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112 Media, Culture & Society 22(1) counterproductive it is. The institutional pecking order is as well established in academia as the caste system is in India. Communication is a failure in the prestige game on US campuses for the simple reason that aside from Penn and Stanford, it barely exists on Ivy League and other elite private university campuses. And at the crucial big three - Harvard, Yale and Princeton – it does not have a research presence at all. Hence the ten leading programs mainly of schools that would rank in the second tier for the other social sciences. So when a dean has to decide between cutting communication or, say, history or sociology, there is tremendous impetus to go for the former. When a dean cuts communication, she or he will get pressure from the likes of Wisconsin, Minnesota, Oregon and North Carolina to back down. When the dean cuts those other fields, the pressure comes from Chicago, MIT, Harvard, Berkeley, Princeton and Yale. Barring other factors, it is a bureaucratic no-brainer. Moreover, the prestige of communication is undermined by its close historic and contemporary association with the media and communication industries. As com- munication research is often conducted in departments with coursework devoted to professional training, its role in a liberal arts college is legitimately called into question. Communication appears as just a hepped-up form of driver's education, while the traditional social sciences sit atop Mount Olympus pondering the fate of the world. And there are very serious grounds for concern here with regard to communication research. To the extent that it is directly or indirectly dependent upon the support of the media industry, it puts distinct limits on the range and nature of what can be and is being done. This theme is underdeveloped in the mainstream treatments of the field, as the mainstream is the beneficiary of this process, producing work that tends to be unthreatening, if not of use, to communication firms. communication research consist Communication and democracy But the irony here is that in the current era of cutbacks and retrenchment, there is ever greater pressure from university administrators on communication departments to cosy up to media and communication interests so as to get them to bankroll an ever greater portion of the field's expenses. In these depressed times, this acquiescence to private power is simply accepted as an unavoidable reality, even by people who would openly disparage the situation were they not part of it. There is little doubt, however, that this is the most significant threat to communications ever becoming a major league discipline, and it is emblematic of the most import- ant threat - corporate, commercial penetration - to the university remaining (or becoming) a relatively free and democratic institution in our society. Cultivating ties to the capitalist communication sector may appear a logical, even unavoidable, 'management' move, but it will probably lead to the demise of communication as a viable discipline. On the one hand, the "administrative' turn is morally deplorable; it takes communication away from what Innis termed the 'university tradition', a source of honest independent inquiry in service to democratic values (in Carey, 1978). At a practical level, too, business schools are far better suited to conduct research along these lines, especially as communication is now a central business activity. Who needs departments predicated upon the public service and pro- fessional principles like journalism when the whole idea is to maximize profit? Yet if the field of communication is relatively weak on US campuses, the political economy of communication is arguably its most neglected subfield. This is due to its critical political purview and values. The political economy of com- munication is an area that will always be discomforting to powerful interests in inegalitarian societies. Indeed, it was only in the 1960s and 1970s, due to the