Before joining Annenberg, Goodnight taught doctoral courses in Northwestern University's Rhetoric Program in Contemporary Rhetorical Theory, Criticism, Argumentation, and the Public Sphere.

As the director of 28 dissertations, he was accorded career awards in Rhetoric and Communication Theory by the NCA and was named among the five top scholars in argumentation of the last 50 years by the AFA. Additionally, Professor Goodnight taught Organizational Communication at the Master's level, and his undergraduate courses included seminars in the Rhetoric of War, Science Advocacy, Risk Communication, and an introduction to the field. A regular contributor to the Quarterly Journal of Speech, former editor of Argumentation and Advocacy, and director of the 12th Alta Conference on Argumentation, Goodnight was a co-founder of the NU-University of Amsterdam graduate exchange. His research interests included deliberation and postwar society, science communication, argument and aesthetics, public discourse studies, and communicative reason in controversy. Professor Goodnight was a CPD Faculty Fellow.