Media U: How the Need to Win Audiences Has Shaped Higher Education, by Mark Garrett Cooper and John

Epilogue

The American university thrives by informing audiences. By this we mean that the university shapes and patterns group interactions. Across campus and across the country, it forges connections among diverse groups, enabling collaboration and engendering debate. In 1945 at Harvard, the Redbook authors set “unity conditioned by difference” as a goal and imagined remaking the nation’s entire educational system as a meritocratic sorting machine. In 1962, the Students for a Democratic Society envisioned campus as a “community of controversy” capable of interrupting what they saw as the university’s prevailing tendency to extend mainstream mass media. In the 1970s, a loose constellation of activists, federal bureaucrats, and campus administrators agreed that universities could provide a means to redress systemic inequalities of race and gender. None of these visionaries got the changes they wanted, but all made change. Each confirmed that the US academy is a vehicle for managing demographic differences. They also, in different ways, informed new distinctions based on educational attainment, disciplinary specialization, and political affiliation. As the examples assembled by this book attest, to inform groups does not mean to create a consensus. It means, rather, to act or be acted upon despite disagreement. We hope to have established that some disagreements are better than others.

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First, there is no point in engaging any argument that pits the university’s “true” or “core” academic mission against football, movies, television, the internet, mobile phones, or any other commercially successful, widely adopted media form. For well over a century, such rhetoric of opposition has belied a far different dynamic, one in which the university learns to collaborate with and appropriate commercial media rather than defend against their supposedly pernicious influence. Examples from this history include John Erskine’s Great Books roadshow, the National Educational Television distribution network, the personal computing industry, and the Distributed Open Online Course. No one armed with our book should find themselves sucked into an argument about whether mobile phones have destroyed students’ will to read the classics. The devices may or may not be culpable (there are plenty of reasons to lose interest in the classics), but there is never a point in rising to this bait, since the solution is always the same. Complainers crediting mobile phones with the power to dictate reading habits should be counseled to follow the example set by I. A. Richards. Faced with a new medium that challenged the classics, he took to the television airwaves and produced a sexy abridgment of The Iliad for 1950s students, who (he thought) would be interested in the battles but not the lists. The message is not only the medium. For all the power of his insights, Marshall McLuhan was wrong to propose that new media render old media obsolete. The past century of adding new media to college classrooms has changed those classrooms without sweeping aside either lecture or seminar modes. To inform audiences connected by means of a medium, it only makes sense to work in that medium. We would be happy to play a videogame version of The Iliad on our phones. We would hope, however, for a version more playable than Richards’s television was watchable. For all his admirable willingness to experiment, Richard’s rejection of TV’s affordances in favor of crumpled notes and a well-worn lecture style bespoke a love-hate relationship with the medium, and this relationship did not serve his larger purpose. The array of more and less strongly feminist approaches to new technologies described in chapter 10 better indicates how to engage new media critically, but not phobically, through collaboration with people who understand new formats and can make the most of them.

Second, avoid at all cost revivals of the stereotypical “two cultures” conflict, including calls to defend “the humanities.” These appeals misrecognize

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the academic enterprise and undermine it. The American research university may have its own kind of institutional culture. It might also be said to have myriad and competing disciplinary cultures—for which “silos” provides one term of art. Academic culture may be singular or plural, but it has never been divisible by two. This was clear after World War I, when schools tried to implement general-education curricula and found them tending to fracture into (usually three) different parts that worked differently at different schools. It was clear at midcentury, when exciting work in communications, information theory, cybernetics, and design violated disciplinary boundaries with abandon and thereby created new fields. It was true in the early twenty-first century, when federal planners popularized the acronym “STEM” to yoke together otherwise distinct “cultures” of science, technology, engineering, and math. Lest anyone miss the point that such aggregation was more culture than nature, moreover, the Rhode Island School of Design took the lead in adding an “A” for “Art,” to make it “STEAM.” Among such successful initiatives, “science” versus “humanities” is a poisonous loser, a deadening schema that ahistorically forecloses collaboration and sometimes preposterously casts “science” against the “liberal arts” (of which science was historically a core component). Do not defend the humanities or the sciences, we urge you. Please defend instead specific initiatives that feature participants from across the disciplines engaged in projects that require collaboration. Follow Steve Fuller’s advice in keeping an eye on the difference between those “who wish to protect the academy from the rest of society” and “those who wish to use the academy as a vehicle for reforming society.”1 In their Designing the New American University, Michael Crow and William Dabars up the ante on that distinction when they declare that in the Anthropocene universities “represent the best hope for the survival of our species.”2 Ecological initiatives are far from the only ones needed to secure the future. There is plenty of work to go around. The scope of the intervention, we suggest, matters less than the type of audience it creates.

Third, avoid easy slogans for abiding contradictions. Student debt, for example, is a much, much better problem to argue about than “the corporate university.” When hurled as an epithet, “the corporate university” typically equates the university’s bureaucratic form with an economic imperative. It thereby flattens the contradiction at the core of American higher education’s mission to democratize access and promote meritocracy

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while also reproducing existing social relations. Concern with student debt, in contrast, strikes at the question of access while inviting debate about the value and cost of college, who should pay for whom, and who benefits from higher education. The difference in framing matters. “The corporate university” reduces what is wrong with higher education to a question of what is wrong with American capitalism—primarily for readers already predisposed to see capitalism as the root problem. In contrast, student debt reminds us that American capitalism takes the shape it does in part because the university has been so good at simultaneously reproducing both inequality and accessibility. For this very reason, audiences unprepared to blame capitalism can also perceive a student debt crisis.

In addition to economic relations, moreover, student debt also foregrounds the overburdening of student judgment. Students have been adults in the eyes of universities for decades, but they are not well positioned to assess, before they even begin college, which school and degree program will give the best return on their investment. The College Scorecard really should come with the warning, customary for grown-up investors, that past performance does not necessarily predict future results. Undergraduates may be even less well positioned to judge what kind of education will best serve their state or nation. That said, despite the limitations of youthful perspective, college students have had an uncanny ability to shape priorities for higher education. The Oberlin College activists we discussed in chapter 10 proposed paying a stipend to student protesters. Given their impact on higher education over the decades, it seems like they deserve it.

Fourth, there is little point in defending the Carnegie unit; the argument should be over what will replace it. When the Carnegie unit allows, say, a physics course at one university to be functionally equivalent to a chemistry course at another (because it satisfies a scientific-literacy requirement), it demonstrates the power of mediation by erasing variables like tuition costs, coursework requirements, grading standards, and class size that might distinguish the two courses and the educational value students realize through them. The Carnegie unit is, in this sense, perhaps the best example of how seemingly small media interventions can ramify through the entire apparatus of higher education. To satisfy themselves that any courses really are equivalent, universities typically create a set of bureaucratic procedures for reviewing syllabi and course descriptions, establish a schedule of fees for transfer credits, and rely on the judgments of

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accrediting bodies about other institutions—all indirect measures of what a student might be expected to have learned. For faculty and students alike, moreover, the Carnegie unit makes time-on-task the most important measure of instructional effort. Replacing the Carnegie unit might be expected to alter all of these habits. Depending on the implementation, the tendency to appraise outcomes as opposed to time spent could make establishing course equivalencies faster and more accurate. It might also facilitate experiments in co-teaching, experiential learning, and undergraduate research, activities that present technical challenges for everyone involved when they need to be rendered in Carnegie units. To replace the Carnegie unit is to broach an argument about who gets credit, for what, and at what price. These are good arguments to have, and foundations like Lumina are expending significant resources to stimulate them. Rather than resist this trend and the risks it poses for existing models of course delivery and curricular development, we recommend more faculty involvement in framing questions and answers.

Fifth, no share without reach. This is two injunctions in one. First, it is a reminder that although debate about higher education has long featured evocative rhetoric and often rewards historical reading, it is also a numbers game. Second, it underlines the conclusions of several chapters, each of which suggests that widely circulated aggregations of degree share into areas like “the humanities” or “STEM” misrepresent the defining features of the US system of postsecondary education as it has evolved over the century and especially after the mid-1960s. Good data is better than fast and loose stereotyping.

Reach reminds us that there are ever more degree options, that these are not evenly distributed across schools, and that, as a corollary, there is more variety in the higher-education menu than is often supposed. As the number of degrees increases, so does institutional variety, while the share of completions falling to each degree is likely to decrease. The academic department has not well accommodated this dynamic of field proliferation. Its responsibility to marry transinstitutional disciplines to the local organization chart makes it a clunky mechanism for curricular experimentation, especially if such experiments appear to violate disciplinary norms. Reach, considered along with a disaggregated share number, makes each of these overall trends visible and reveals how particular degrees fit within them. Any argument about the prospects for disciplines and departments will be improved by consideration of this metric.

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Sixth, do not rise to defend “academic freedom.” Instead, change the narrative by leaping to defend job security for everyone. We have repeatedly observed that the university’s division of labor evolves in tandem with descriptions of what the university does and whom it is for. The earlytwentieth-century defense of academic freedom promoted the entire academic enterprise as a public service when it explained the research professor’s role, but it could never entirely thwart the implication that tenure primarily benefited professors. (Upton Sinclair, we noted in chapter 2, zealously exploited that implication.) In the early twenty-first century, the professor’s freedom often appeared to come at the expense of term-contract instructors. A new division of labor had resulted from research specialization, the academic star system, the rise of student services, and increased reliance on adjuncts to contain costs and preserve administrative flexibility. When the mainstream press looked at this university, it was inclined to see tenure less as a public benefit than as a professorial privilege. By clinging to tenure as the answer even as their departments hired more and more adjuncts, faculty only strengthened the impression that “academic freedom” was self-serving. We have argued, with Michael Bérubé and Jennifer Ruth as well as with Christopher Newfield, that the path forward lies in passionate advocacy for the job security of others.

We would go further by observing that the important protection from arbitrary dismissal is not the only reason tenured professors have decent jobs, the kinds of jobs worth saving and extending to many more people.

Although we work long hours, confront increasing bureaucratic pressures, and, at most public schools, face static compensation, ours can be remarkably unalienated work. We mean this in an old-fashioned way. In The German Ideology, Karl Marx called attention to the limitations a division of labor imposes by imagining a society in which he might “hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.”3 For all the ways it identifies persons with their occupational roles, the academic division of labor remains relatively unusual in the flexibility it affords many who participate in it. A professor might review grant proposals with peers across disciplines in the morning, address campus WiFi problems with IT staff in the afternoon, teach a class in her specialty during the evening, and write a book on something entirely different after dinner. It is possible to have too much of a good thing. Certainly, not

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everyone at the university moves easily across roles, or wants to. Nonetheless, precisely because connecting audiences by means of knowledge is inherently collaborative and creative work, universities must have teams that transcend specialty. If we better understood audience making as part of the job description for pretty much everyone who works at a university, we might all enjoy it a bit more.

Seventh, and finally, forget about a master plan. For every Booker T. Washington who seeks to broaden access through university extension, there has always been a W. E. B. DuBois who hopes to cultivate merit where it has been denied. The idea of mass quality education condenses the proposition that we should not have to choose between these two approaches.

Yet insofar as quality entails determinations of merit, it will invariably make hierarchies that undo the leveling effects of access. Washington and DuBois each clearly perceived and sought to manage this contradiction by understanding that students were not the only people higher education was for. Tuskegee self-help was built to go viral, while the Talented Tenth were meant to rework racist ideology from the inside out. In other words, each educational leader engaged the core mediation problem, albeit with an emphasis on different audiences. If empowerment is to be more than a sales pitch, the audience problem cannot be avoided. The problem of whom the university benefits cannot be sundered from the problem of whom it addresses and how. The classroom is hardly academia’s only means of address. Washington and Du Bois jostled for the attention of the same readers. Their early-twenty-first-century counterparts engaged a fractured and hotly polarized mediasphere, in which a wide array of gatekeepers managed which pitches reached which audiences. Such diversification has made it more difficult to imagine that the university could accomplish something so grand as managing the national welfare. We should face that difficulty without nostalgia. Universities have always informed widely various, often discontinuous audiences of different shapes and sizes. They do not produce shared ideas or maintain national culture so much as mediate more and less broadly shared experiences, habits, and arguments. In the United States, for good and ill, no master plan guides this effort, whose trends and tendencies can anticipate the future only after the fact.

Media U rethinks the development of American higher education by viewing universities as media institutions. Examining over a century of the intersections of media and higher education, Mark Garrett Cooper and John Marx argue that the fundamental goal of the research university has been to cultivate audiences from across society and convince them of its value.

“Tackling everything from football to general education to the credit hour, Media U helps us understand our turbulent university landscape.

With a deep sense of history and careful marshaling of data, Cooper and Marx show us that higher ed is not just a maker of knowledge but also a platform for information—a medium in its own right.”

—Paula M. Krebs, executive director, Modern Language Association “This book shows that many of the strangest yet most important features of universities come from their status as media operations that try endlessly to increase and manage their audiences. By putting the pieces of our Humpty Dumpty campuses back together again, the authors offer original insights and even reasons to hope for new directions in higher ed.”

—Christopher Newfield, University of California, Santa Barbara “This book powerfully demonstrates that universities have been media institutions all along, well before the mobile phone and the MOOC. Cooper and Marx challenge us to consider what is at stake when universities approach the educated class as an ‘audience’ and what mindsets and strategies they deploy in the process.

Provocative and timely, Media U is bound to stir up discussion and debate.”

—Lisa Parks, Massachusetts Institute of Technology “This is a key and compelling study that, more than just in media studies, intervenes in insightful ways in debates about the very nature, purpose, mission, and reach—both real and possible—of the American university.”

—Dana Polan, New York University

Mark Garrett Cooper is professor of film and media studies at the University of South Carolina. He is the author of Love Rules: Silent Hollywood and the Rise of the Managerial Class (2003) and Universal Women: Filmmaking and Institutional Change in Early Hollywood (2011).

John Marx is professor of English at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of The Modernist Novel and the Decline of Empire (2005) and Geopolitics and the Anglophone Novel, 1890–2011 (2012).

Columbia University Press New York cup.columbia.edu Printed in the U.S.A.

ISBN: 978-0-231-18637-7

Cover design by Catherine Casalino

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