Media U: How the Need to Win Audiences Has Shaped Higher Education

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.

Business & Money

Marx, John

Cooper, Mark Garrett

Education & Reference

Columbia University Press

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.

John Marx argues that the early twentieth century was a key moment in the emergence of modern globalization, rather than simply a period of British imperial decline. Modernist fiction was actively engaged in this transformation of society on an international scale. The very stylistic abstraction that seemed to remove modernism from social reality, in fact internationalized the English language. Rather than mapping the decline of Empire, modernists such as Conrad and Woolf celebrated the shared culture of the English language as more important than the waning imperial structures of Britain.

The Modernist Novel and the Decline of Empire

Literature & Fiction

British & Irish

Cambridge University Press

John Marx argues that the early twentieth century was a key moment in the emergence of modern globalization, rather than simply a period of British imperial decline. Modernist fiction was actively engaged in this transformation of society on an international scale. The very stylistic abstraction that seemed to remove modernism from social reality, in fact internationalized the English language. Rather than mapping the decline of Empire, modernists such as Conrad and Woolf celebrated the shared culture of the English language as more important than the waning imperial structures of Britain.

Literary fiction is a powerful cultural tool for criticizing governments and for imagining how better governance and better states would work. Combining political theory with strong readings of a vast range of novels, John Marx shows that fiction over the long twentieth century has often envisioned good government not in Utopian but in pragmatic terms. Early-twentieth-century novels by Joseph Conrad, E. M. Forster and Rabindrananth Tagore helped forecast world government after European imperialism. Twenty-first-century novelists such as Monica Ali, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Michael Ondaatje and Amitav Ghosh have inherited that legacy and continue to criticize existing policies in order to formulate best practices on a global scale. Marx shows how literature can make an important contribution to political and social sciences by creating a space to imagine and experiment with social organization.

Geopolitics and the Anglophone Novel, 1890–2011

John Marx is of the generation of design architects who witnessed their pencils morph into mouses and their drafting tables into computer desktops. Throughout this transition, he has maintained a remarkable aesthetic consistency in his architectural projects. Wandering the Garden of Technology and Passion is a study of digital design through Marx's work. This beautifully illustrated book traces the professional path of an architect whose mastery of digital tools transformed his practice into a global player, but who still manages to hold on to the intimate qualities of a boutique practice.

Wandering the Garden of Technology and Passion

Arts & Photography

Serraino, Pierluigi

Architecture

Balcony Press

John Marx’s watercolors, first published in the Architectural Review, are a captivating example of an architect’s way of thinking. Subtle and quiet they are nonetheless compelling works in how they tackle a sense of place, of inhabiting space and time all the while resonating with the core of one’s inner being. There is an existential quality to these watercolors that is rare to be found in this medium. Something akin to the psychologically piercing observational quality of artists like De Chirico or Hopper. As architects strive to communicate their ideas, it is interesting to explore the world of Marx’s watercolors as an example of a humane approach to conveying emotional meaning in relation to our environment. Marx’s subject matter read like “built landscapes” heightening the role of the manmade yet wholly in balance with the natural world. This is a message and sentiment that is perhaps more important than ever to relay to audiences.

Etudes: The Poetry of Dreams + Other Fragments

Painting

ORO Editions

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Marx, John. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Marx, John

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Marx, John. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Media U: How the Need to Win Audiences Has Shaped Higher Education

Media U: How the Need to Win Audiences Has Shaped Higher Education

The Modernist Novel and the Decline of Empire

The Modernist Novel and the Decline of Empire

Geopolitics and the Anglophone Novel, 1890–2011

Wandering the Garden of Technology and Passion

Etudes: The Poetry of Dreams + Other Fragments