One of the capstone projects completed by the students at the Department of Defense Joint Course in Communication compares news stories with embedded reporters with those stories with non-embedded reporters, pointing out that embedded reporting was more favorable toward the military, thus suggesting that the "results are beneficial to the military because public support is crucial to morale and a successful military operation." The statement makes explicit the implicit values and biases of this military-funded project, perhaps drawing our attention to the role of the project in serving the public affairs needs of the military. This sort of academic involvement in promoting military agenda raises critical questions regarding the ideology guiding such research and the politics of such research. Research like this conducted under the auspices of dominant social actors serves the power structure rather than questioning the ways in which it operates. The research project is implicitly co-opted into the military agenda by supplying a set of legitimate research questions and methodlogical tools for answering these questions.
In light of the discussion we had during our advisee meeting on Friday about being strategic in our means as critical scholars I was struck by the words of Lenin who emphasizes the role of the intellectual. He says, "The history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade-union consciousness, i.e., it may itself realize the necessity for combining in unions, for fighting against the employers and for striving to compel the government to pass necessary labor legislation, etc. The theory of socialism, however, grew out of the philosophic, historical representatives of the propertied classes, the intellectuals." (pg. 74) This idea of the bourgeois socialist intelligentsia as an instrument of raising consciousness and fomenting dissent is an ideal one I am sure but in contemporary times we, the academics, forming a substantial part of the "intellectual elite", occupy a unique position which forces us into &
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