PrintSome Columbia students may joke that they’re majoring in TV. When nights that should be spent reading Herodotus and Kant devolve into nights watching what happens when seven strangers stop being polite and start getting real, or vampire/human hybrids making love in the bayou, it may seem that we’re devoting more of our time to the study of the small screen than to reading the Great Books. For Columbians, TV is a sinful escape from real work. And unless you watched “Destinos” in ninth grade Spanish, it’s probably been a while since a TV show was assigned for any of your classes.
And yet, at an institution committed to a well-rounded education that’s strong in the arts and located in the one of the major TV capitals of the world, it seems odd that there is barely a single class at our university that’s devoted to studying TV’s production, history, or writing. It’s true that the history and study of television sounds less academic than say, comparative literature, but there still doesn’t seem to be any reason why the genre should be completely overlooked.
Television studies as a discipline certainly isn’t absent from all of higher education. On the contrary, many other top-tier universities have extensive TV studies offerings. Northwestern offers an undergraduate major in radio, TV, and film. NYU’s Tisch School offers an undergraduate film and TV degree, whose completion requires taking classes in TV production, history, and writing. For their minor in mass communications and media studies, Tufts even offers a class called “Reality Television.”
Perhaps Columbia could learn from Boston University’s Communication school. Deborah Jaramillo, an assistant professor at BU’s department of film and television, and author of a new book called “Ugly War, Pretty Package: How CNN and Fox News Made the Invasion of Iraq High Concept,” sees Television as serious stuff—serious enough to warrant a capital “T.” “There is this cultural hierarchy that demonizes or at least dismisses television. Television is a bad word in many academic circles. Film was legitimated in the academy very early on, [but] television has struggled,” says Jaramillo.
“When I get students to sit down and watch television as scholars,” she continues, “with a comprehensive understanding of the drama that unfolded between broadcasters and regulatory bodies … with an eye toward authorial style, with an awareness of the tension between creativity and commerce, and with a heightened sense of how audiences are hooked and constructed as fans and different types of consumers, then an entirely new world is opened up to them.” For Jaramillo, TV has proven to be a useful, rigorous subject for academic analysis—despite the disdain that many other academics direct toward her field.
Sure, NYU, BU, and Northwestern are universities with pre-professional bents, but Tufts is a liberal arts school just like Columbia. So why is it that Columbia is completely devoid of TV studies?
Perhaps there’s an “upstairs/downstairs” principle at work within the film studies department. After all, TV has always been film’s more frivolous younger sibling, the Star Magazine˜ to film’s Vanity Fair. But when asked about the relative respectability of the two genres, Annette Insdorf, director of Columbia’s undergraduate film studies program, has only positive things to say about television. “I believe that my colleagues, like myself, respect the medium of television, especially given the cross-over between major artists in both media,” she says. And Insdorf doesn’t completely leave out TV in her own film courses: “When I teach the work of Sidney Lumet in my ‘American Film History’ class, I talk about his crucial training in live television—not to mention that one of his best films of the past ten year, ‘Strip Search,’ was made for HBO,” says Insdorf.
Television has even proven itself to be a valuable teaching tool in some Columbia courses. Irene Motyl, who teaches a German class at Barnard that focuses on German telenovelas, believes wholeheartedly in the power of television to teach language. “Since they [TV shows] are part of popular culture, they are easier to understand. They rely mostly on visual images and sound and therefore are very accessible,” says Motyl.
Some may be surprised to hear that Motyl uses the German version of “Ugly Betty” as a teaching tool. “We look at the genre analytically, we talk about the main characteristics, compare them to the American soaps, and make a comparison of ‘Verliebt in Berlin’ to ‘Ugly Betty’ and the Spanish version, ‘Yo soy Betty, La Fea’” Motyl explains. “This way we develop a visual competency, expand our vocabulary, the structures of colloquial, as well as analytical language—all in German.”
Even so, many undergraduates are skeptical about the academic heft of television. When asked, some Columbia students say that they believe there are inherent differences between TV and film that make study of the former less worthy. As Sam Laskey, a Columbia College junior majoring in film studies says, “Instead of producing two hours that are meant to stand the test of time, TV stations create tons of programming to satisfy the moment. The goal of most TV is not permanent. It is hard to analyze something that was never intended to last past next week’s episode.”
Point taken. There’s a lot of crap on TV that’s held to a much lower standard than Oscar-bait films. But no one can argue that an episode of “The Sopranos” doesn’t hold more cultural worth than say, the two carefully edited hours of “The Love Guru.”
Still, the stereotype of TV being all fluff and no substance could be behind its absence at Columbia. Some believe that TV is omitted from the film studies curriculum not because of disrespect for the genre, but rather because of insecurities within the film studies department itself. “The problem begins with the fact that film studies has always been viewed as a slightly dubious course of study. They assume that the pop culture associations with television will either a) muddy the waters or b) affirm what skeptics of film art have long believed,” says Jordan Lord, a Columbia College sophomore majoring in film studies.
Disrespect for TV is only one factor that explains why Columbia currently offers no classes that focus exclusively on television. “We would love to have more courses in the area of television studies, but [we] suffer from under-funding,” says Annette Insdorf. “We used to offer ‘History of Television’—a popular elective course—but our adjunct budget is terribly limited,” she continues.
The lack of TV studies may also be symptomatic of Columbia’s dogged opposition to pre-professionalism. As Columbia’s promotional literature has reminded countless applicants, students, professors, and potential donors, Columbia is first and foremost a liberal arts institution. It is committed to offering a laundry list of “-ologys,” those lofty subjects whose study expands the mind and leaves career choices blissfully open-ended. Other students toil at pre-professional factories, but Columbians learn how to think as opposed to what to think. At least theoretically, Columbia keeps its curriculum pure, free from subjects like “business,” “accounting,” and “communications.”
TV studies, therefore, may be a field that’s too closely related to doing and making rather than thinking. This is all well and good, but some students bemoan the lack of TV studies as just another way that Columbia doesn’t prepare its students for life outside these iron gates. “There are more jobs in television than in film. If we are being trained for the real world—I’m sorry, the thought of being trained for the real world at Columbia makes me laugh—then we should be trained in TV,” says Sam Laskey.
If the teaching of actual TV production is out of the question given the composition of Columbia’s curricular structure, TV’s place at Columbia comes down to how the powers that be at Columbia categorize television. If TV is mere entertainment, then it probably doesn’t belong in Columbia’s academic cannon. If TV is a product of culture, then perhaps it should be analyzed—as it already is in Motyl’s classroom—in more language, anthropology, sociology, and history courses. And if TV truly falls under the elusive heading of “art,” then it certainly belongs in the film studies department.
The absence of TV in our curriculum may be a case of Columbia unfairly thumbing its nose at a valuable area of study that could enrich the academic lives of its students. It seems silly if it really is just TV’s mass appeal that is keeping it out of Columbia’s courses. After all, the Bible is the bestselling book of all time, and it’s taught in both Lit Hum and CC. Imagine the possibilities if Columbia did start to embrace TV studies. Who wouldn’t want to take a new Sociology class called “From Flavor Flav to Bret Michaels: Class and Gender Bias on VH1”?