Abstract
More than 30 years into my academic career, I thought we had seen almost everything when our campus took a History of Rock and Roll course online with more than 500 students enrolled for general education credit. Creative administrators, however, recently joined an online “consortium” in hopes of unlimited growth. The automated multiple-choice exams appear to represent a way to grow a student credit hour (SCH) cash cow for the college and university.
Cooper, a professor of film and media at South Carolina, and Marx, a professor of English at California, Davis, help explain such desperate administrative measures in Media U. The basic argument is that for more than a century, U.S. universities have been building audiences: Although the unobtrusive Carnegie unit may seem different in kind from a spectacular football game, the running battle over academic freedom, and all manner of public relations initiatives to promote particular schools, it is a mistake to pry these varieties of mediation apart. (p. 2)
They see our campuses caught in the contradiction of existing to “flatten social hierarchy and reproduce it at the same time” (p. 2).
Similarly, journalism and media communication programs have a mission to “restaff . . . newsrooms” (p. 3), but they also “reproduce the customary privileges” (p. 3). Thus, the authors roll eyes at massive open online courses (MOOCs), and their earlier technological cousins of correspondence courses and educational television. More recently, a course Twitter hashtag, YouTube video, or downloaded article, then, are explained as this: “. . . professors would need to compete for audiences with commercial media but equally . . . they could find new ways to exploit the media that make every classroom a connected one” (p. 7).
The historical critique is organized into 10 chapters: Campus Life; Public Relations; Communications Complex; Not Two Cultures; Television, or New Media; Co-optation; Student Immaterial Labor; By the Numbers; Bad English: The Culture Wars Reconsidered; and The Long Twentieth Century. The professors underscore how our current economic and social pressures have grown from the organizational structure of campuses.
“As a sector, then, higher education secured its position among key American institutions by learning to address abstractly ‘general’ and concretely plural publics through myriad media” (p. 70). While some of us may serve as media experts, the professors conclude that research universities have not won any power to manage social problems. This part of the book may be useful for graduate students seeking to critique the early communication models or the counterculture of computing. Likewise, the higher education data analyses in this book may help explain why so many journalism programs have seen steep decline in the number of majors. Cooper and Marx urge professors to leave the silos of their departments and schools: Do not defend the humanities or sciences, we urge you. Please defend instead specific initiatives that feature participants from across the disciplines engaged in projects that require collaboration . . . Ecological initiatives are far from the only ones needed to secure the future. There is plenty of work to go around. The scope of intervention, we suggest, matters less than the type of audience it creates. (p. 266)
They argue for learning and using new media formats, collaboration, expressing concern over student debt instead of attacking capitalism, replacing the Carnegie unit, a focus on good metrics, and movement away from defending academic freedom and toward “leaping to defend job security for everyone” (p. 269). Academic teams could embrace audiences, address racism and other inequalities, inside and outside the classroom.
Media U, however, does not directly address the rising cost of higher education, or initiatives that embrace open educational resources (OERs). These efforts attempt to slash expensive textbooks from our syllabi are in early stages of development on most U.S. campuses. In short, the book could spend less time in its historical social critique and instead focus on how entrepreneurial creativity could be used to solve difficult problems.
George, a retired teacher and freelancer, and Yagnik, an assistant professor of advertising at Penn State in Erie, published a small, 18-chapter handbook that offers numerous exercises. Creative Aerobics (CA) begins with an exercise that asks writers to rearrange words to form others. The next word finding exercise is followed by a rules creation one. The book explores left and right brains in an effort to stretch thinking through additional exercises. Big ideas, for example, have become useful in media entrepreneurship courses: 1. “Big Ideas must 2. “Big Ideas are disruptive.” 3. “Big Ideas have talk value.” 4. “Big Ideas stretch brands.” (p. 19)
The creative process exercises throughout this book offer step-by-step active learning opportunities that could be used in any journalism and media communication (JMC) course. In social media courses, for example, we deal with “novel” ways to communicate: “Although skills and strategies that are successful today may become obsolete tomorrow, the one skill that never goes out of fashion or demand is that of creativity” (p. 144). This is true for advertising not only copywriters and creative directors but also students, faculty, staff, and university administrators.
My belief is that simple data-driven decision-making without creative problem-solving produces mass education that frequently weakens depth and quality of learning. Just as our Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) leaders at our recent Toronto conference have begun to explore career issues (from graduate student through retirement), mid-career faculty must engage with administrators offering technological solutions for complex educational problems and issues. These are challenging times for the university, country, and planet. Taken together, these books offer resources that could help us engage our students by activating their creativity and ability to develop fresh ideas.