https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/10/11/authors-discuss-book-about-how-they-see-colleges-media-organizations-much?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=a16ec8ddf5-DNU_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-a16ec8ddf5-233850209&mc_cid=a16ec8ddf5&mc_eid=5c54a08240 Fuzzy Wuzzy was a bear... Or whatever they're saying.
The essay is discussing a recent book, about universities, written by two professors who happen to teach film studies and English... "Most people think of colleges and universities as primarily educational institutions. But a new book says that, for a long time, they have been "media institutions," focused on appealing to different audiences." I agree that universities perform a variety of social functions and appeal to different audiences. Many universities produce a significant percentage of their revenues from their medical schools. In this instance their business is to provide medical care, they serve patients (and their insurance companies) and they operate like HMOs. Agriculture schools have long operated extensive agricultural extension services and serve farmers all over their respective states, And obviously, the doctoral research universities operate as perhaps the foremost scientific research establishments in the nation, producing another large fraction of the university's revenue from research grants, serving industry, the NIH, the NSF, the DoD and other research funding sources. So teaching students is often just one of the things that universities do, and in some cases perhaps not the one that university administrators and legislators perceive as most important. But I suspect that the idea of looking at universities as "media institutions" is mostly a function of this new book having been written by media professors. "The idea came out of our frustration with repeated declarations of a crisis in the humanities. Crisis talk so often assumes that a declining audience rightfully belongs to "us" while also revealing a stubborn narrowness when it comes to defining who "us" is, exactly... We wanted another option. We craved a more capacious account of the university, one that would allow us to understand how it has grown, and how it has attracted audiences of all sorts. We quickly noticed that higher ed was competing and collaborating with other audience-seeking enterprises." Their example immediately following is how university professors often appear on PBS television shows and how those PBS shows compete on the air with entertainment programming. "They've [universities] only succeeded to the extent that they do behave as media institutions. Undergraduate degrees and peer-reviewed publications have worth because people agree that they have worth. Degrees are more like the medium of paper money than they are a commodity like rice or steel. People value credentials to the extent that institutions of higher education (among other media institutions) have been effective in associating them with careers, self-fulfillment, public service and the pleasures of campus life." That returns us to the "crisis of the humanities". People readily accept the value of things like medicine, engineering and the sciences. A large part of the "crisis of the humanities" is that much/most of the public no longer perceives much value in things like film studies or literary theory. Students aren't interested in studying them if they don't pay off career-wise, and the public isn't happy about funding professors if the subjects they teach don't appear to have any social value. (Especially if they are perceived as being corrosive to accepted values and to social cohesion.) It hasn't always been that way. I remember that back in the 1950's and 60's the middle class still read what was said to be the "great" literature of the day. There was still a sense that the humanities had something to offer the average person, something uplifting somehow. Everybody had read at least some of the Shakespeare plays. Life magazine ran features on Hemingway. Everybody was perplexed by Samuel Beckett. Sartre was discussed, if little read. Today I don't think that exists any more. To the extend that people still read at all (they spend all their time staring at cell-phones) they read thrillers, romances or fantasies purely for entertainment, not in hopes that exposing themselves to "literature" will broaden their perspective or teach them anything. I suspect that nobody on the street today could name a single Nobel literature winner from the last 30 years, or has ever read any of their works. "Literature" has become irrelevant to most people lives and so have the professors that teach it. And that's not just a matter of marketing either that can be reversed by better salesmanship. It requires that the literature professors look closely at what they have been doing for the last generation. They need to turn their vaunted "criticism" away from everyone else and towards themselves. (Maybe there's a reason why the public doesn't care any more.) Addressing the "culture wars"... "This dynamic of polarization on the one hand and fragmentation on the other continues to characterize new battles in the seemingly endless culture war. Even as certain issues create high energy us-them distinctions, a more fundamental fragmentation into niche audiences is altering social life. It's not just that left and right have always already agreed to disagree ferociously about "culture". It's that physicists, historians and sociologists who happen to share concerns will find it a challenge to find a common audience that might act on those concerns." Which suggests that one of the purposes of scholarship is promoting activism. And then they go on to discuss a Netflix model for the humanities that concentrates on speaking to and pleasing niche audiences. Which doesn't seem to me to address the "crisis in the humanities" at all. This is a subject that interests me, so maybe this author interview has achieved its purpose. I would kind of like to read the book.
Then I hope the book gets to saying something concrete. If they are speaking to the educational future then that's a fuzzy future.
Don't hold your breath, Decimon. The book's introduction seems rather incoherent to me, jumping from topic to topic and issue to issue in kind of a 'stream of consciousness' manner. What coherence your interview may have had might have been imposed by the interviewer. The 'Introduction' begins: "In the United States of America, research universities exist neither to produce nor to curate knowledge but to connect people by means of it. They are media institutions... A common imperative informs them: through feats of mediation, universities bind individuals into groups and certify hierarchical distinctions" So there's what appears to be the thesis, or at least the underlying assumption, of the whole book. Universities as ideological organs (agents of capitalist/race-class-gender domination and more recently, frenzied opposition to that) and how society's contemporary fragmentation into mutually incomprehending and often violently hostile niche audiences (often the universities' doing) effects the "common imperative". Nope, I'm not going to read this thing. I certainly might be jumping to conclusions since I haven't even read the book. But we all have to make decisions for ourselves whether books deserve the time and effort of reading them. I'll mark this one up as just another example of the crap that seemingly dominates academic publishers' catalogs these days. (This example is Columbia University Press.) The table of contents and first pages (including the introduction) are here: https://books.google.com/books?id=30pBDwAAQBAJ
Thanks. If I could read that as a critique of research universities then it would be food for thought.
