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.
Tracing over a century of media history and the academy, 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.
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 a midcentury
communications complex linking big science, New Criticism, and design,
from the co-option of 1960s student activist media through the
early-twenty-first-century reception of MOOCs and the latest promises of
technological disruption. The book considers the ways in which
universities have used media platforms to reconcile national commitments
to equal opportunity with corporate capitalism as well as the vexed
relationship of democracy and hierarchy. 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.
