You respect readers so little as this?

This is an article about a television show? Inside Higher Ed needs to respect its readers more than this. People who influence the world do indeed produce television shows, but people who influence the world do not watch them. Inside Higher Ed has just indicated what it thinks of its own readership. TV references are an insult to the informed mind. Maybe we all should go back to reading the Chronicle.

Gregory Barton, asst. prof world history, at 8:57 am EDT on October 12, 2005

Lighthearted

Sounds like a fun, lighthearted article. I enjoyed reading it, although I’m not sure of the point.

Kevin, Undergraduate, at 10:49 am EDT on October 12, 2005

Everyone seems to have a different approach to leisure time, I suppose. As for me, after a long, hard day of influencing the world, I like nothing more than to relax with a couple of mass-produced lowest-common-denominator TV shows.

The academy should never pass up a chance to laugh at itself, and this show sounds like a grand opportunity.

dan, at 11:52 am EDT on October 12, 2005

I’m not sure why the first comment to this article is so negative. Kudos to the creative people who not only produced “The B.C.” but also included real faculty and admin.

I must say that I feel sorry for Prof. Barton — if he feels TV is beneath mention in the world of higher ed news, then he is severely out of touch with his students, not to mention missing out on some good content on the History channel.

By the way, Prof. Barton, The Chronicle does run articles about TV, including one about *gasp* the recent reality show “The Scholar” where students competed for a scholarship. ;-)

Tolana, English major, at 4:42 pm EDT on October 12, 2005

TV

Thanks to those of you who commented on my comment on Inside Higher Ed running an article about television.

A quick response. I fully agree that life is about more than scholarship. And that life is also about recreation. I will add to that, life is about many things, including health.

Sit coms are not a fit subject for discussion for a number of reasons, let me quickly add them up.

1) Mass media is controlled by a handful of individuals, corporations and moguls. They are as Al Gore recently pointed out in a speech to the national press, a danger not only to democracy, but to civilization.

2) Mass media controls, distorts, and destroys culture.

3) Children grow up wiith disabled minds, smaller brains, unable to communicate with thier peers.

4) adults are subjected to not only the propoganda of the mass media, ("news” or sit-coms it hardly matters), but are also isolated from thier families, inactive physically, and reduced to such a passive state that personal enrichment is difficult and unlikely.

5) the effects of television on health would be too lengthy to enumerate in this forum.

I still conlcude that Television is for fools. Losers. People who are willing to have thier minds colonized, people who are willing to spend thier short life on earth in a state less active than sleep. It has no place in the life of the mind, nor in the life of a lover, an adventurer, or a human.

Inside HIgher Ed insults us with articles on TV as if we would actually sit down and watch a piece of furniture in a dark room for hours on end. This forum should no more promote such activity than promote the shooting up of heroine.

My advice to those who are media abused, who imagine they are “in touch,” when they watch TV? It is this. Consider getting a life. A REAL one. It can be done. You can throw away your TV and life TV free. I do. People who change the world do. You can to. You can love, read, exercise, start a business, have sex, have a child, write, clean the house, even, yes, help someone in need.

And finally good luck. I know its a hard addition to break. But it is so very much worth it.

Gregory Barton, at 1:51 pm EDT on October 13, 2005

Of Mr Barton’s several points, the one I find most alarming, particularly coming from a working historian, is the thought that television somehow “destroys culture.” That very limiting theory assumes a static, and shared, definition of what we mean by culture at all. Mr Barton equally assumes that we, as academics, are, or have right to be, in some way the arbiters of an acceptable cultural form. We’re not, nor does our education or our chosen profession lend such an outlandish claim any legitimacy over that of your average OC watching undergrad. Television does not destroy culture, television IS culture. We are witnessing the creation of new culture every day, transmitted here by a new medium, the internet. And, snarkily dismiss what you will, it will not just go away. Today’s youth culture may not share familiar forms with the comfortable culture of bygone days, but shouldn’t we, as historians, be the first to realize how ridiculuous a concept that actually is? A parody such as this works solely because it caricatures those stereotypes and pop culture images its audience has readily internalized, and as historians, indeed as a forum of collected academics here under the kind auspices of Higher Ed, we should be fascinated not frustrated with the glimpses a show such as The BC gives us into the fabric of a vital and deceptively complex intellectual world that is far too often obscured from view: the undergraduate. In case you’re looking, they’d be those young-ish folks you’ve seen on your walk to work, unless they’re all indoors...you know, busily destroying culture.

-Eamon Walsh Schamis-Irish Studies, Boston College

Eamon Walsh Schamis, Grad Student — Irish History at Boston College, at 4:49 pm EDT on October 22, 2005