It's my topic! At last! tears I'd like to thank the Academe...

Rhetoric, like many other humanistic fields such as philosophy and composition, has been largely relegated to the dreaded "general education requirements" portion of a college education. I cannot point to a specific moment in time when this happened, as it has been a gradual change, although we can look at the first half of the twentieth century as a time when that change was accelerated due to various factors.

Rhetoric may not have the status it once did in a college education, but that's not necessarily bad -- human knowledge has expanded dramatically, and it's generally not possible anymore to get a "liberal arts" degree - although some universities do offer them, in the modern economy to choose this option would be seen by many as foolish in the extreme. College now is about specialization, but most universities still see themselves as part of the liberal arts tradition and so continue to include speech, English composition, and other such courses in their general requirements. It is true, however, that the number and depth of those courses have dropped rather dramatically from what they might have been, say, two centuries ago.

The overall decline in humanism or "the liberal arts" as the core of a college education can be seen as due largely to the increase in professionalization and the general increase in scientific knowledge of the 20th century. Take, for example, Theodore Roosevelt's Harvard education in the late 1870s -- the closest analogy to his degree today would be Biology, as he focused on naturalism, yet he still intensively studied Latin, Greek, rhetoric, history, and philosophy along with his science courses. (Roosevelt, of course, came into his education with a substantial hobbyist background in naturalism and ornithology, so we cannot ascribe all of his success as a naturalist to Harvard.) Nowadays if we graduate a student with a degree in Biology they are expected to know, at varying levels: life sciences, microbiology, marine biology, vertebrate/invertebrate physiology, human anatomy, ecology, and many more areas. Much of this knowledge is relatively new -- perhaps the last century or two, which corresponds roughly with a decline in focus on the liberal arts.

So, time in study is an issue -- at my institution, for example, the undergraduate major in biology is 37+ hours - not much time for Plato in between dissections. Thus, universities require a single Philosophy, World History, and Public Speaking course which students groan through, resenting the time those courses take away from their "real" purpose in college -- to get certified as educated in a particular field that will earn them a job.

However, there are also other larger sociocultural issues at play. The early 20th century also saw the rise of the social sciences such as psychology, anthropology, and sociology. Although many physical scientists dismiss these as "soft" sciences, they represent an attempt by scholars to take scientific paradigms and methods and apply them to areas which had more traditionally been the province of the liberal arts -- the mind, for example, which was the realm of philosophy, becomes the province of psychology as we seek to quantify and catalog various psychological disorders. The move to a more systematic view of the world carves out large areas of humanism and claims them for science -- recall, for example, that evolution is just beginning to be seen at this time as a major force in the natural world. What else might we be able to discover using science that we had once believed to be mystical? Well, literature, art, and persuasion, for example. It's no accident that this is also the Age of Propaganda -- for the first time propagandists are applying psychological theories to persuasion, rather than simply relying on Aristotelian proofs. So, a background in human psychology becomes the qualification for working in advertising, rather than an education in the traditional argumentative forms one would have gotten in rhetoric.

That having been said, it is certainly still quite possible to study rhetoric at the undergraduate and graduate level. In the United States, rhetoric is typically housed in English and/or Communication departments. Rhetoric in English is often called "Rhetoric/Composition" or "rhet-comp" and tends to focus more on written texts, audience, form, and the construction of personae within a text, although those boundaries are quite blurred at this point. Rhetoric in Communication departments tends to be either classically-focused (lots of Aristotle, Cicero, etc.) or based in the study of modern public address (speech) and focuses on persuasion, although again, that's a very broad generalization. I teach courses in the history of rhetorical theory, rhetorical criticism, political rhetoric, propaganda, rhetoric of technology, and environmental rhetoric, for example. There is also a lot of work in media studies, cultural studies, sociology, human/social geography, and other related fields that we would recognize as rhetorical in nature, even if it isn't being called such. (NB: Every so often I read a paper in sociology or another discipline in which the author advances a daring new methodology - the analysis of discourse! the extraction of themes from public discussions! - and just scribble "Aristotle" in the margin before moving on.)

I hope this helps -- if you have more specific followup questions, I'd be happy to address them. And if you're interested in studying rhetoric, I can give you some places to look :)

I studied rhetoric at University during my English degree, the module was called 'the literature of argument' but essentially it was a module on rhetoric. So, it is still being studied, at least in English departments in the U.K. It involved critical analysis of persuasive writing and recorded debates from Cicero to the Putney debates to modern Newspaper columns and Hansard and composing extended essays on controversial subjects such as 'is terrorism ever justified?'