沟通 & Media Arts: - 麻省理工学院人工智能研究专业

沟通 & Media Arts:
Of the Humanities & the Future

Roderick P. 哈特

The field of communication was added to the menu of higher education in the early
part of the twentieth century. One hundred years later, it is thriving at colleges and
universities throughout the United States and gaining a foothold abroad as well.
This essay recounts its growth, surveys its campus manifestations, and explores the
challenges it now confronts. In a world of ever-advancing technologies, of evolving
forms of online interaction, and of massive amounts of misinformation and disin-
形成, no citizen can ignore the changing media environment. While the com-
munication discipline can take pride in its growth, it must also heed the demands of
the Old Humanities: to sort fact from fiction, to identify cultural traditions worth
honoring, to question how power is arranged and whom it serves, and to help stu-
dents formulate messages for a diverse and changing world. The field of communi-
cation has many challenges before it and that is a glorious thing.

T his essay began just as one of the most tumultuous moments in Ameri-

can history was waning. As of June 2022, COVID-19 has killed more than
one million Americans; more will be lost before the disease is completely
vanquished. 幸运的是, scores of brilliant researchers across the globe brought
a variety of vaccines to market quickly. Marvelously intricate machines located
at companies like Pfizer, Moderna, and AstraZeneca produced precious vials of
medicine in record time, after which the federal government’s Warp Speed Pro-
gram delivered them to 42,000 zip codes across the United States. 科学. Busi-
内斯. Engineering. 政府. What more needs to be said?

Getting shots in the arms of 320 million people. Would the pharmaceutical
companies share everything they know with one another? Would the workers
running the production lines keep their superiors informed of each day’s churn?
Would the government remain open to inquiries from the press while the vaccine
was being delivered? Would the Trump administration tell the Biden adminis-
tration everything it knew? And what of the people? How many would sign up
for the first shot, and who would remind them to get a second? Would the web’s
grand conspiracies–that vaccines will rot your brain, that vaccines are a Chinese
plot–keep people away from the vaccinators? In a nation where 430 different lan-

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guages are spoken each day, would medical advisories be translated clearly and
distributed broadly? And who would buoy up the people’s spirits while all of this
was going on?

COVID-19 reminds us yet again that communication is a delicate thing, bril-
liant when it works, devastating when it does not. Speaking of devastation, 期间
his last days in office, President Donald Trump stood on a platform, as despots
had before him, and harangued twenty thousand people mightily, telling them ev-
ery lie under the sun. The Trumpers responded immediately, filming themselves
while storming the nation’s shrine to democracy. Five people died, hundreds went
to jail, and the nation was torn apart. Donald Trump did this work with a primi-
tive tool–with his voice.

Then the questions began. Had the United States Capitol Police failed to read
their Twitter feeds? Trump’s Twitter feed? 的确, had they not read a daily
newspaper during the last four years, outlets that had told the “Stop the Steal” sto-
ry relentlessly? Had they not heard the shrieking in flyover country after Trump
lost the presidency? Had they missed the right wing’s coordinated messaging?
Did they not notice Fox and Newsmax constantly stoking the postelectoral fires?
The United States Capitol Police performed heroically but they also failed to
listen.

COVID and the Capitol. Events like these raise a thousand questions and many
of them feature human communication. Science can produce vaccines by the
truckload, but unless people are persuaded to take them, they are for naught. A
我们. president may have the nuclear football at the ready, but if only public adu-
lation can make him feel truly powerful, dangerous things will happen. 这些都是
my biases and I come by them honestly, having studied political rhetoric through-
out my career and having served for eleven years as dean of the Moody College of
Communication at the University of Texas at Austin. 因此, wherever I look
I find people failing to listen. Wherever I look I find people saying unfortunate
事物. Communication is an open door except when it closes.

And how do the humanities relate to the study of communication? I cannot
answer that question without reflecting on my own story. Having entered college
在 1962, I have witnessed the remarkable growth of communication studies in the
学院. In the latest compilation of degrees conferred by American colleges and
大学, The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that 110,981 bachelor’s de-
grees were granted in communication and journalism in 2017–2018, 相对 52,625
in English language and literature, 23,953 in foreign languages and linguistics,
29,552 在历史上, 和 13,097 in philosophy and religious studies.1 Is the growth of
communication studies a good thing? COVID and the Capitol suggest that it is.
Unless we understand the rhetorical crosswinds associated with such events, 我们
will be poorly equipped to live a modern life. Communication and the humanities
need one another. That is the story I tell here.

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代达罗斯, 美国艺术学院学报 & SciencesCommunication & Media Arts: Of the Humanities & the Future

I blame Shakespeare for the evil that befell me. As a sophomore English ma-

jor in 1964, I should have been focusing on aesthetic matters (especially on
the objective correlative) and I certainly should not have been thinking about
how King Lear reminded me of Lyndon Johnson. But I noticed the resemblance:
how Lear wanted to be worshipped by his daughters even as he tried to orches-
trate their emotions. I wondered if Johnson might not have a Lear Complex, 这
need to control without seeming to control, the need to be admired without open-
ing himself up to critique. 这是, 为了确定, a sophomoric thought. 更差, 我
ventured that thought in class. I recall the professor’s look to this day. It lay some-
where between contempt and disgust. How could I, his look queried, profane
Shakespeare’s world, a place where one’s feelings were meant to be recollected in
tranquility, where one was expected to just sigh knowingly?

That look–that look–is still emblazoned on my brain. My contribution in class
on that fated day may well have been fatuous, and I probably should have been
thinking deeper thoughts about the Bard. In my defense, 尽管, students on my
campus were beginning to register their opposition to the war in Vietnam, so it
seemed to me that Shakespeare might have something to say about the leader of
the free world in a time of turmoil. Alas, it turned out there was no room for poli-
tics in the English department. So I declared a second major. The communication
部门, I was to learn, would let me study rhetoric, language at full-stretch.
But what did that mean for graduate study? English at Columbia or rhetoric at
Penn State? I made a decision. Then life happened.

H igher education has always been a scandal, constantly adding new sub-

jects to its portfolio, domesticating them, and then turning them into a
new orthodoxy. Imagine the contretemps, 例如, 当在 1876, A
group of Harvard radicals proposed creating a department of English literature,
not a unit that would focus on proper authors like Aeschylus, Sophocles, 和
Euripides, but one that would study popularists like Christopher Marlowe, 本
约翰逊, and my friend William Shakespeare, writers who played to the crowd,
who engaged the base emotions, who made people laugh.2 Imagine, 也, the cam-
pus row at Princeton when, in the early 1900s, a department of philosophy was
proposed, not a unit for steeping young Princetonians in Calvinist doctrine, 但
one that would expose them to Kant, Hegel, and other upstart Germans.3

Things got worse. Suddenly, departments of classics had rivals on campus. 不
longer were Greek and Latin sufficient, some declared, but students needed to
communicate with their contemporaries in other countries as well. 在 1803, 西方
Point hired a professor of French studies, and soon departments of modern lan-
guage began sprouting up in the Ivies and near-Ivies.4 Simultaneously, 虽然
Yale had housed a department of history since the 1760s, history suddenly became
更短, with some faculty proposing to bypass the Renaissance and explore the

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151 (3) Summer 2022Roderick P. 哈特

American adventure itself. Would nothing stop such heresies? Could the profes-
soriate not be disciplined?

It could not, but it could create disciplines. 在 1914, a brave band of English
professors got the field of communication started when James Winans of Cor-
nell, Charles Woolbert of Illinois, James O’Neil of Wisconsin, and fourteen oth-
ers abandoned the National Council of Teachers of English to form their own
association, one that would place a primacy on practical speech, an association
that would, in the argot of the times, help people become more useful when they
spoke.5 Soon, new technologies advanced the discipline further: radio brought
argumentation to life; television brought literature to life; film brought history
to life. These new technologies changed not only what people said but how they
would be heard. Overnight, it seemed, students arrived on campus wanting to use
what they were learning even as they learned it. These students of communication
were an impatient lot, making them seem shallow to philosophers, impetuous to
历史学家, and prosaic to litterateurs. 仍然, they came.

A recent Humanities Indicators report of the American Academy of Arts

and Sciences released data about humanities departments in 2007 和
compared them with similar facts gathered ten years later.6 Total enroll-
ment for communication undergraduates in the United States was 686,330 在里面
fall of 2017, with an average of 897.2 students per department. Total graduate en-
rollment was 65,690 (85.9 per department), with full- and part-time faculty num-
bering 11,710 (25.5 per department). In part because these departments offered so
many communication skills courses, they had more than their share of part-time
faculty members.

The report contains both good and bad news for the humanities in general, 但
the indicators for communication studies are forward-leaning: more and more
departments at more and more universities, more students over time at both the
undergraduate and graduate levels. 历史, 英语, and modern language de-
partments had the most faculty, with communication ranking fourth, outnum-
bering the thirteen other disciplines sampled (语言学, 人类学, philos-
奥菲, 美国研究, 等等). Communication departments had an aver-
age number of female instructors, but their faculty members were granted tenure
more often than most departments.

Enrollment-wise, communication departments had the fourth-highest num-
ber of students of the seventeen disciplines assessed and ranked first in degrees
granted during the 2017–2018 academic year. Communication students ranked
second among those completing a minor (经常, 我猜测, in schools of business)
but they were less likely than most to have a “benchmarking” requirement for
graduation. 那是, instead of doing a thesis, communication students were es-
pecially likely to have one or more internships. Communication students report-

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代达罗斯, 美国艺术学院学报 & SciencesCommunication & Media Arts: Of the Humanities & the Future

ed liking their career services operations more than most students did, 和他们的
departments ranked first among those offering externships. Communication de-
partments ranked better than most in tracking their students’ career outcomes.

Also not surprising, given the recency of new media, 41 percent of communi-
cation departments offered fully online or hybrid courses (highest among the dis-
ciplines studied), although communication students were not heavily involved
in what has come to be known as the “digital humanities.” At the graduate level,
communication departments ranked third (of seventeen fields) in student enroll-
ments and their graduate students were more likely to be instructors of record (在
skills-level courses) than to provide grading or classroom support for advanced
undergraduate courses. While communication students often helped with cam-
pus recruitment efforts to attract community college students, they were not es-
pecially active in other forms of community service.

A s one of the newer disciplines, communication’s architecture differs from

campus to campus: different academic structures, different faculty com-
positions, different scholarly specializations. At the risk of over-general-
化, the field is now made up of four broad clusters that respond to quite dif-
ferent scholarly consortia: 1) communication and rhetorical studies (全国
Communication Association and the Rhetoric Society of America); 2) 新闻学
and mass communication (the International Communication Association and the
Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication); 3) film and
media arts (the Society for Cinema and Media Studies and the University Film &
Video Association); 和 4) advertising and public relations (the American Acad-
emy of Advertising and the American Association for Public Opinion Research).
Faculty members on the same campus (sometimes in the same department) af-
filiate with one or more of these clusters. 因此, it is not easy to make covering-law
statements about the field, but one gets some insight by looking at the different
ways it is configured on U.S. campuses:7

• Single unit (mostly social scientific): Arizona, Cornell, Ohio State, Michi-

两个都, Penn, Purdue, 斯坦福大学, UCLA, UCSB, UCSD.

• Single unit (mostly humanistic): 棕色的, 芝加哥, Dartmouth, Emory, 但-

sachusetts, 圣母, NYU, Pittsburgh, Tulane, 弗吉尼亚州, 耶鲁大学.

• Single unit (mostly balanced): 丹佛, Marquette, Miami, New Mexico,

Northeastern, Oregon, 犹他州, 华盛顿.

• Multiple units (co-located departments/schools): 伊利诺伊州, LSU, Maryland,
Minnesota, North Carolina, Northwestern, Penn State, 锡拉丘兹, 威斯康星州.

• Collective unit (inclusive/multidepartmental): 波士顿, 科罗拉多州, Florida,

印第安纳州, Michigan State, Rutgers, Temple, 德克萨斯州, USC.

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151 (3) Summer 2022Roderick P. 哈特

•

Interdisciplinary/graduate: 伯克利, Columbia, Duke, Georgetown, 头发-
vard, 和, 普林斯顿大学.

• Undergraduate/masters: Boston College, 乔治华盛顿, 伊萨卡岛, Ma-

calester, TCU, Tulane, Vanderbilt, Villanova, Wake Forest.

This is but a sampling of how the communication discipline is represented
in the United States. Virtually every state flagship offers a PhD in communica-
的, most state regionals offer a master’s degree, and the great majority of private
schools offers a bachelor’s degree. Moody College, for which I was dean between
2004 和 2015, shows how robust the field has become. The College is made up
of five academic departments, twelve research and outreach centers, and houses
both an NPR station and a PBS affiliate in its four-building complex. The College
currently has 102 tenure-track faculty members, 101 professional faculty, 302 职员
members, 4,373 undergraduate majors, 和 454 graduate students. The College
runs semester-long programs for its students in Los Angeles, 华盛顿, 华盛顿特区,
and New York City, has large career services and student advising offices, and em-
ploys seven full-time fundraisers. 超过 54,000 individuals have graduated from
the College since its inception, thirty of whom have received the Pulitzer Prize
and more than fifty an Emmy. Its PhD recipients now teach at colleges and univer-
sities across the United States and throughout the world. There is nothing about
Moody College that is not complicated.

T hat is also true for the communication field itself. Some faculty members

trace their roots to English departments in the early 1900s. Others harken
back to laboratory studies of World War II propaganda conducted by Har-
old Lasswell and his cohort at the Office of War Information. A significant num-
ber of faculty members in communication got their terminal degrees in sociolo-
gy, 心理学, and political science, gravitating to communication departments
because of their openness and taste for diversity. Other renegades came to media
arts departments from comparative literature and area studies, still studying liter-
ature but now literature on-the-move.

今天, the communication field boasts many specializations. Traditional stud-
ies of political rhetoric still abound, although they must now calculate how mass
media affect people’s receptivities. Scholars studying film, 电视, 和社会的
media report their work in over three dozen scholarly journals. Journalism histo-
rians generate hypotheses for survey researchers; others conduct online experi-
评论, exposing one set of subjects to Stimulus #1 and others to Stimulus #2. Stud-
ies of communication within complex organizations (那是, 商业, nonprofit,
and governmental settings) are now plentiful, but so too are studies of how par-
ents and children communicate at home. And there is more: What sorts of mes-
sages will get the elderly to take their medicine? How can teachers use new media

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代达罗斯, 美国艺术学院学报 & SciencesCommunication & Media Arts: Of the Humanities & the Future

in the high school classroom? Why is misinformation consumed so avidly these
天? Are online deepfakes really changing public opinion? How is the “Holly-
wood ethos” affecting films made by Europeans? Why are young people better
informed about environmental challenges than their elders?

One of my colleagues, Scott Stroud, a philosopher by training, has created
the Media Ethics Initiative, a wonderful archive of case studies that gets students
talking about the issues of the day.8 His students ask, 例如, if it is ethical
to use TikTok to snitch on people for violating COVID-19 restrictions. 他们还
ask what sort of political advertising–if any–should be censured? Are partisan
news outlets good for democracy despite their excesses? Should Twitter have cut
off Donald Trump? Is doxing always immoral? Are first-person shooter games
harmful to children and, if so, 如何? Is online deception harmless, dangerous,
不可避免的? Which memes go too far? Which Confederate memorials are allow-
有能力的? Should sports journalists profit financially from their coverage? Did Nike
advance or retard Colin Kaepernick’s civil rights initiative? New questions, 这
old humanities.

I began my professional career in 1970 at Purdue University, where I taught for

nine years. During my interview for a newly opened position at the Universi-
ty of Texas at Austin, I was told sotto voce that the department was conducting
informal meet-and-greets with undergraduates in an attempt to attract more ma-
jors. While the department was prosperous because of the skills courses it taught
to all students on campus, it had fewer than one hundred of its own kind, 麦-
ing the department seem insubstantial to some. 今天, that department has 584
majors.

Why the increase? 原因有很多, 但, generally speaking, the 1970s
and 1980s sent a new breed of students to campus. Their immersion in the elec-
tronic media was part of that story but they also brought a new mindset with them.
Herodotus was fine, they reasoned, and reading Jane Eyre enjoyable, but could one
combine creativity and pragmatism in equal measure and then make a career of
它? These students were unquestionably impatient, heirs to the land-grant men-
tality that has made American higher education so distinctive. Like those in busi-
ness and engineering, communication students embraced homo faber. 他们还
had a new set of heroes: Aristotle rather than Plato, Neil Postman instead of E. D.
Hirsch.

But this is also true: most communication students, like those in linguistics
and psychology, 拿 75 percent of their coursework in the arts and sciences writ
大的, as well they should. What speechwriter could write a speech, 毕竟, 和-
out a taste for history? Who can produce a clever advertisement without a sense
for cultural nuance? What journalist could write a feature story without the em-
pirical skills needed to sift through mounds of data responsibly? How can Twelve

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151 (3) Summer 2022Roderick P. 哈特

Years a Slave be brought to the screen without understanding Solomon Northrup’s
world of 1853? Everyday messages come and go but the messages that linger, 那些
that have impact, come from an education that is broad and deep.

What do students study when studying communication? Depending on the
breadth of the curriculum, the answer to that question varies from campus to
campus, but most departments offer a range of introductory skills classes. 这些
include public speaking, interviewing skills, introduction to advertising, basic re-
移植, elements of broadcasting, graphic design, feature writing, sound mixing,
introduction to screenwriting, 等等. On some campuses, these classes are
taught by lecturers or working professionals and, in the case of departments offer-
ing the doctorate, they are sometimes taught by graduate students.

Such courses draw directly on the humanities, focused as they are on com-
positional skills, audience analysis, structure and form, argument design, visual
dexterity, 和文化认同. Proletarian coursework like this would have
shocked the Oxford dons of the nineteenth century but America is America, A
place where transactionalism resides comfortably. Communication courses make
two bold promises: 1) put in the time and change who you are; 和 2) say what
you say and change the world. Rousseau would blanch. Ben Franklin’s ears would
perk up.

The interweaving of communication and the humanities can be seen by look-

ing at just a few of the courses taught at UT’s Moody College:

• Communication and rhetorical studies: theories of persuasion, 社区-
cation and social movements, political communication, conflict resolution,
communication and personal relationships, gender and communication, 阿尔-
gumentation and advocacy.

•

Journalism and mass communication: digital storytelling, news literacy,
media law, reporting social justice, online publications, sports reporting,
international journalism, online incivility, the Latinx newsroom, news and
性别, journalism portfolio.

• Film and media arts: media and society, narrative strategies, history of tele-
想象, world cinema, digital platforms, Internet cultures, global Holly-
木头, documentary production, film noir, interactive game development,
independent films.

• Advertising and public relations: creativity and culture, international ad-
vertising, brands and storytelling, health messaging, ethics of public rela-
系统蒸发散, communication campaigns, digital metrics, audience development
and engagement.

Here is something we too often forget: to engage others in communication is
to impose ourselves upon them, to narrow their options, and that brings power

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代达罗斯, 美国艺术学院学报 & SciencesCommunication & Media Arts: Of the Humanities & the Future

to the forefront. The courses listed above focus on questions like these: Whose
stories are worth telling? Is mass advertising hegemonic, public relations a whit-
ed sepulcher? How can community tensions be reduced and whose job is it to do
such work? Which political promises are legitimate, which a fraud? Who owns
the nation’s airwaves and what gratuities does ownership permit? Are all Amer-
icans being heard regardless of their gender and ethnicity? At what precise point
do digital discussions run afoul of human decency? What cultural assumptions
are built into the evening news? Must filmmakers conform to an implicit set of so-
cial norms? Which public arguments are legitimate? How do we know? Who de-
cides? These questions reveal how intertwined communication and the human-
ities have become.

T he field of communication is still a newcomer on the academic scene but

it has had its growing pains. On some campuses, turf wars have developed
between communication and the older disciplines, wars exacerbated by
imbalances in FTEs (full-time equivalents), most of which favor communication.
Because it is an applied liberal art, some traditionalists have questioned the field’s
depth while others are suspicious of its connection to popular culture. 还有其他-
er critics resurrect Augustine: to be genuine, communication should be sponta-
尼厄斯, not practiced; to be responsible, communication must lay out the whole
案件, not just the attractive parts; to be ethical, communication should be taught
by those who know the truth, not by those searching for it.

There have been tensions within the field as well. The 1970s brought entirely
new discourses to the discipline, as the rhetoric of civil rights and, 之后, wom-
en’s rights and gay rights demanded new places in the curriculum. Keeping up
with rapidly developing media modalities created budgetary problems in many
departments, problems that sometimes masked deeper resentments between se-
nior and junior faculty or between researchers and practitioners. The most nota-
ble tensions, 然而, were those between faculty in the humanities and social
科学, strains that continue to the present.9 These latter tensions resulted from
competing epistemologies but also from questions about what counts: 图书
versus articles, 单身的- versus co-authored studies, applied versus basic research,
foundation-based versus federal grants? The school-to-school taxonomy laid out
above shows how these tensions have been resolved (or sublimated) in universi-
ties across the United States.

Communication’s practical roots have let it escape some of the problems be-
setting other disciplines, but it has not escaped them all. “Communication schol-
ars have failed the challenges posed by critical theory,” say some scholars. “Its
laboratory experiments have insufficient statistical power,” say others. “康-
munication is too ‘white’ a discipline,” some argue, too willing to accept racial
privileges for the fortunate, cultural erasure for the rest.10 “Communication is too

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151 (3) Summer 2022Roderick P. 哈特

timid a discipline,” some complain, too ready to dismiss extramural controversies
over gay rights, gender rights, and labor rights. “Communication is too U.S.-cen-
tric,” say some, too dismissive of the capitalistic logic undergirding media pro-
gramming and too accepting of the sheer impossibility of bipartisan politics.
“Communication is too Western,” others argue, too ready to ignore the Global
South’s needs for cultural recognition, for new modes of governance, and for new
technologies of public engagement.11

Some disciplines are based on a principle: for philosophy, all truths must be in-
terrogated. Some disciplines are based on a habit: for English, reading expands the
人心. Some disciplines are based on a belief: for history, to ignore the past
is to become its victim. The discipline of communication, I suggest, is based on a
pledge: freedom goes to the articulate. This pledge has its entailments: Through
沟通, I decide who will pay me or love me or vote for me. Through
沟通, I decide who will share my truths, honor my gods, appreciate my
heritage, purchase my deodorant. Through communication, I become more than
flotsam on the seas of your prejudices, more than jetsam on the tides of your ig-
norance. Through communication, life’s waters become not my grave.12 Perhaps
these are truisms, but if so, that is what happens when a discipline is built on a
pledge.

在 1981, just as enrollments in communication were beginning to soar, 我曾是

asked to write an essay for a volume supported by the National Education As-
sociation. The essay I wrote was delightfully overwrought and, as I reread it
forty years later, its pontifications embarrass me. 仍然, the essay remains true to
the person I have become. In the piece, I castigate the New Philistines who, 什么时候
describing a college between halves of a Saturday afternoon football game, “make
orgiastic allusions to its famed nuclear accelerator, its lengthening cadre of law
school graduates, its burgeoning enrollment in data processing, and its newly de-
veloped techniques for increasing hog production.”13 Rarely, I noted, “do we find
academic institutions described as legitimate havens for those who love litera-
真实, 音乐, and the arts; who want to know something of their cultural heritage;
or who wish to detect moral dilemmas before the special prosecutor knocks on
their doors.” The New Philistinism, I warned, could soon engulf us.

I was only getting started. I went on to ask what special burdens are placed
upon faculty in communication when confronted with students who have not
mastered a foreign language and, 因此, who have little crosscultural sensitivity.
I also worried about students who struggled when committing their thoughts to
paper because they had taken too few English courses or who could not sustain
an argument beyond the level of moral expediency because they had eschewed
philosophy as well. Those of us in communication will be swamped by the New
Philistinism, I continued, if we fail to remember our heritage in the humanities.

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代达罗斯, 美国艺术学院学报 & SciencesCommunication & Media Arts: Of the Humanities & the Future

My solution at the time: to remember what it means to think rhetorically. 为了

me it meant this:

To think rhetorically means, 至少, to think about the resources of language
as well as to learn how to utter words. To think rhetorically means to consider the cul-
tural assumptions of would-be listeners and to take those assumptions into account
when speaking to them. To think rhetorically means to acknowledge that all ideas–
even technological ones–are debatable ideas and that no idea has pre-eminence un-
less people grant it same. To think well rhetorically is to seize upon the ethical dimen-
sions of a human issue and to lay them bare for listeners. To think well rhetorically is to
reason consecutively, to structure ideas and arguments in ways understandable to per-
sons ignorant about those ideas and arguments. To think well rhetorically is to disbe-
lieve almost everything one hears and to take intellectual solace in that skepticism.14

The conclusion I advanced at the time: communication without the human-

ities is forsaken. Said I:

It is quite possible that our students’ inability to understand subtle rhetoric when they
hear it results from their misunderstanding the complex human motivations depicted
in that unread Pirandello play or from their unfamiliarity with such historical person-
ages as Joe McCarthy and Huey Long. Their untutored critical sensibilities, dulled by
a pablum of media extravaganzas, are part of the problem as well. When our students
fail to understand how they are influenced by their social environment or how they
can marshal their intellectual resources to combat those influences, they play into the
hands of the New Philistines. . . . If communication is to become the New Humanities,
it must listen respectfully to the current din of pragmatism but it must hearken, 也, 到
the meeker cries of the Old Humanities.15

Naturally, I am delighted that communication enrollments are strong through-
out the United States and that a media-saturated world is greeting our students
warmly upon graduation. I am delighted as well that the field’s intellectual stan-
dards have gotten increasingly higher during my time in the academy. In the last
three years, 例如, humanities faculty members in my modest-sized depart-
ment have published three books with Cambridge, two with Oxford, two with
芝加哥, and one with Berkeley. During that same time, research conducted by
my social science colleagues has been funded by an astonishing variety of foun-
dations, 机构, and corporations, all designed to find out why communication
fails and when it succeeds. Communication is magical and something of a mys-
tery, but it is no longer a complete mystery.

Some members of my discipline are anguished that Harvard has no commu-
nication department for its undergraduates and that the Boylston Professorship
of Rhetoric and Oratory has been assigned to poets since 1925. Harvard still has
its star debaters, 当然, as well as the Harvard Crimson, the Harvard Lampoon,

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151 (3) Summer 2022Roderick P. 哈特

和, on the other side of campus, the Shorenstein Center on Media, 政治, 和
Public Policy. No doubt, Harvard students would be better off if they could take
courses like those offered at Moody College but, somehow, 我猜测, they will find
a way to make a living upon graduating. Elsewhere in the country, indeed almost
everywhere else, students will study communication, the modern incarnation of
the oldest humanistic discipline in the Western world.

关于作者

Roderick P. Hart is the Allan Shivers Centennial Chair in Communication and
Professor of Government at the University of Texas at Austin. He is also the Found-
ing Director of the Annette Strauss Institute for Civic Life. 他是, 最多
最近, Trump and Us: What He Says and Why People Listen (2020), Civic Hope: 如何
Ordinary Americans Keep Democracy Alive (2018), and Modern Rhetorical Criticism (4第三版。,
with Suzanne Daughton and Rebecca LaVally, 2017).

尾注

1 “Outcomes: Degrees Conferred, by Level, Discipline, and Gender, 2017–18,” The Chronicle
of Higher Education, 八月 16, 2020, https://www.chronicle.com/article/degrees-conferred
-by-level-discipline-and-gender-2017-18?cid2=gen_login_refresh&cid=gen_sign_in.
2 For more on the origins of English departments, see William R. 派克, “Where Do

English Departments Come From?” College English 28 (5) (1967): 339–351.

3 See Princeton University, “Department of Philosophy: The Early Years,” https://

philosophy.princeton.edu/about/early-years.

4 约翰·R. McCormick, “History of Foreign Language Teaching at the United States Military
学院,” Modern Language Journal 54 (5) (1970), https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-4781.1970
.tb02274.x.

5 Roughly ten years later, another group of malcontents left still other English departments
to form the first school of journalism at the University of Missouri. See Hilary Akers
Dunn, History of Journalism Education: An Analysis of 100 Years of Journalism Education (和-
published master’s thesis, Louisiana State University, 2018).

6 American Academy of Arts and Sciences, The Humanities in American Life: Insights from a 2019
Survey of the Public’s Attitudes and Engagement (剑桥, 大量的。: American Academy of
Arts and Sciences, 2020).

7 The first five groupings are restricted to programs regularly enrolling a significant number

of doctoral students.

8 The Media Ethics Initiative is housed within Moody College’s Center for Media Engage-

蒙特. 参见https://mediaethicsinitiative.org/.

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代达罗斯, 美国艺术学院学报 & SciencesCommunication & Media Arts: Of the Humanities & the Future

9 For a data-packed overview of these intradisciplinary differences, see James A. Ander-
son and Michael K. Middleton, “Epistemological Movements in Communication: 一个
Analysis of Empirical and Rhetorical/Critical Scholarship,” in A Century of Communi-
cation Studies: The Unfinished Conversation, 编辑. Pat J. Gehrke and William M. 基思 (新的
约克: 劳特利奇, 2015), 82–108.

10 For more on this matter, see a bracingly thoughtful set of essays edited by Thomas Na-
kayama, “Forum: Whiteness and Communication,” Communication and Critical/Cultural
学习 17 (2) (2019): 199–266.

11 These and other challenges to the discipline are described in helpful detail in the chapters

contained in Gehrke and Keith, 编辑。, A Century of Communication Studies.

12 Adapted from Roderick P. 哈特, “Why Communication? Why Education? Toward a Pol-

itics of Teaching,” Communication Education 42 (1993): 97–105.

13 Roderick P. 哈特, “Speech Communication as the New Humanities,” in Education for the
Eighties: Speech Communication, 编辑. Gustav Friedrich (华盛顿, 华盛顿特区: National Edu-
cation Association, 1981), 37. This and subsequent excerpts from this essay have been
slightly modified for presentation here.

14 同上。, 40.
15 同上。, 41.

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