| This dissertation examines the sources and substance of rhetorical choices made by Cold War foreign policy leaders and explores the impact of those rhetorical paradigms on the culture of the university in general and English Studies in particular throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Through detailed rhetorical analysis of seminal early-Cold War foreign policy documents and speeches, loyalty oath laws and the subsequent academic hearings and conversations on intellectual freedom, the National Defense Education Act, campus activism among students and faculty, and various curricular and professional shifts in English Studies, this project documents how the rhetorical patterns created during the inception of international Cold War hostilities were eventually overlaid upon, echoed in, and reversed through subsequent domestic events and crises, leaving English Studies, as a profession, radically transformed. I argue that, through purposeful language choices, American political leaders created a definition of the enemy, in the guise of the Soviet Union, that was then sold, via propaganda, to the American public as a reality, leaving the average citizen no choice but to integrate those language choices, and the resultant philosophical implications, into their lives. As university administrators, faculty, and students were, at the onset, a target audience for much of the propaganda, and later actual targets for attack by patriotic cold warriors, academia was forced to adjust itself in terms of how it envisioned academic freedom, curricular equality, and both professional and humanitarian responsibility. In response to such questions, academics in the humanities, those with the most impetus toward reform, made their own rhetorical choices that resulted in the construction of a reality that was structurally the same as, yet in polar opposition to, early foreign policy leaders. I conclude that, regardless of extant political pressures, academics have a responsibility to make education relevant and critically evaluate the world in which they live while helping their students to do the same. |
