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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.
List of contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Campus Life
2. Public Relations
3. Communications Complex
4. Not Two Cultures
5. Television, or New Media
6. Cooptation
7. Student Immaterial Labor
8. By the Numbers
9. Bad English: The Culture Wars Reconsidered
10. The Long Twentieth Century
Epilogue
Notes
Index
About the author
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) and the coeditor of Rediscovering US Newsfilm: Cinema, Television, and the Archive (2018).
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).
Summary
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.
Additional text
Media U delivers a thoughtful and historically grounded account of the commercialization and digitalization of American higher education...[setting] itself apart from the slew of works that inveigh against the rise of the “corporate university”...present[ing] a message that virtually all historians will applaud: current critiques of the American university would profit from a deeper and less polemical understanding of earlier relationships between these institutions and their audiences.
