Download Interview with Terrence P. Moran

Interview with Terrence P.
Moran
© Terence P. Moran and Figure/Ground
Dr. Moran was interviewed by Angela Cirucci. October 12th,
2012.
Terence
P.
Moran
is
Professor
of
Media,Culture,
and
Communication at New York University, where he has taught
since 1967. In 1970, he co-founded the graduate programs in
Media and Communication, which he directed for over thirty
years. In 1985, he was the founding director of the
undergraduate program. The co-editor (with Neil Postman and
Charles Weingartner) of Language in America (1969),the coauthor (with Eugene Secunda) of Selling War to America: From
the Spanish American War the the Global War on Terror (2007),
and the author of Introduction to The History of
Communication: Evolutions and Revolutions (2010), he is the
author of numerous articles on language, media, and propaganda
in both academic and popular publications.He is also a writer
and/or producer of documentaries on such diverse subjects as
career women in New York City (City Originals: Women Making It
Work, 1994), the conflict in Northern Ireland (Sons of Derry,
1993), and the cultural history of McSorley’s Old Ale House
(McSorley’s New York, 1987), for which he shared a New York
Area Emmy Award for Outstanding Arts/Cultural/Historical
Programming. He has received a Teaching Excellence Award from
the Steinhardt School, a Louis Forsdale Award for Outstanding
Educator in the Field of Media Ecology from the Media Ecology
Association, and a special Founder of Media Ecology Award from
the New York State Communication Association.
How did you decide to become a university professor? Was it a
conscious choice?
I’m not sure that I decided to do it; it was an evolutionary
process. I served four years in the Marine Corps and when I
came out I went to NYU. At that time I was intending to be a
writer. I thought if I got a degree in English, I could get a
job as a teacher and then I could have summers off to write.
So I became an English major. I graduated and went to teach in
the New York City public school system. At the time, in order
to get the license and to get more money, you had to have a
master’s degree; so I stayed on and got a master’s degree in
English. During that time Neil Postman had been my professor
and then we’d become sort of friendly, and he trained me a
bit. He encouraged me to go into the doctoral program. So I
went into the Ph.D.. I went for a year part-time while I was
teaching, still in the public school system. And then Neil
said to me: “We’ve got an opening for a teaching fellow. Would
you like to do that?” So I said “Sure.” One year after that
there was a special opening – somebody left immediately
because he was just promoted to assistant professor, and they
asked me if I would like to take the position as an
instructor. So I got the job as an instructor. I was never
interviewed by anybody; I never turned in a resume or
anything. That was 1967 and at that time I was teaching here
at NYU, and Neil and I were working together on designing a
graduate program in language and communication, which
eventually morphed into the Media Ecology Program in 1970. We
finished and I graduated with my degree in ’71, and then I was
appointed assistant professor. And two years later I was named
associate professor. So I sort of slid into it – I didn’t set
out to be a university professor.
Who were some of your mentors in university and what were some
of the most important lessons you learned from them?
Well, I was really fortunate that I learned a great deal from
a number of people and Neil was in English education in those
days. Neil helped me tremendously to think about communication
and language and those sorts of things, and to think
critically. But I had about a half dozen fabulous professors
here: Floyd Buckingham was one, Roger Cayer was a tremendously
good guy, and there were just a bunch of really, really good
people. Neil became my mentor and my guide and my dissertation
Chair, so I was mostly influenced by him. He had a great
friend who wasn’t here but was teaching in Queens – Charlie
Winegardner – who became a great mentor to me. And then
outside of that, I had taken courses in communication, both
undergraduate and graduate, in what was in those days called
the Communication and Education department. It was established
by Charles Siepman, and was one of the first such departments
in the United States, started in the late ‘40s, if I remember
the history of it. I had classes with both Siepman and George
Gordon, who was a fantastic professor of communication who
wrote roughly ten books on the discipline of communication and
moved around a number of places. He and I stayed friends for
many, many years. And he was just an exceptionally good
teacher.
I would have to say, though, that Neil was my major influence.
It wasn’t in just the content of what he taught me, but he
taught me how to think and how to teach.
In your experience, how did the role of university professor
“evolve” since you were an undergraduate student?
I can only speak from my own experience. The university has
moved from what the sociologists call a “social system” to a
“bureaucratic system.” It used to be a much more collegial
kind of place where a lot of the decisions and a lot of the
structures were quite informal. And now they’ve become highly
technical, highly rigid, very formal. Not just simply
formalized but very, very technical. I mean no one could be
hired the way I was. Sometimes it astonishes my young
colleagues who are just joining us that I never went through
anything that they are. It was an evolutionary process because
the people who hired me knew me as a student; they knew what
my qualities were, and what my work was so there wasn’t a big
debate about it. And that process was done a lot in those
days. It was good and bad: It was good because it was
informal, but it was bad in the sense that it really was there
for networking. We didn’t use those terms, but if you knew
somebody, you were there. You were hired more on whim than
anything else.
The communication environment here changed. So the medium of
the university changed and it became much more bureaucratic,
much more hierarchical. And that wasn’t done because there was
a change in the structure of technology. It was done because
there was a change in the people who were running the place.
They moved to another kind of model. There was nothing to say
that you couldn’t run it the other way, but it’s become much
more corporate. And I am told by colleagues that this is the
norm around America, that the universities are becoming more
like business corporations. Decisions are being made more
along those business lines of profit and loss, rather than
more socialized lines of what’s worth knowing and what’s the
best way people learn.
Off the record, Dr. Peter Fallon commented that, “when you
wrote a reaction paper or a critical analysis for Terry,
pretty much every square inch of remaining white space on each
page was filled with his comments, questions, objections, and
encouragements.” He pointed out that he integrated this
approach into his own pedagogy and tried to teach his students
that what they were learning was a process, not a product.
What makes a good teacher today? How do you manage to command
attention in an age of interruption characterized by attention
deficit and information overflow?
I still think that the foundation of good teaching is the same
as it always was – which is that you practice critical
thinking and you facilitate your students into becoming
critical thinkers. Peter’s very kind comments have to do with
what I write on student’s papers, which are always questions.
I almost never, ever write a declarative sentence. I learned
that from Postman – that you should ask questions. And so it’s
always a question of how it works with the general theory: I
don’t know what the truth is but I can ask questions about
what you think. We can identify weaknesses. I try to do that,
try to help the students. But it’s a process. It’s very hard,
and good teachers try to teach people to do that. They teach
me to help others think for themselves, and you provide
students with ways of learning and ways of thinking, and you
hope it works out. I just came from a lecture of 110 students,
trying to teach them the history of communication. And it’s a
hard thing to do, to try to get them to think in a kind of a
critical way over a long period of time. There’s not much
chance for feedback. It’s the environment too. Talk about a
communication environment – I’ve taught seventh, eighth, and
ninth grades in middle school and high school, and I’ve taught
everything from freshman to Doctoral students in university.
It makes a difference how many people you’ve got in a room,
and it makes a difference how committed they are. By and
large, graduate students are easier to teach because
they want to learn and you are trying to help them think
critically. There’s a real difference between them and a lot
of undergraduate students these days. You didn’t ask the
question, but there is a real difference. When I started
teaching here in the late ‘60s, the students that were here,
almost every one of them, were paying his or her own way, or
the parents were. And these were people who were committed to
going to school. Many of the students now – almost all them –
are full-time students. They are getting all kinds of
scholarships and benefits and loans. And a lot of them are
here not because they want to be here, but because their
families want them to be here. And they’re not as motivated,
quite frankly. In the old days, if you mentioned two or three
extra books, the students were out reading them. Here you can
barely get them to read the assigned stuff. They are very
pragmatic these days. I don’t think that it has to do with
intelligence or anything like that; I think that it has to do
with total commitment. And I think college has become watered
down because the people going to school now wouldn’t have gone
thirty years ago. So, in a sense, that self-selection made the
students better, but much more independent, thinkers. And,
quite frankly, it’s harder to teach now than it was thirty
years ago. Students were more interesting then.
What advice would you give to aspiring university professors
and what are some of the texts young scholars should be
reading today?
My interests are the history of communication and propaganda.
I have a bunch of books on cave art, prehistoric paintings and
the like. The best one of those I know is Randall
White’s Prehistoric Art, but I’ve got half a dozen others
sitting over here at the moment. Daniel Everett has a book out
called Language: The Cultural Tool, which I found quite good.
And then James Glikes’ The Informationwas a very, very
interesting book. I used it with a graduate class last year;
they had a hard struggle since they found it a little harder
to get through. That’s a really good book, but the problem
with that one is that you actually have to know the ShannonWeaver model really well before you can understand what he’s
doing, because he doesn’t explain it to well. But I still
found the book really exciting and interesting, and I thought
that it was a very powerful piece of work. I used a couple of
standard texts on the history of writing, including a book
calledThe Story of Writing by Andrew Robinson, which is a
pretty good thing and there’s another, The History of
Writing by Albertine Gaur, and then there is an ancient one
(but it’s still great) by I.J. Gelb called The Study of
Writing. It’s one of the really first great books on writing
that I find tremendously useful. Regarding the study of
language, Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct – even though
I don’t agree with it I like it and I use it. On Writing, by
Walter Ong, Morality and Literacy, by Eric Havelock, The
Origins of Western Literacy – I still think that’s one of the
great, fabulous books on the topic. And then on printing,
Eisenstein’s good, two-volume history of printing, The
Printing Press is an Agent of Change. Steinberg’s Five Hundred
Years of Printing is a great book. Those are some of the best
ones I know on that.
I don’t know if there is any single great book on the other
stuff. Of course, in terms of overview, Marshall McLuhan –
always. Harold Innis, another excellent Canadian – I still
find his work just extraordinary and provocative, and worth
thinking about. It’s rather helpful for trying to get the
understanding of the whole. I’m just into books that I have
been using lately to teach from and to use them with the
students. One guy I left out is David Crystal. He’s got a
book, How Language Works ,andhe’s also the editor of
the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, which I find very
useful. Another work – recommended to me by a friend of mine,
Neil Hickey – is Paul Starr’s The Creation of the Media.
One of the things that I stress in my own thinking and in my
teaching is that language is the basis of all language
communication. So if you don’t understand language and how
that developed and then how writing developed, and how that
led to printing, then you don’t understand how the electronic
stuff came along. This is the core of the thing. So one of the
things that I do first with my students today is I ask them
what they do with their smart phones. They talk into it, they
take pictures with it, they text with it, they Tweet with it –
and everyone one of those activities is connected to an
earlier technology, and to language. So, I keep stressing that
over and over again. So I guess in that sense, I left out
somebody – and that is Socrates, in the great dialogue called
Phaedrus, which influenced Walter Ong so much. That is one of
the key documents of the difference between writing and
speech. It is the first place where somebody noted that the
structure of the medium makes a difference in what is going to
happen.
I would tell inspiring professors to read – a lot. I sometimes
think about it and when I give students a book or two books to
read on a topic. I’ll have maybe 50 books on the topic, and of
them I have chosen these one or two. Read widely but deeply so
that you are well-read in an area. And in communications it’s
a little difficult, because so many people become specialized.
I’m not per se, since I am doing the histories of propaganda
and communication – these are sweeping areas. It is very much
in the Innis-McLuhan tradition of trying to understand it all.
It’s hard to read it all; there is so much reading that you
have to do. One of my T.A.s said to me yesterday when I was
giving what we were going to do in this class, “That’s an
awful a lot of anthropology, isn’t it?” And it is! But you
know that’s what language is about. It’s about paleontology
too, and it’s about ancient civilizations. It’s not enough,
for example, to know that Egyptians developed hieroglyphs. You
really have to know about the history of Egypt. So I may have
read 50 books on the history and culture of Egypt, and the
structures that way. Unless you inform yourself deeply, then
whatever you say is just whatever you have happened to have
read or assigned to the students – and that’s not very
helpful.
In 1964, Marshall McLuhan declared, in reference to the
university environment that, “departmental sovereignties have
melted away as rapidly as national sovereignties under
conditions of electric speed.” This claim could be viewed as
an endorsement of interdisciplinary studies, but it could also
be regarded as a statement about the changing nature of
academia. Do you think the university as an institution is in
crisis or at least under threat in this age of information?
He was wrong. We tried. We tried in our own department to be
interdisciplinary. We tried to have these interdisciplinary
connections with other parts of the university. It fails for
one reason – it’s back to the bureaucratic structure again. It
fails because it gets in the way of money. This is true of
private and public institutions in the United States. As you
may know, even the public universities in America have to fund
raise now; they have to raise a lot of money on their own. So,
everybody’s into making money and then each department gets
pressured by the Dean into making money. And they are not
going to give up anything that gets in the way of their moneymaking, so all corporation always fails because who is going
to control the money, who is going to get the money? I’ve
tried here for 35 years with many colleagues from other
schools and departments. We have tried to put these
multidisciplinary things together, and even though sometimes
they talk about knocking down what they call this silo of
departments, the departments remain there, and that’s because
we are held accountable. My department chair is held
accountable for how much money we turn in and how much profit
we make and how much we spend. It’s just like a business. And
every time you do an interdisciplinary thing you weaken your
financial base. It’s that simple. We used to have a lot more
cooperation, but it was easier than. Now, it’s very hard to
cross lines here, very hard. I absolutely believe in the
interdisciplinary approach; in fact, our department was
founded on that very idea. And we do practice it as best we
can, we do try to get as much of that in there, and we do try
to teach it to the students. We try to always have different
ways of doing things, not just one way. To do that you need to
understand communication, to understand anthropology, and
sociology and history and philosophy and psychology. So the
books we’ve used and the people we’ve used and the thinkers
that we have brought in are always reflective of trying to
extend that whole way of thinking. But, as I said, I think
that McLuhan was wrong. He was talking in ‘64. There may have
been a moment then when we were all talking like that, and we
thought we could do it. But, we ran up against the
bureaucracy.
I’ll give you a hard example. Somewhere about 25-30 years ago
NYU was in the reign of a man I know as the best president we
have ever had in this university, John Branamus. He did
tremendous things for this university, and he encouraged a
group of us from all over the university – multiple schools –
to be on a telecommunications committee together. And a bunch
of us from Arts and Sciences in the journalism department,
from the law school, from the Tisch School of the Arts in Film
and Television and Cinema Studies, and a couple of guys from
the business school were doing marketing communication. And
about ten of us got together and wrote a proposal to create a
school of communication here at NYU, putting all of our
departments together into a school where we would do this
interdisciplinary study of communication. And they disbanded
the committee because it threatened the income and prestige of
five schools. It was that simple. My own department is the
biggest money-maker in our school. It’s not the largest
department, but we make the most profit. The Dean is never
going to give us up. She would have a real big hole in her
budget. She’d be in deficit. And that’s the truth. The same is
true in arts and sciences, journalism – they are very
profitable. In the Tisch School of the Arts, the Film and
Television Department is their most prestigious. Nobody has
ever heard of any of the other departments over there. This is
the Hollywood Department. And nobody wants to deal with this
sort of thing. The guy from the law school got so upset over
this he resigned from NYU. It was a great idea – they asked us
for an idea, we had a great idea, it was feasible, we showed
them how to do it, wasn’t a big deal, but you know that’s what
I mean. McLuhan did not consider the money and the bureaucracy
enough.
In 2009, Francis Fukuyama wrote a controversial article for
theWashington Post entitled “What are your arguments for or
against tenure track?” In it, Fukuyama argues that the tenure
system has turned the academy into one of the most
conservative and costly institutions in the country, making
younger untenured professors fearful of taking intellectual
risks and causing them to write in jargon aimed only at those
in their narrow subdiscipline. In short, Fukuyama believes the
freedom guaranteed by tenure is precious, but thinks it’s time
to abolish this institution before it becomes too costly, both
financially and intellectually. Since then, there has been a
considerable amount of debate about this sensitive issue, both
inside and outside the university. What do you make of
Fukuyama’s assertion and, in a nutshell, what is your own
position about the academic tenure system?
Well, I’m old-fashioned; tenure is the only thing that
protects the faculty from the administration. It’s not a great
protection, but it’s the only one we have. Fukuyama’s position
is exactly the same position as that of all administrators in
all big universities: they would like to get rid of tenure,
and they would like to have everybody on contract. First of
all, it would lower their costs, but on top of that, they
could do it two ways. As you get older and make more money,
they could let you go and hire younger people to keep the
overhead down. Secondly, you would have faculty that were
totally under control of the administration. Even now with
tenure, most faculty do not stand up to the university. They
privately will be upset with something, but they are afraid to
stand up because even with tenure, you can be punished in many
ways. You don’t get as big of a raise, you don’t get the
grants, you don’t get any extra support, you don’t get any
recognition. I have a number of colleagues who were
loggerheads of the administration and they simply get punished
for it. Now, they are tenured and can’t be fired, but if they
could fire them they would. Every university is trying to do
this, simply because tenure costs. It’s really that simple.
And it allows people to speak up to the president. I can stand
up in a meeting and disagree with the president and he can’t
fire me and he can’t demote me. But he could certainly make my
life miserable if he wanted to. Which has to do with things
like housing. We get subsidized housing here at NYU, and if
they like you they give you a nicer place. If you give them a
hard time they just don’t have to do it. So, I think Fukuyama
is making a fortune, just so he can say that. But, I think
that the tenure is at the core of the university. It’s the
only thing that protects faculty – and it’s not even that
strong, by the way.
The public universities in most states have unions, a very
rigid kind of thing. Now some of the rigidity is not good, but
at the same time, they are protected. You would have a harder
time doing something to somebody. It’s very hard in a private
university to prove bias, like let’s say a chairman didn’t
like you. It’s hard because it’s judgment, but if I write a
book and there is nothing to say that the people who read this
say it is a good book, they could say well this is a pretty
awful book, or it’s dumb, or whatever – they can say anything
they want.
Media Ecology, Medium Theory, The Toronto School of
Communication, Canadian Communication Theory… Is there a
difference among these terms, in your view?
Lance Strate wrote an article about ten years ago at least
wherein he talked about the three schools of media ecology –
the Toronto School, which of course would have been Innis and
McLuhan, the St. Louis School, which would be Walter J. Ong,
and then the New York School, which was Postman and the rest
of us here. He sort of grouped us all that way and yes – we
share the same name. There has always been some argument about
who first used the term “media ecology.” McLuhan used it and
liked it, but we used it for the program and liked it for a
long time. I still am a professor of media ecology here even
though there is no program any longer. “Media theory” is
something else. I always think that that smacks of Europe –
the Germans, French, and other thinkers. But the Toronto
School would have been very compatible with us. I don’t know
about Canadian communication theory now. If you mean the
classic stuff, then yes, we are all thinking the same thoughts
and working toward it in the same of way. At the moment the
name of department is Media, Culture, and Communication, which
is not a bad name, given the sense of what we were trying to
do. Postman used to say toward the end of his life that what
we were really doing was contextual analysis. We were
analyzing contexts, communication contexts, environments. He
was always really strong with that environmental idea.
What do you make of the fact that the doctorate program at NYU
no longer carries “media ecology” as its title? What do you
see media ecology evolving into in the future?
It bothers me a great deal. I think it was one of the greatest
errors ever made. It wasn’t that they had anything to replace
it with; they just wanted to get rid of it. Partly because
they think that the people who voted on this didn’t really
understand it. They never committed themselves to it. In fact,
they lied when they got their jobs. But it was a deliberate
thing to wipe it out after Neil died. If Neil had lived, it
wouldn’t have happened, if he were there. But I was out-voted.
And they just did this thing and – I say this as analytically
as possible – they haven’t found a core to replace it. So we
have meetings every year wherein we try to find out where we
are going and what are we doing. And all of their complaints,
all of what’s wrong, is exactly what they caused by destroying
media ecology, which wasn’t just the program’s way of
thinking. It was a way of behaving with students. It’s that
kind of congenial collegiality. And we used to fortify that
with conferences wherein we would talk to our students as
equals. This faculty didn’t want to do that any longer because
they didn’t want to associate with students. They wanted to
just deal with them as professor-student, not as equal
thinkers. I think they made a tremendous error. The place is
making a tremendous amount of money, but it was built on media
ecology. We were the ones who designed the original doctoral
program; we designed the undergraduate program, which now has
750 students who support the graduate programs. All of that
came from media ecology. But there is no center now, there is
no core, there is no direction. Every time we have these crazy
meetings it’s the same issue – they identify all of their
problems, but they don’t see what the solution is, which is
putting media ecology back into the program.
One of your areas of specialization is propaganda, both
political and sociological. Has your approach to propaganda
been informed by the media ecology tradition in any way? How
can these two areas of scholarly research/inquiry inform one
another?
Oh, totally. I learned propaganda analysis from George Gordon,
and one of his inspirations was Jacques Ellul, and his great
book
on
propaganda,
Technological
Society.
Ellul’s Technological Society was one of the basic texts of
the media ecology program. He was our way of looking at
technology. He has a very McLuhanesque view of it – that the
medium is the message, the technology is the message. Alewell
is my guide in this whole thing. Of everything I have read of
the history of propaganda, from ancient time until now – and I
read hundreds of books on it – Ellul is still to me the best
guide, and I still use his books every year in my propaganda
classes. Ellul was a modelistic sociologist, but he is all
over the place – not a rigid fellow. And the two books
Propaganda and The Technological Society are part of what we
saw as the foundations to what we were doing. We were using
Lewis Mumford as well, On Technology, but he seems a little
out of date now. Essentially Ellul’s argument is the same as
McLuhan’s: that the medium is the message because, he argues,
the content of propaganda doesn’t matter. It’s the structure
that does. And whether you are selling democracy or
totalitarianism, Nazism or communism, the structure is the
same; you produce the same kind of thinking and behaving
person – someone who is not an independent thinker. I think he
says somewhere that a person can do a lot of things with
propaganda, but that person can’t make a democratic person. He
also said that all you do is wind up getting a storm trooper
spouting democratic slogans. And that is so clearly
McLuhanesque.
What are you currently working on?
My editor thinks – and she is pushing me on this – I’m trying
to write a book on analyzing propaganda. I want it to be media
ecological approach. And I have been troubled by it. Because I
have been teaching it for a long time, and have taught it in
different ways, I just can’t figure out which way to do the
book at the moment. I’m trying to break out of my historical
bias, and do it in another, more thematic way. And until I can
get that idea crystalized, I can’t go ahead with it/ My hope
is that I will figure it out sometime this semester and get
started over the holidays on the book and finally get it
written within the next 6-8 months.
Any final thoughts?
Just the totality of all of it. I was very fortunate in that I
was first trained as an English scholar. I learned how to read
critically and I also learned about language and the
structures and semantics of language. I thought that was a
tremendous background for me. If you know how to decode
literature, you can decode anything. You are used to looking
at symbols and structure and figuring out how they work. You
are taught to be analytic at all times. And especially, I was
lucky enough to study in the department that was influenced by
a woman named Louise Rosenblatt – she wrote a very important
book back in the ‘30s calledLiterature’s Exploration.
Essentially, Louis’ theory was that literature was not a text;
it was an experience. What she was interested in was the
relationship between the reader and the text, and why people
were making meanings, what kind of meanings readers were
making out of a text, and why? What influenced that, and how
do you do it? Your question wasn’t what is Hamlet’s
motivation, the question becomes, “well how do you react to
Hamlet, what do you think his motivation is, and why do you
think that?” It becomes something about you, and I have always
thought that that was quite useful.
And there is one other thing, the other end of it – the
writing. One of the things that Postman did was he wrote so
clearly. He used to say if you can’t figure it out, then you
don’t know what you are talking about. No tolerance for these
very arcane, convoluted discussions, like how some of the
theorists do; they twist it. I like clear writing, absolutely
clear writing. Some people think that McLuhan is not writing
clearly. But he is if you know what he’s read. That was the
thing too. I guess we were really privileged to have had an
English background because we knew what McLuhan was talking
about, we knew what his references were. He didn’t like to
explain where they came from, but they were there. He’d be
tossing in all these things from Finnegan’s Wake. If you
knew Finnegan’s Wake, then you knew what he was talking about,
but if you didn’t, you thought it was gibberish. I truly
treasure the quality of writing. I like writers who are very
clear in what they are writing about, and get to the point. I
try to teach that to my students too, to be as honest as you
can, and if you understand it, tell the people what it is
about.
©
Excerpts and links may be used provided that full and clear
credit is given to Terrence P. Moran
and Figure/Ground with appropriate and specific direction to
the original content.
Suggested citation:
Cirucci, A. (2012). “A Conversation with Terrence P.
Moran,” Figure/Ground. October 26th.
< http://figureground.org/interview-with-terrence-p-moran/ >
Questions? Contact Laureano Ralón at [email protected]