Judging simply from the title, a reader might expect Media U to be an examination of the intersection between popular media and higher education. The book, however, is not a historical study of how institutions of higher education have used popular media, at least not directly. Rather, Cooper and Marx look at how the American university has become a medium in itself. The history of higher education, they contend, can be viewed as a story of how colleges and universities became involved in the business of “audience creation and management” (p. 2).
The book begins by looking at the advent of football on college campuses and the ways in which universities used college football to attract a mass audience for campus outreach and growth. For example, when it was built in 1914, Yale's stadium held seventy thousand spectators, even though the institution's entire student body was only thirty-three hundred. Additionally, school colors, which students at Yale and elsewhere had selected to provide a sense of community in student life, were co-opted and became “official” school colors to be marketed to a broader community that would attend games. Individuals involved in college football programs not only played but oversaw press relations, marketing, and branding. In time, colleges came to maintain audiences through football games as much as curricula.
The ramifications of seeing the university as a medium extend well beyond football and are vast, varied, and not always unifying. As mass media developed in the twentieth century, universities had to work hard to keep up with the reach of other media. Universities began to produce popular media of their own in a variety of efforts to seek audiences for their work. In the second chapter, the book details the development of the Great Books initiative, arguing that mass marketing of Great Books courses was an attempt to take the idea of general education to the public. In the 1920s, Americans attended public lectures, professors went on tour, and the university began to hire public relations professionals. By the 1960s, colleges attempted to use television to help them create an audience for their instruction. The Ford Foundation worked with universities to advance the idea of noncommercial television. WBGH, one early example, was formally connected with Harvard and other Boston universities. It used professors as on-air talent, and universities became major players in the growth of public television. Finally, the book argues that the advent of the massive open online course (MOOC) was an attempt to extend the idea of the correspondence degree by harnessing the power of the internet as a medium.
Media U also details the influence of the Carnegie Unit in shaping the idea of a general education, especially as a way for academics to make whole the sundering of knowledge that had resulted from the specialization that was becoming endemic to the academy. Importantly, the book also argues that the rise of general education meant that courses within a single university began to compete against one another for students. In looking at the university as a medium, the book argues that this need for courses to maintain their audiences also shaped the way the institutions themselves developed. It led to a fragmentation of the university structure, with students using that fragmentation as a way to shape the institutions where they studied. They used the process of creating new majors as a means to agitate for including disciplines like African American studies, film studies, and women's studies. The number of majors increased faster than the number of departments to manage them, leading to drastic shifts in organizational structures and interdepartmental relationships.
One of the book's more compelling claims is that this altered university landscape led to a shift in the audiences for the research the university produced and, therefore, the tenure system. The tenure system strengthens not only academic freedom, the book argues, but also specialization. When considering the university as a medium, the audience for an individual professor's work has become other people in the discipline and decreasingly people outside of a specific discipline. Moreover, it is the people working in a specific discipline who are responsible for deciding an applicant's tenure. The implication of this is that tenure becomes less about protecting academic freedom and more about the need to attract top faculty to a department to maintain the size of the department's audience.
Media U covers a lot of intellectual ground. Beyond football, public television, MOOCs, the Carnegie Unit, and the tenure system, the book also examines a host of other topics. At one point, it argues that one of the Manhattan Project's most important legacies was the creation of a communications complex, a vast interconnected web in which our nation's universities were nodes. At another point, the book notes the importance of the invention of microfiche in how research results were shared among scholars. It looks at the role of the university in shaping avant-garde art, including creating the idea of the art house film. The book traces the development of STEM as a field and the expansion of the scope of English departments, as both became vehicles for consolidating the universities' diverse audiences. Even the arrival of Pell Grants becomes an illustrative example for looking at the university as a medium. Since Pell Grants follow the student, not the institution, their implementation increased competition for an audience, leading to the ideas of the “safety school” and college application coaches. The authors even use this idea of examining the university as a mass medium to comment on crucial topics currently facing the public university. They provide well-needed perspective on issues such as the increased use of adjunct faculty to teach courses in diverse new majors without the departmental infrastructure in place to manage them. They also discuss recent protests over alt-right members—activists operating largely outside the university who speak on college campuses attempting to use the university for their own political ends.
Throughout the book, the reader gets a sense that the authors are using their book to defy the sort of specialization of the academy that it traces. In doing so, the book often feels like an edited volume whose disparate chapters are held together simply by the lens the authors use to look at the history of the university. Ultimately, then, Media U is more valuable for the overarching theoretical orientation—viewing the university as a medium—than it is as a resource for a researcher working in any specific area of educational history. In that regard, though, it is a highly valuable text.
