Media U
How the Need to Win Audiences Has Shaped Higher Education MARK GARRETT COOPER AND JOHN MARX A H I STO RY O F HOW HI GHER EDUCATI O N HAS C REATED I TS AU DI EN C E THRO UGH N EW MEDI A TEC HN O LO GI ES
Are homecoming games and freshman composition, Twitter feeds and scholarly monographs really mortal enemies? Media U presents a provocative rethinking of the development of American higher education centered on the insight that universities are media institutions. Mark Garrett Cooper and John Marx argue that the fundamental goal of the American research university has been to cultivate audiences and convince them of its value. “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
Media U shows how universities have appropriated new media technologies to convey their message about higher education, the aims of research, and campus life. The need to create an audience stamps each of the university’s steadily proliferating disciplines, shapes its structure, and determines its division of labor. Cooper and Marx examine how the research university has sought to inform publics and convince them of its value to American society, from the rise of football and Great Books programs in the early twentieth century through the co-option of 1960s student activist media and the latest promises of technological disruption. By exploring how media engagement brought the American university into being and continues to shape academic labor, Media U presents essential questions and resources for reimagining the university and confronting its future. MARK GARRETT COOPER
is professor and director 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). $30.00* / £24.95 paper 978-0-231-18637-7 $90.00 / £74.95 cloth 978-0-231-18636-0 $29.99 / £24.95 e-book 978-0-231-54660-7 J U LY 320 pages / 6" x 9" MEDIA STUDIES
All Rights Except First Serial Rights: Columbia University Press; First Serial Rights: The Authors
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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).