Every Chronicle reader will be familiar with breathless arguments that some new form of entertainment or technology presents an existential threat to higher education. That threat may come from college football, with its big-money TV contracts and scandals; mobile phones, with their classroom distractions; or even online courses, with their hyperinflated claims about access.
Such arguments reflect a mistaken belief that the university’s authority resides in its autonomy. They reproduce the myth of older, purer forms of classroom conduct and scholarly research untainted by pop culture or commercial concerns. Despite all evidence to the contrary we somehow continue to feel that students treasure above all else those talents that, by dint of long and lonely training, we professors uniquely possess.
In fact, the American research university is defined not by its separation from but by its appropriation of commercial media. To pit the university’s “true” or “core” academic mission against football, television, or smartphones ignores the real history of higher education. The “ivory tower” did not precede the mass marketing that stereotyped it. An accurate picture of the university’s past is necessary to confront the challenges of the present.
As Steven Shapin has shown, the term “ivory tower” did not name the American university until the middle of the 20th century. Shapin attributes the new usage to political contests over the degrees of “detachment” and “engagement” appropriate for postsecondary institutions. Such contests presumed a prominence that American universities had spent the first half of the 20th century struggling to achieve.
In its early days, higher education developed in the relative absence of federal funding, central coordination, and — to the concern of those who worked within it at the time — any real demand for the credentials it offered. The evolving university exploited technology, pop culture, and indeed any means available to win over parents, students, employers, elected representatives, and philanthropic foundations. University planners did not sally forth from aery turrets to parley with these outsiders. Rather, they borrowed promising marketing and publicity strategies from wherever they found them.
In the late 19th and early 20th century, football was perhaps the most effective tool for colleges to secure the attention of an otherwise uninterested public. College football conveyed the appeals of “campus life” to millions, but it would never have done so without coverage by mass-market magazines, movies, and pioneering radio networks like NBC, which first broadcast the Rose Bowl in 1927.
College football’s appeal can be measured in stadiums. In 1903, Harvard set the bar with a structure capable of holding 40,000 fans. Yale upped the ante in 1914 with the 70,000-seat Yale Bowl. The University of California at Berkeley completed its 73,000-seat stadium (on top of a major geological fault) in 1923. In 1927 Michigan constructed the Big House for as many as 84,000 fans. These facilities were not built for students alone — Yale’s enrollment when the Yale Bowl opened was approximately 3,300. A premise of football on campus was that it would make a slice of academic life accessible to fans who would never enroll in classes.
The American research university is defined not by its separation from but by its appropriation of commercial media.
At the same time, football recruited students. “Who hears of a University as having a reputation for the number of hours the students study each day?” Illinois’s Daily Illini asked in 1921. “The youth of America is attracted to a university which has a strong football team, a talented band. … If a college has a strong faculty, that is good advertisement among the teaching profession but it has little or no weight with the high school graduate.”
At the turn of the century, building a football program and developing a research portfolio seemed equally vital to the project of launching a college. William Rainey Harper, the first president of the University of Chicago, was an academic prodigy who completed his Yale Ph.D. in Semitic languages at 18. He built Chicago by plucking the soon-to-be-Nobel Prize-winning physicist Albert A. Michelson from Clark University, the philosopher John Dewey from the University of Michigan, and his former student, the football standout Amos Alonzo Stagg, from Springfield College. Stagg became the first tenured physical-education professor in the country and the first tenured football coach as well. He made Chicago a powerhouse, a founding member of the Big Ten, and the national champion in 1905 and 1913.
Scholastics and football began to diverge for the university around 1920 with its “New Plan,” an effort to recruit higher-quality applicants. In 1939, Chicago canceled the football program that had helped call it into being and established the university as part of the city’s social life. Notre Dame, the University of Illinois, and other Midwestern institutions moved to fill that niche.
Institutions like Chicago could present football as a diverting sideshow to the core educational enterprise. Their success in promoting brands emphasizing the sanctity of academic rigor explains, in part, why the rest of us have such difficulty perceiving the broad array of approaches to promotion that universities historically undertook.
In 1905, the University of Wisconsin reported enlisting its English department to write bulletins conveying to newspapers “in an attractive way, the story of discoveries, inventions, and innovations” across campus. This effort received national recognition, and quickly became a model reproduced by other colleges hungry for press attention. The University of North Carolina hired students to write dispatches. After World War I, the University of Kentucky logically turned to professors in its journalism department to promote the university’s good works in the state and, thus, its growth. For a time, then, it seemed that expertise in fields like English and journalism might equip professors and students to double as publicity agents for their universities. By the 1930s, however, colleges found an even more efficient strategy for generating positive press — the training and credentialing of public-relations experts.
In working with societies like the National Education Association, the public-relations pioneer Edward L. Bernays noted, universities sought not only to promote themselves but also to redress more general concerns, such as the lack of prestige for scholarly expertise. In his 1928 book Propaganda, he quoted from a magazine column: “It may surprise and shock some people … to be told that the oldest and most dignified seats of learning in America now hire press agents, just as railroad companies, fraternal organizations, moving picture producers and political parties retain them. It is nevertheless a fact.”
Today faculty tend to scorn such overt promotional efforts as a new “corporate” imposition. In a recent Chronicle Review essay, Jeffrey Williams argues that professors who act like journalists or advertisers blunt scholarship’s critical edge. When we “internalize market-speak,” he contends, we betray academic values. The history of higher education suggests the opposite: The academy helped develop “market-speak” in the United States, thereby providing professionals inside its walls and out with tools to garner and manage the attention of others. Moreover, the ability to speak in different vernaculars to different audiences is a longstanding, if underappreciated, academic virtue.
Universities need both scholarship and PR to make the world a better place. Williams’s complaint finds its true target when this division of labor comes into view — he observes that calling on scholars to be dedicated publicists as well as brilliant researchers assigns them “too many jobs for most people to do well.” The promotion of scholarly work is best understood not as the customer-service ethos that Williams derides, but as a necessary job — one that enables other, very different kinds of work.
Students also participate in campus promotion — and not only as campus tour guides. The University of California at Berkeley’s “FSM 50" (Free Speech Movement at 50) website indicates the extent to which student activism redefined that university’s brand. In 1964, Mario Savio famously denounced the Cal “machine.” Fifty years later, university marketing appropriated his image to locate “activism” in the institution’s “DNA,” as the website’s banner proudly declares above images of Savio and Martin Luther King Jr. hailing multitudes.
The university’s publicists are not wrong to claim activism as a defining feature of the institution. At the same time, the challenge of student radicalism is not erased when PR blunts its sharper edges. To the contrary, in the movement’s wake, generations of campus activists could be expected to fill Sproul Plaza just as generations of Cal football fans could be expected to crowd California Memorial Stadium. Both kinds of marketing help Berkeley remain Berkeley.
In the same way, the embrace of technology that enables distance education and microdegrees, far from destroying the legacy of higher education, actually represents a continuity of the sector’s tendency to offer diverse approaches to learning. From the 1910s forward, higher education used film, radio, and television to promote university extension, and with notable success. To pick just one example, Indiana University collaborated with extension programs in Iowa and Wisconsin to produce Gardening, Canning, and Drying, three films that generated overwhelming requests for showings beginning in July 1917.
The association of the past century’s ed tech with extension services, thus with often vocational as opposed to liberal-arts schooling, broad availability as opposed to selective admission, mass improvement as opposed to elite credentials, and, not least, lower-paying nontenured instructional work, may partly explain the phobic reactions of some professors to post-print media. Whatever the cause, a love-hate relationship with commercial media has been typical. In 1951, Robert Maynard Hutchins, chancellor of the University of Chicago, declared television viewers “indistinguishable from the lower forms of plant life.” Hutchins then went on to support substantial investment in civic and educational uses of the medium when he became head of the Ford Foundation.
Long before MOOC hype inspired fear and loathing, a succession of now-old “new media” made its imprint on the academic experience. Classroom instruction embraced photographic slides, motion pictures, radio, television, and computers — all before the World Wide Web. Each wave of media innovation invariably coughs up enthusiasts who promote a “revolution” in education that, as the independent scholar Audrey Watters gleefully documents, typically overstates the potential of new technology and fails to understand the institutional context that might put it to use. The result is the oft-repeated canard that new technology will disrupt chalk-and-paper classrooms (as if our instructional spaces were not already rife with a wide array of media formats).
Almost equal in absurdity to the contention that digital media represent an unprecedented disruption of higher education is the proposition that the humanities should repel such threats. Eric Bennett’s “Dear Humanities Profs: We Are the Problem” lambasts “scholarly thralldom to the internet” and asserts a history in which “the screens outshined and the speakers drowned out the fainter, truer, deeper power of difficult texts and images.” Bennett holds that English departments and their foundational theories of New Criticism received support in the mid-20th century “for their purported capacity to counter propagandistic simplicity,” which, presumably, is exuded via any medium newer than the novel.
But consider the Ford Foundation-supported effort to put the New Critical progenitor I.A. Richards on television. Richards was involved in no fewer than three important early TV series at WGBH-Boston. One of these programs, Wrath of Achilles (1958), updated Homer’s epic poem for 1950s students who (Richards thought) would be mostly interested in the battles.
Richards had a complicated relation to film, radio, and TV. He derided them for producing “dehumanized social animals” instead of “self-controlled, self-judging, self-ruling men and women.” Yet he was also steadfast in his commitment to educational film, television, and, later, computing. In this, Richards typified one academic habit, in which intellectual denunciation of technology and commercial mass media invariably produces calls to appropriate those media for different ends. As recent arguments over the value of the TED talk suggest, this has been a consistent response for a century or more.
Higher education as we know it exists not despite popular culture, mass media, and technology, but because of them.
Some media engagement happened at the edges, through extension services and other operations that enabled the academy to become more accessible. Some drove growth through good public relations and a good football team. Some happened through scholarly research and the kind of classroom innovation that made clear academic seriousness was not inherently opposed to the engagement mass media enabled. Higher education exists, in part, to explode such oppositions and work through them.
Just so, Cathy Davidson, Anne Balsamo, Tara McPherson, and others model alternative modes of university engagement with digital media. And in their work lies a lesson for the rest of us: Media innovation is at home in higher education, and university practices can be remediated without being ruptured.
Mark Garrett Cooper is a professor of film and media studies at the University of South Carolina. John Marx is a professor of English at the University of California at Davis. They are the authors of Media U: How the Need to Win Audiences Has Shaped Higher Education (Columbia University Press).
