Higher Education Has Always Been Commercial: Its embrace of pop culture, mass media, and marketing has sustained it

[...]the American research university is defined not by its separation from but by its appropriation of commercial media. College football conveyed the appeals of "campus life" to millions, but it would never have done so without coverage by mass-market magazines, movies, and pioneering radio networks like NBC, which first broadcast the Rose Bowl in 1927. In working with societies like the National Education Association, the public-relations pioneer Edward L. Bernays noted, universities sought not only to promote themselves but also to redress more general concerns, such as the lack of prestige for scholarly expertise. The academy helped develop "market-speak" in the United States, thereby providing professionals inside its walls and out with tools to garner and manage the attention of others. [...]the ability to speak in different vernaculars to different audiences is a longstanding, if underappreciated, academic virtue.