April 4, 2023
I want to start by thanking Sue Murray for her leadership as chair and for organizing this anniversary celebration, Dean Knott for his support, and Terry Moran and Debbie Borisoff for their years of leadership and service to this department. I did not know Neil as well as Terry or Debbie did, or even Sue, who started a few years before me. However, Neil was still chair when I interviewed in the spring of 2002 to come to NYU. I remember sitting with him and Debbie for a very short interview. I have no recollection of what we talked about. What I remember is Neil’s smile and his wry sense of humor.
I had the privilege of serving as the fifth chair of MCC after Neil – and before I go on I want to give a shout out to the fourth – Lisa Gitelman, who was a great chair and a great mentor who helped orient me during my first year as chair.
The thing I’m proudest of during my time as chair – and it’s a collective accomplishment – are the five outstanding new faculty we hired from 2016 to 2021, and I’m going to say a few things about how they are extending Neil’s legacy and try not to embarrass them, but I probably will: Angela Wu, Laine Nooney, James Wahutu, Whit Pow, and Nicole Fleetwood.
Based on the stories I heard about Neil and what I’ve read, I associate Neil Postman with three dimensions of excellence: in teaching … in interdisciplinarity … and in public-facing scholarship.
The first was his teaching style, a style of teaching that was more about listening than holding forth. Neil, I was told, often walked into the classroom, seemingly completely unprepared for class – no lecture, no notes, sometimes no books. He WAS prepared, but more than that he was PRESENT in the room. He worked from the assumption that learning has to start with the students. What are their questions? What are their concerns? What are they passionate about? The purpose was not simply to convey information but to foster thinking and reflection and deep discussion. And somewhere in that discussion, usually, the assigned text did come up, but in a way that ensured that students clearly understood its relevance and importance.
I saw that ideal in action when I sat in on one of James Wahutu’s seminars during the fall semester. The topics of discussion were complex: economic development policy and state broadcasting policy in Ghana. There were assigned readings, though just two. Less is more. The students had read the articles and they had read them deeply. They asked probing questions about the legacies of colonialism and empire. They looked up economic data on their computers and brought it into the discussion. There was a brief lull in the conversation, and Prof. Wahutu asked them if they were ready to take a break. They were not! And it went on this way for more than 2 hours, without a break! I was inspired by the mutual respect and warmth of the discussion. Neil’s ideal of teaching as respectful listening and passionate discussion lives on at MCC, and I know that James Wahutu is not alone at MCC in achieving this ideal.
Second ideal: Interdisciplinarity. Real interdisciplinarity, let alone respectful multidisciplinarity, as we know, is hard to achieve. It requires a deep capacity to be open to new ideas, to be able to call into question our assumptions, to learn from each other.
Three, maybe 4 years ago, Laine Nooney took the lead (along with Finn Brunton) to establish a monthly department colloquium for PhD students and faculty to present their work to their colleagues. (Terry and Debbie can confirm: I believe that when Neil was chair there had been something like this that brought the entire department together on a regular basis to talk about their own research, not just about administration and committee work.) But this tradition had been lost. Laine did a fantastic job to revive and renew it for our time, and it has been through this monthly colloquium (including the one coming up this Thursday) that we actually achieve interdisciplinarity. Laine’s own work is deeply interdisciplinary – in their soon-to-be published book from MIT Press entitled – great title! – How the Computer Became Personal.
Likewise, for Angela Wu’s fantastic research on algorithmic cultures and internet governance, which often brings together theories and qualitative methods in the humanities with super-sophisticated quantitative analysis. Laine and Angela represent a new generation of outstanding interdisciplinary scholars, but they are not alone, and it’s important for our students at all levels as well as for our faculty.
The final ideal of Neil Postman’s – this is what I think most people think of first when they hear his name – is public-facing scholarship. The ideal of the public intellectual.
When we hired Nicole Fleetwood last year, we were affirming this ideal. Nicole is not only an outstanding scholar, she is an award-winning writer and curator, and an influential public voice for racial justice and carceral reform. Whit Pow is a leading scholar of trans histories of video games, software, and computational media game history as well as a powerful voice for transgender rights. And last month, Whit and Nicole teamed up to co-sponsor the Trans Lineages Symposium, one of the many public-facing events MCC sponsors – with the able support of Dove Pedlosky – to make sure that our cutting edge scholarship reaches activist and other publics beyond the academy.
As a department, we’ve also explored questions and innovated in ways that go beyond Neil Postman’s vision in terms of our intellectual range, diversity, and global scope – with initiatives such as the Media Lab led by Jamie Bianco and the journal Public Culture led by Erica Robles-Anderson, just to name a few.
In sum – this is a very different department than the one I joined in 2002. But still, as I’ve tried to show, we’ve also kept faith with Neil’s core ideals — and that’s one of the reasons that we continue to be a department of media, culture, and communication like no other in the world.