May 24-25, 2014: Crowd-sourced Images of College

[My alma mater has seen more than its fair share of cultural representations, including a number of film portrayals of the university. Those films have a lot to tell us, not only about images of Harvard but also about educational, social, and cultural issues through that lens. So this week I’ve AmericanStudied five such Harvard Movies and their meanings. This crowd-sourced post is drawn from the ideas of a couple fellow AmericanStudiers about cultural images of higher ed—share yours in comments, please!]

My colleague Frank Mabee highlights Richard Russo’s funny and pointed academic novel Straight Man (1997).

Irene Martyniuk shares a trio of films from the past few decades that offer their own versions of the real world vs. college dynamic I highlighted in Monday’s With Honors post: Animal House (1978), Back to School (1986), and Old School (2003), the last of which comes with the motto, “All the fun of college. None of the education.”

Memorial Day series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other images of higher ed you’d highlight?