Recent books tell the story: Liberal Arts at the Brink, In Defense of a Liberal Education, Crisis in Higher Education: A Plan to Save Small Liberal Arts Colleges in America, Unmaking of the Public University: The Forty-Year Assault on the Middle Class, Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters.¹ The academy is fighting for its life. For years, the liberal arts and the humanities in particular have been fighting to stress their importance to society. College and university scandals regularly make front-page news, politicians scrutinize and threaten funding—even scientists are marching in the streets (Fig. 1.1)—and anxious parents steer their children away from liberal arts majors. Students and instructors feel this crisis in other ways too, from protests over race, gender, and tuition to policies affecting sanctuary campuses and the closing of departments or entire campuses—all within a widening sense that liberal arts education has lost its way, if not its value.

The academy, of course, has a long history of fighting, starting with Plato’s Academy in ancient Athens. Plato, originally named Aristocles after his grandfather, reportedly started his career as a wrestler, and his broad physique earned him the nickname Plato, as Platon in Greek meant ‘broad’. But the wrestler Plato turned from fighting with his body to fighting with words, and as a philosopher he founded his Academy as a dialectical Fight Club in order to take on a very different competitor: the Homeric rhapsodists whose myths, songs, and dances, he claimed, could only repeat common knowledge or doxa and thus not produce true knowledge or episteme . A societal battle raged over how best to raise the Athenian youth: whether they should continue their immersion in the Homeric tradition with its myths (mythos ) and images (imagos), or whether they should learn new forms of thinking and discourse, those of ideas (eidos) and logic (logos), taught by the philosophers.

The fight was thus about media. In The Republic, Plato famously excluded the poets from his vision of the ideal city, and his victory over both Homer and the sophists enabled his Academy to shape the forms, practices, and primary audience of education and research for centuries to come. Media other than writing, such as music, dance, and song, would largely become art (mimesis) and cease to function as means of knowledge, thereby establishing logocentric (logic-based) writing and speech as the only legitimate media of thought. Today amidst the crisis of the liberal arts, we must grapple with this Platonic tradition, not to overthrow or toss this tradition out of the ring, but to reconfigure it from the bottom up. For centuries, Platonism has transmediated the world into logocentric writing. The time has come to transmediate knowledge in other media for other audiences in addition to scholars. Outdated modes of teaching, learning, and sharing research prevent the liberal arts from fully engaging its contemporary societal challenges and, as importantly, its own students. StudioLab Manifesto wrestles with Plato’s Fight Club.

StudioLab is a hybrid pedagogy attuned to fundamental transformations in twenty-first-century social institutions and societies, especially at the levels of values, practices, and media. We can sketch some key tensions between traditional and emerging institutional forms and also consider some work-arounds.

The university traditionally organizes knowledge into separate departments with specialized faculty who hold terminal degrees and teach in distinct types of learning environments: studios for art and design, seminars for the humanities and social sciences, and labs for the sciences and engineering. The goal has been to train and produce individual students and scholars based on the model of the Romantic genius, whose originality and virtuosity make them exemplars in their field. In the wake of the Gutenberg revolution, modern knowledge production has been almost entirely monomedia, and the power of alphabetic print is captured in the motto ‘publish or perish.’ The university typically organizes both media training and study into distinct monomedia, with writing required for everyone, and visual arts, literature, music, dance, and theater divided up and then separated off for tiny populations in art and design schools. In the liberal arts, the privileging of nineteenth-century cultural forms made sense in the twentieth century, as these forms provided the models for contemporary intellectual and cultural movements. Today, however, the continued predominance of nineteenth-century cultural forms helps to maintain and increase the divide between high and popular cultural forms—even though these nineteenth-century forms were once considered popular culture, today, they are seen as high culture. More importantly, this predominance forestalls the emergence of conceptual, aesthetic, technical, and organizational languages and skills to work in contemporary transmedia forms shared with multiple audiences. Needless to say, the tension between high and popular culture is further increased by the continuing dominance of the book and written essay as the privileged media of knowledge production and the marginalization of media genres that speak to non-specialized audiences.

We may seem to be opposing these two sets of forms and practices, but imaginative faculty, students, and administrators have been finding ways to overcome and work around these distinctions by creating more transversal practices and media. Increasingly, federal grants seek projects involving teams of inter- and transdisciplinary research teams, and foundations offer funds to introduce the liberal arts into professional fields. Administrators and faculty also seek out opportunities for team-taught courses providing multiple disciplinary perspectives around a single topic, and students themselves combine and integrate disciplinary knowledges through dual majors and minors that take them across diverse fields. Community-based research and service-learning courses provide opportunities for students to engage their college learning with communities who have different sets of local concerns and knowledges. And both scholars and communities have begun working in media forms such as TED Talks, PechaKuchas, podcasts, blogs, and info comics. Yet despite these encouraging developments across many disciplines, the liberal arts and higher education in general lack a coherent and accessible digital pedagogy that can be used by potentially any field or department.

If one is willing to enter the contemporary educational battle, it helps to know more about the history and terrain of the crisis affecting Plato’s Fight Club today. The critical thinking at the basis of first-year writing in universities and colleges remains crucially important at this historical moment when democratic institutions and practices of civil discourse have weakened and come under threat. In a time marked by ‘fake news’ and ‘post-truth,’ critical thinking becomes both more necessary and yet more insufficient on its own. If arguments alone sufficed, higher education would not be in crisis. In the US, critical thinking means using evidence and logic as a guide to decision-making and is considered an Essential Learning Outcome (ELO ) by the Association of American Colleges and Universities. These ELOs inform the evaluation and assessment of academic programs across the US, and most entering students are required to take first-year writing courses because educational leaders believe that critical thinking is essential to becoming not only a successful student but also an informed and engaged citizen. Indeed, the StudioLab pedagogy is designed for students to build on their first-year writing courses at any stage in their studies, extending their critical thinking into critical design and digital media. This extension defines StudioLab’s approach.

The battle of ideas lies at the heart of modern democracies, and this book argues that traditional critical thinking and academic writing alone are no longer sufficient for entering into public debates or, moreover, for conducting expert research. StudioLab is informed by the critical thinking of structuralism, feminism, psychoanalysis, critical theory, deconstruction, and postcolonialist theory: decades of critiques, built on centuries of critiques stretching back to Kant, all suggest one thing: critiquing media is like praying against science. Words and written arguments alone are not enough.

To critical thinking and writing we must add critical design and digital media, design and media that move across many forms in order to engage different audiences and open new avenues for thought and action. In particular, tactical media practices from art activism, along with human-centered design practices from industrial engineering, can reinvigorate critical thinking and introduce post-ideati...