June 28, 2014  

The Duck Dynasty Controversy from Multiple Perspectives: Part 1

ACADEME BLOG

Now that the media has moved past the brief furor caused Duck Dynasty patriarch Phil Robertson, it seems appropriate to examine that controversy in a less emotionally charged context. Some might complain that such a discussion is simply an attempt to revive the controversy, but I would argue that one of the major consequences of the controversy-of-the-moment mindset among news providers and news consumers has been that very little is analyzed with the benefit of hindsight. As a result, many of the significant aspects and almost all of the nuances of a controversy—most of the things that might inform our responses to similar, subsequent issues—either go unarticulated or go largely unnoticed in the din of partisan talking points.

For these reasons, it seems to me that now would be the right time for us to address such issues, where they are relevant, in our classes.

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About martinkich

I am a Professor of English at Wright State University's Lake Campus, where I have been a faculty member for more than 30 years. I have served four terms as the president of the WSU chapter of AAUP, one term as the president of the Ohio Conference of AAUP, and three terms as an at-large member of the executive committee of AAUP's Collective Bargaining Congress. I was elected to the Ohio Conference Board ahead of the statewide effort in 2011 to repeal by referendum Ohio's Senate Bill 5, which would have eliminated collective-bargaining rights for all public employees in the state. As co-chair of the Ohio Conference's Communication Committee, I began to do much more overtly political writing during that campaign. It was a tremendous learning experience, though often quite overwhelming. At the beginning of 2018, our chapter at Wright State went of strike for three weeks. The second longest strike by a public university faculty in U.S. history, it was necessitated by an effort to gut our contract. Everyone who stood firm to preserve our contract paid a substantial financial as well as emotional price to do so, but the sense of solidarity--not just with our Wright State colleagues, but with our students, the faculty at other Ohio institutions, the members of other unions, and many community supporters who joined our picket lines and helped in countless other ways--was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. I have sustained my activism over several decades, and at the risk of stating the obvious, I have very much enjoyed the work, I have been grateful for what we have sometimes managed to accomplish, and I continue to cherish the great friendships that I have made. Receiving AAUP's Sternberg and Tacey awards for those efforts has been a great honor, but also has seemed a little redundant. Beyond my blogging, I have been a fairly productive writer of articles and reviews for academic journals and more general periodicals. I have written one book and co-authored another, and I have co-edited a collection of essays. I am currently working on two book manuscripts.

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