Niall Ferguson disses Media Studies in the City of Marshall MacLuhan

Media studies guru and one of Canada's favourite sons, Marshall McLuhan

The Munk Debates were held at a packed Roy Thompson Hall in Toronto last Friday where the motion to be resolved was 'Does the 21st Century Belong to China?' Henry Kissinger, 88, took this opportunity to promote his new book and debated in public for the first time in his long career.  Joining him in the 'con' position was CNN personality Fareed Zakaria. The statesman and the journalist squared off against the scholars, Harvard economic historian Niall Ferguson and his partner, Tsinghua University international economist David Liu (李稻葵). As is standard for Munk debates, a pre-debate tally of audience opinion was taken with 21% undecided on the motion and the 'cons' at 40% were only one percentage point above the 'pros' at 39%. The audience was overwhelmingly open-minded with 96% stating they would be willing to change their outlook based on the outcome of the debates. It was going to be interesting.

And it was. All the main issues were brought up, the widening gap between rich and poor as the downside of China's meteoric rise, China's recent military activity, demographic problems, growing geopolitical importance, domestic infrastructure challenges, African investment etc.. The interaction was engaging, professional and scholarly. At one point though, Ferguson may have gaffed and gaffed badly.

In driving home his point regarding increasing innovation in China (which he gauged by the increasing number of patent applications) he also mentioned the vast population of Chinese students that are studying abroad.  Ferguson paradoxically tried to defend the Chinese nation as innovative by implicitly claiming that Chinese will learn innovation through their careers at Western universities. He then began listing the types of degrees that would be of benefit to China, engineering, and hard sciences mostly, and finished off before sitting down by stating dismissively, "And not a PhD. in 'media studies'".

The tone seemed to suggest that media studies as a field was somehow not useful when it came to promoting innovation. Worse yet, he said it in such a way as though he were passing off the idea of 'media studies' as a joke unto itself. Ferguson laughed a little at his own joke as he took his seat but I think even he was aware that the Toronto audience my have been clapping but it was not laughing with him.

It's safe to assume that Ferguson is not particularly aware of the history of media studies (though he borrows the distinctly techy term 'app' in his new book) or he may have known that Toronto has played a major role in that history since its beginnings. In 1963, the grandfather of media theory, Marshall "the Media is the Message" McLuhan established the world's first ever media studies programme at the Centre for Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto (where the charitable foundation of event host, Peter Munk, established the Munk School for Global Affairs in addition to the Munk Debates).  Doubtless some members of the audience studied at that institution. Some may even have had PhDs. and they are acutely aware of and proud of the role both the University of Toronto and the city itself have had in forwarding media studies as a respectable academic endeavour. Famous for his research skills, Ferguson really ought to have known this about media studies before slighting its capability of contributing to practical innovation and doing this in the city where it first became an academic field.

When Zakaria offered his rebuttal, there were several points he could have addressed but it seemed he had read the crowd's non-reaction to Ferguson's attempt at humour and only discussed that point. He mentioned research and development expenditures of Microsoft and compared it to that of Apple. The R&D expenditures at Apple are significantly lower in both absolute and relative terms because rather than hiring strictly software engineers and computer scientists, Apple's approach is all about design and focuses on how humans interact with the machine interface. "Exactly the kind of thing one learns with a PhD. in media studies," concluded Zakaria before sitting down to thunderous applause. So, in addition to possibly offending members of the audience by poo-pooing media studies in general, Ferguson was also apparently wrong about the source of innovation in the IT industry and Zakaria took both factors and went straight for the jugular with them.

Though the debate was argued well on each side, an initially very undecided audience voted heavily in favour of the 'con' position in the end. It's impossible to say how much an effect Ferguson's mini-slight on media studies may have had on that outcome but if it cost the 'pro' side even a little bit, it does prove McLuhan's own axiom that "A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding."