Letters to the Editor

Welcome to the family To the editor: Steve Brauntuch's column about being a Comm major ("Not all Comm majors are equal," The Daily Pennsylvanian, 3/6/03) reminded me of the time when, as an undergraduate, I made my own decision to switch to communication for grad school. My father, who had wanted me to get a Ph.D. in literature, was dismayed and mystified by my choice. I mentioned his misgivings to one of my favorite professors, with whom I had taken a course in the philosophy of aesthetics. "My dear Mr. Messaris," he said, in his mellifluous, high-culture accent. "Think of what you're doing. Your father wants you to spend your life in the intellectual company of Joyce and Beckett. Instead, you propose to become a student of soap operas and advertising!" But my professor was actually being ironic. As he quickly added, and as I soon enough found out for myself, people who study soap operas and ads are not noticeably more feeble-minded than people who spend their time analyzing the higher forms of culture. Still, the attitude that my former prof was parodying is both understandable and, probably, inevitable, for reasons best explained by Thorstein Veblen more than 100 years ago: Among people with status anxieties (i.e., all of us?), the pursuit of the recondite and the putatively otiose will always carry a lot more cultural clout than such transparently self-serving activities as learning about advertising and PR. So, I sympathize with Brauntuch's account of his friends' reactions to his choice of major because I have had to learn to live with similar reactions from some of my non-Comm colleagues and friends. And let me take this opportunity to welcome you to the major, Steve. I hope that, by the time you graduate, you will have discovered at least a few more courses that you liked. Paul MessarisThe writer is the acting associate director of undergraduate studies at the Annenberg School for Communication.