Abstract

In the United States today, the executives of the transnational corporations and their flunkies in the military-industrial-educational complex are working a technological revolution within a society as stratified in fact as it is egalitarian in theory. One obvious part of this military-industrial-educational strategy is a drive to maintain and extend corporate control of schooling and-more generally-corporate control of the accumulation, storage, and dissemination of knowledge. The rich and powerful (need one say it?) mean to profit at the expense of the poor and powerless while proclaiming their concern for the good of all. We who teach the use of English can expect no honored place in the corporate executives' envisioned world of computerized high technology. The language of their Institutional Voice already differs observably from the Standard English which some of us have known and all of us have claimed to teach. To be sure, we have our own creaky modulations of the Institutional Voice. They are prescribed by the style manuals of our professional societies-societies which by and large accept the social assumptions of the dominant and cultivate modes of expression calculated to set upwardly mobile professionals apart and to reduce