I’m sure most of us have come across coverage of NYU student Alana Taylor’s post on MediaShift about the lack of new media course offerings at her J school and the paper-bound career-ladder-climbing mentality that prevails among faculty members. She quotes one of her professors, and, as if on cue, the professor responds by banning live-blogging and twittering in a class entitled “Reporting Generation Y.” Taylor has been admonished by officials at NYU who basically accuse her of poor form – personally and journalistically – in not clearing her piece with the professor and fellow students, but NYU authorities and blogosphere pundits recognize that while NYU, as a private university, is technically exempt from the First Amendment concerns that would certainly be in effect in a CUNY classroom, to engage in active censorship in the form of declaring classroom discussions off-the-record is a losing argument and not what anyone really wants.
Taylor’s reportage may sometimes veer into the snarky and sound-bitey, as when she characterizes the journalism department as “exceptionally estrogen-infested,” but I think the volume of controversy surrounding her piece in the blogosphere point to a definitional weakness of the university. Universities are effective transmitters of well-defined bodies of knowledge, but less so of emerging realities and developing social practices. Universities are composed of many individuals with highly specialized knowledge bases and expertise. In many instances, groundbreaking and paradigm-changing work does flow from institutions of higher education, especially insofar as experts are employed as tenured faculty (think of a university-based historian or a research scientist) as opposed to part-time emissaries from the private sector (business school adjuncts, for example). What I’m suggesting is that universities as they are traditionally organized may not be structurally compatible with quickly-developing expertises like social media.
Not earth-shattering, I know, what can you expect? – this is just a blog, folks.
