situations. Students construct persuasive speeches for different speaking situations in order to develop critical and practical skills.

326. American Public Address
A study of American history through examination of the speeches of spokespersons for social, political, legal and religious institutions and movements. From Thomas Jefferson to George Bush, from Susan B. Anthony to Phyllis Schlafly, from George Wallace to Martin Luther King Jr.: a study of the impact of rhetorical strategies upon ideas and events and of ideas and events upon rhetorical strategies.

The school website also references a fascinating resource: the Silva Rhetoricae guide to the terms of classical and renaissance rhetoric.

Congratulations to the Maurer family for this much needed correction to the, you know, persuasiveness of American youth, like.