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Reflections on higher education and the media

Introduction It’s a wonderful thing, the Internet. One minute I was rummaging fruitlessly through the attics of memory for a particular aphorism – something Greek about the relentlessness of change; the next I was reading that over 2,500 years ago, Heraclitus argued that ‘All things go and nothing stays’ (Graham 2005). The array of supporting information was dazzling: I had fed Google a morsel and it had responded with a feast. I also recalled scraps of a French epigram suggesting a different truth. Again, my memory could not come up with the exact words, let alone whose they were, but a few mouse clicks revealed that about 160 years ago, Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr wrote, ‘Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose’ – roughly, ‘The more things change, the more they stay the same’ (Wikipedia 2011). If I had wanted to explore the topic further, I could have dipped into any of the 12.4 million search results that had been delivered in 0.26 seconds. The reason I wanted to track down these quotes was that they are germane to my argument: that the relationship between higher education and the media changes continually and yet is, or should be, grounded in certain unchanging principles. In this arena, both Heraclitus and Karr are right. The ease with which I was able to find their pearls of wisdom points up another theme of this paper: the extent to which recent and expected changes in the university/media relationship are associated with the Internet.