September 12, 2014  

The Language and the Marketing of “Intelligence”

ACADEME BLOG

I have recently posted an item on the controversy generated by the Department of Defense’s when it made available to its employees with Appalachian backgrounds a course on how to talk less obviously like hillbillies [http://academeblog.org/2014/08/31/do-you-speak-hillbilly-and-wish-that-you-didnt/]. And, even more recently, I have posted an item on the ways in which armed conflicts often involve battles over language and, alternatively,  the ways in which battles over language often suggest what we feel most threatened by [http://academeblog.org/2014/09/05/wars-on-language-and-the-language-of-wars/].

Here is another linguistic item related to the Department of Defense, one which relates as well to the series of eighteen posts that I recently finished called “National (In)Security: Fifty Notable American Espionage Novels” [http://academeblog.org/2014/08/30/national-in-security-fifty-notable-american-espionage-novels-49-50/; this final post in the series includes links to all of the others].

Perhaps you have at some point considered a career in espionage, or perhaps you have considered writing an espionage novel, or…

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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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