First we'd have to change our view of the relations among practice, pedagogy or praxis, and theory. Unfortunately, no matter how unreflective a practice might be, or how reductive a theory might be, praxis, the discourse of training, remains even more intractable in its effects than either of them because it usually serves the interests of the institution. But even if we changed our ideas about practice, theory, and praxis, these changes would take effect only with the institution of different protocols. This change in protocol marked the change of a religious college into a secular university. It was a change in the language of the rule for following rules.
Protocols are the key to changing systems.
The most significant axioms of systems are rules for rules, structuring structures, and the like. As the New Critics proved when they placed criticism above scholarship, it is possible to introduce new protocols into university systems, especially protocols for intellectual exchanges. The latter is the protocol that generates attempts to falsify claims in a disciplinary mode of argumentation. Though omitted in our official view of literary study, collective inquiry historically has been the most effective means of changing critical conduct. The moral of the intersections of the careers of Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, William Wimsatt, RenJ Wellek, Austin Warren is that their intellectual exchanges changed the shape of literary inquiry for three generations of literary students.