Terence P. Moron, Professor Emeritus
April 4, 2023
In the beginning were the words. And the words were “Media Ecology,” a name that redefined media as not only the techniques and technologies of communication but as environments in which cultures grow. The name and the approach were born during a series of meetings in the late 1960’s on campus and during many lunches and dinners in long departed local establishments like Harout’s, Rocky’s, and the Jade Cockatoo. Neil Postman, Christine Nystrom and I were broadening our M.A. and Ph.D. Programs in Linguistics and Semantics to embrace all media of human communication into what Neil liked to call “General Semantics writ large.” In 1971, our efforts culminated with the establishment of the new M.A. and Ph.D. Programs in Media Ecology: Studies in Communication.
In 1955, before I became a student and then a faculty member at New York University, I was a raw recruit at Marine Corps Boot Camp on Parris Island, South Carolina. There I was trained to be a Marine infantry rifleman and received from our Senior Drill Instructor the sagest advice I ever got in my life when he told our platoon that “Rules and Regulations are made for the guidance of the wise and the obedience of the fool.”
For Neil and Chris and me, all concepts, theories and models were to be used as guides, not commandments, to help shape a learning community of open-minded faculty and students dedicated to creative critical thinking about media, culture, and communication. For 30 years our fall and spring Media Ecology Conferences in the Catskills augmented our classroom explorations in shaping our learning community which preferred open to closed systems of thinking and open-minded inquiries to mind-forged manacles of conventional academic thought.
The success of the graduate programs inspired us to create an undergraduate program in 1985. With the cooperation and encouragement of our department chair, Roger Cayer, and the collaboration of our colleagues in Speech Communication, notably Deborah Borisoff, in Educational Communication and Technology, and Graphic Communication, notably Greg D’Amico, we fashioned and taught a range of core courses that formed the basis for the new program that offered students opportunities to study media, culture, and communication across all available courses offered in the various schools of New York University, particularly the Journalism Department in the College of Arts and Sciences, Marketing courses in Stern, and film and media courses in the Tisch School of the Arts. We also offered a wide range of internships across the wide expanse of the communication, information, and media industries located here in New York City.
From the beginning of the Media Ecology program in 1971, we attracted a sizable number of foreign students from across the globe and offered special summer courses in Germany, Egypt, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Ireland, Israel, and Czechoslovakia. As our enrollments continued to grow, we were able to expand our faculty, thereby adding new perspectives to our learning community, based on ideas to be examined rather than ideologies to be followed.
With Neil’s death in 2003 and Chris’s retirement, the then Department of Culture in Communication was re-organized and renamed into a new Department of Media, Culture, and Communication. The name “Media Ecology” was replaced, but I hope that our commitment to open inquiry into the environments shaped by media continues to form the basis for an ongoing learning community. In 2017, with my retirement after 50 years on the faculty, the founding generation passed away. As our great friend Charlie Weingartner always said, “change is the only constant in the cosmos.” In The Disappearance of Childhood, Neil wrote these opening words. “Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see.” Today the faculty and students and staff in our department continue to carry the messages that creative critical thinking and open-minded inquiry are needed more than ever in our rapidly changing media environments.
Neil always insisted that we were educating ourselves, and our students for survival in a continuously changing and ever-challenging world. Allow me to close with three strategies for survival, taught to all Marines: Adapt. Improvise. Overcome.
I wish you all continued good luck and good creative critical thinking.