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IMAGINING THE ACADEMY
IMAGINING THE ACADEMY
higher education and popular culture
EDITED BY
RoutledgeFalmer
NEW YORK AND LONDON
Published in 2005 by RoutledgeFalmer 270 Madison Avenue NewYork, NY 10016
http://www.routledge-ny.com/
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.
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or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to
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Published in Great Britain by RoutledgeFalmer 2 Park Square Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon,
OX14 4RN http://www.routledgefalmer.com/
Copyright © 2005byTaylor & Francis Books, Inc. RoutledgeFalmer is an imprint
of the Taylor & Francis Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or
by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission
in writing from the publishers.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Imagining the academy: higher education and
popular culture/edited by Susan Edgerton…[et al.].—1st ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical
references and index. ISBN 0-415-92936-9 (alk. paper)—ISBN 0-415-92937-7 (pb: alk. paper) 1.
Education in popular culture—United States. 2. Education, Higher— Social aspects—United
States. 3. Education, Higher—United States— Marketing. 4. Education, Higher—United States—
Public opinion. 5. Public opinion—United States. I. Edgerton, Susan Huddleston, 1955–
LC191.94.I53 2004 306.43′2—dc22 2004009275
Mary Beth
Matilda
Acknowledgments ix
10. “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” Lesbian Professors in Popular Culture 163
ALLISON J.KELAHER YOUNG
11. Mamet’s Oleanna in Context: Performance, Personal, Pedagogy 179
LEE PAPA
12. Vampires on Campus: Reflections on (Un)Death, Transformation, and 190
Blood Knowledges in The Addiction
MORNA McDERMOTT AND TOBY DASPIT
13. Black Higher Learnin’: Black Popular Culture and The Politics of Higher 204
Education
LINWOOD H.COUSINS
Contributors 221
Index 224
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Acknowledgments
We are especially grateful to our contributors for their immense patience as we struggled
to complete this manuscript through a variety of obstacles. We want to thank our
colleagues at Western Michigan University and at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts
for their continuous support. Thanks go to the editors at Routledge: Karita Dos Santos,
Seema Shah, Paul Johnson, and Catherine Bernard, who shepherded us through the
various phases of this project as well as through changes at Routledge. Special thanks to
Elizabeth Ellsworth, Peter Taubman, and an anonymous reviewer for useful suggestions
and encouragement. We are grateful to Stephanie Higdon for her assistance with some
technical matters. Deep gratitude goes to Stacy Alatalo and to Ellen Barber for their
willingness to read works in progress and to offer helpful commentary.
Introduction
Dreaming the Academy
SUSAN EDGERTON AND PAUL FARBER
As I (Susan) pass through my living room where the television is on for the day’s weather
forecast, I hear for the umpteenth time the commercial for Olympia Career Training
Institute: A bank teller asks her customer, who is making a deposit, “And did you win the
lottery?” Customer replies, “No, but I got a really great job” (after graduating from
OCTI). I get my coffee and return minutes later. It’s on again, but this time the happy
OCTI student peeps, “Four years of college is not for everyone—especially not me. I
needed a REAL career, and I needed it fast!” The emphasis on the word real seems to
imply something negative about the careers that result from traditional nonprofit, four-
year college educations. “Maybe that’s what’s wrong with me”, I mutter, “I need a REAL
career.” Later, at the university where I work, I attend meetings about new kinds of
“outreach” that are clearly entrepreneurial, hear complaints about a part-time faculty
member in a new regional center program, and listen to arguments about theory versus
practice. There are discussions about the “dumbing down” of teacher education classes
and American Association of University Professors (AAUP) contract negotiation issues.
There are discussions with colleagues jealous over promotions, publications, and
privileges. I work behind a computer in my tiny (but larger than most others on the floor)
office in a run-down 1960s building that has been scheduled for renovation for the past
ten years but has once again been placed on a back burner.
Still, whatever the frustrations, I know that life as a professor is a privileged life in so
many ways. Many of us enjoy flexibility of schedules, much work that can be done at
home, work that can challenge and reward one’s creative spirit, and more. But it also
offers a disturbing standpoint from which to observe some of the worst trends in social
and cultural change, as well as the best. Such a standpoint carries with it the
responsibility of speaking one’s “truth to power.”
Finally, home for the day, I spend a seductive hour with The Education of Max
Bickford, a short-lived television series about a history professor at a private elite college.
There are scenes amidst masses of ivy, hardwood floors and trim, and big wooden desks
in big messy offices. The professor, played by Richard Dreyfuss, is wise though flawed.
The issues he faces look like few of mine as a professor in a large Midwestern state
university. The next day begins with news of students at my university who have rioted
for the second time this year as the culmination of a drunken party. It was “to relieve
stress,” one student explained to the news reporter. At work, our dean suggests that the
only research that counts for us now is funded research. We are shown slick, expensive
new recruitment brochures meant to convey images of a serious learning community that
Imaging the academy 2
is also full of fun and images of a world of work after college that is exciting and
rewarding, leaving everyone in smiles.
Many times I’ve heard colleagues and myself utter the phrase, “This is not what I
thought it would be like to be an academic—to be a professor.” Why was our image of
the academy so different from the reality? How was it different? What is the broader
public image of the academy, and how does that differ from “reality?” How have those
images and that reality changed over the years? What expectations of the academy
resonate within contemporary society? Based on the variety and often-contradictory
nature of comments we get from student evaluations of our classes, one could argue that
expectations are complex and multiple. In an institution that is increasingly operating as a
corporation, we are continually striving to “please the customer,” as if we know what the
customer wants. It would be important, if for no other reason than that, to explore the
multifarious ways in which academia is perceived and fantasized in order to expose the
fallacies of such a pursuit. But the reasons run deeper.
The nature and direction of higher education in American society are matters widely
pondered. What transpires in higher education directly and profoundly affects the well-
being of the society as a whole. This is so in part because of the kinds of expertise and
leadership that higher education is expected to foster. But more than this, higher
education represents a crossroads of our social and political landscape, the nearest thing
we have to a laboratory for addressing the promise and challenges of our contentious,
culturally diverse, and fundamentally incomplete democracy.
A great deal is said and written about the role and tendencies of higher education. The
debates and discussions are earnest, as they should be, and often illuminating. Scholarly
works, high-level policy studies, and journalism each in their own way confront issues in
higher education and contribute to public understanding and debate. Within particular
colleges and universities, vigorous internal debates over priorities and initiatives are
commonplace. Both kinds of discussion are important and welcome, a sign of health in
the institution of higher education.
This book was written to place such efforts in a seldom-acknowledged context. What
higher education is, what it means, and where it is (or should be) heading are not matters
for specialists and experts alone to judge. The questions have meaning and carry
consequences for broad segments of the population in an open, democratic society. And
in any event, whatever any elite panel of commentators might believe or wish for, the
policies and practices of higher education depend upon forms of public support and a
workable convergence of views, as, for example, when the expectations of entering
students encounter the demands of their professors. The question, then, is how the
broader public understands the institution of higher education. By what means do notions
about the academy and its role in society circulate and crystallize in people’s minds? The
question points to the diverse phenomena and ubiquitous media of popular culture.
The book is intended to draw together diverse studies of the relationship of higher
education and popular culture. In these pages, we examine representations of higher
education in various forms of popular culture, both historical and contemporary. The
meanings of “cultural studies” and “popular culture” and approaches toward their study
are embedded in an academic history of contestation with analyses that range between the
structuralist and the post-structuralist or post-modernist. Contributions to this volume
represent a variety of methodological approaches to cultural studies as well as a variety of
Introduction: dreaming the academy 3
points of view toward the concept of popular culture. It is our hope that the reader will
find a balanced offering in this set of stories around the relationship of popular culture
and higher education. These works, taken together, ground and extend inquiry, exploring
ways in which debates about the status and purpose of higher education are shaped and
constrained by notions circulating in the wider culture through the media of popular
culture.
The book is organized around three matters central to the evolving landscape and
mission of higher education, in sections entitled: Constructing and Contesting the Image
ofthe Ivory Tower, The New Vocationalism and the Marketing of Higher Education, and
Exploring Identity and Difference in the Context of Higher Education. Before introducing
the work in these sections, however, it should be understood that within these three
categories there are different but overlapping approaches to the study of relationships
between higher education and popular culture. Some chapters, through the analysis of
movies, novels, television, and/or music, examine popular representations of higher
education in those venues. A second approach involves exploring the impact of larger
(popular) cultural movements on the university. For example, it can be argued that the
ways market forces have educated us to a shopping mentality influence our approaches to
selecting and dealing with a university as consumers in a shopping mall. In such a world,
credentials take precedence over traditional notions of what it means to become an
educated person (see, e.g., Labaree, 1997). University administrators feel compelled to
respond to these pressures, at times, by situating students as customers. Hence, a third
approach of study must be to view higher education as a conveyer of, and conduit for,
popular cultural forms through, for example, advertisements for universities and hidden
curricula validating anti-intellectual and entrepreneurial tendencies.
To what extent and in what ways is the popular notion of academia as the ivory tower
accurate and desirable? In what ways does it serve to marginalize the work and limit the
effectiveness of scholars in academia to have an impact on urgent social and political
issues and debates of their time? Alternatively, to what extent does intellectual freedom,
and much that is good emerging from it, depend upon academic insulation from the
everyday affairs, interests, and pressures of the “real world?” Academic scholars have a
vital interest in how the traditional notion of the ivory tower evolves because it colors
public perceptions of the worth, relevance, and meaning of their work. And because such
perceptions in turn condition the possibilities for academics in addressing vital issues of
the day from their place in the academy, others with an interest in such matters also have
a stake in how the image of the ivory tower changes over time. Contesting notions
abound about the distance there is, or should be, between the academic and everyday
worlds. Part I of this book explores how popular culture reflects and informs such notions
and the debates in which they are entangled.
Susan Talburt and Paula M.Salvio’s chapter, “The Personal Professor and the
Excellent University,” “explore[s] the effects of consumerist and technocratic ideologies
and practices on the work of faculty and on the ways academics’ responses do and do not
challenge the privatization of the university’s purposes.” They examine both the concept
Imaging the academy 4
A second issue revolves around public perceptions of the role of universities. How
universities garner and maintain support for their mission has changed over time. The
older notion of a kind of higher calling closely linked to the roots of higher education as a
training ground for clerics has given way to a new kind of vocationalism. Universities are
now geared to and marketed in terms of their role as credentialing agencies and sites for
the development of marketable skills and expertise. Although, as David Kirp (2003)
reminds us, the university has always been driven by the pursuit of funds, “what is new,
and troubling, is the raw power that money directly exerts over so many aspects of higher
education.” (p. 3) In some situations, Kirp notes, market forces within and upon the
university have had positive effects. It is good news, too, that lively debates rage within
academia about the soul of higher education. The future of such debates and their
practical possibilities are greatly influenced and constrained by the public’s perception of
what higher education provides. Hence, popular perceptions of the university’s “cash
value”—the personal and social economic interests it is believed to enhance—have a
distinct bearing on internal struggles to shape and define the mission and values of
academia.
Paul Farber and Gunilla Holm examine the self-presentation of universities in 30-
second promotional films made for television, typically shown during broadcasts of
college athletic events, in their chapter, “Selling the Dream of Higher Education.”
University promos are analyzed in terms of the principal slogans they present, the most
common images they incorporate, the major interest groups to whom they are addressed,
and the thematic tensions they embody. These unifying elements are examined against
the contrasting backdrop of prevailing conflicts, tensions, and uncertainties that
characterize contemporary higher education.
Karen Anijar, in “In Just Six Short Weeks, You Too Can Be a Truck Driver, a
Teacher, or a Preacher…a Doctor, Lawyer,…or Engineer,” offers a provocative
suggestion that proprietary institutions, many of which have been built on fraudulent
claims, may have led the way toward greater corporatization for traditional higher
educational institutions in recent years. Through various political and marketing
strategies that could have included “infiltration” of government regulating agencies,
proprietary institutions of higher learning now occupy a prominent position in the higher
education marketplace. The Higher Education Act of 1998 “afforded proprietary schools
closer to equal status with ‘traditional’ colleges and universities,” Anijar writes, enabling
money to flow for student loans and otherwise from the government to these institutions
at a more vigorous rate than ever before. Now, traditional universities must compete for
students with schools that advertise almost instant gratification and superior practicality.
No effort is expended attempting to disguise disdain for “ivory tower eggheads”—that is,
traditional notions of the intellectual and the calling of the university.
In “Meritocracy at Middle Age: Skewed Views and Selective Admissions,” John
G.Ramsay examines longstanding issues concerning the way valued places in higher
education are allocated in the competitive context of selective admissions. In particular,
he attends to debates and perspectives concerning the question of how meritocratic such a
process is or ought to be. Given the inherent complexity of the social phenomena in
question, a central role in public understanding of the issues is played by popular and
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