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114 Media, Culture & Society 22(1) For this reason, among others, it is important for professors and students to press universities to be committed to core values of open inquiry and academic freedom. Indeed, developing an understanding and critique of the ways universities operate is mandatory for scholars to maintain their sanity and their integrity; developing a practice to change universities is mandatory for their survival, or, at least, to limit the effects of the assaults which are on tap in this business-friendly, 'lean and mean' era. It is a key and unavoidable political fight in the coming generation. That being said, let me offer four suggestions for how to upgrade the field of communication. First, over the past decade there have been many elegant explanations of why communication is an important and necessary academic discipline. Let me offer an inelegant one. It is clear from experience that the other social sciences cannot and will not study communication in anything but a decontextualized manner. It is also clear that the types of communication research questions that generate good research are not derived from these other disciplines. My first book, for example, was a pure archival history on the development of US broadcasting (McChesney, 1993). But the research question that led to the book came out of seminars in current communication literature, not historical writings. The book could never have been produced in a US history department. The point is simply this, communication works best as an interdisciplinary exercise, far more so than almost any other field I can think of. It is our strength and we should be proud of it. There will always be a tension between 'mainstream' and 'critical' scholars, but scholars of conscience and principle will strive to see the tension maintained at a constructive level. At its best, this coexistence can force scholars to challenge and defend their own assumptions and attempt to reach those who are not true believers. Second, attempting to ape the existing social sciences by putting on airs about communication being a quantitative social science is not only wrong intellectually, it is wrong pragmatically. Communication is never going to gain prestige and status by imitating sociology or psychology; that guarantees its minor league position. Communication should strike out boldly as a rebel field that produces original thinkers and public intellectuals. We should be the discipline that takes risks while everyone else regurgitates that same old same old. It should be cause for concern that the leading critical work on journalism has been provided by Herman and Chomsky, two scholars with almost no connection to the field. If we do that, it will only be a matter of time until communication is generating a number of thinkers who will attract attention across the social sciences and humanities. As it is now, most of comi outside of the field, in both critical and mainstream research. Third, communication needs to make an explicit study of the relationship of communication to participatory democracy and both of them to class-divided capitalist societies a defining feature for the field. In short, the subfield of political economy of communication should return from the margins and become a corner- stone of the field. It is worth remembering that many of the most significant communication 'social scientists', including George Gerbner and Paul Lazarsfeld, have had a historical and political economic grasp of communication that is arguably nowhere to be found among US quantitative scholars today. I do not wish to romanticize the past; when one looks at some of the field's founding giants, like Harold Lasswell, one does not need to go very far to find an elitist and anti- democratic conception of society. My point is that no one in communication can be neutral on the issue of whether markets equal democracy and that market-driven communication equals democratic communication. Short of evidence I have yet to see, these claims should be the province of the corporate public relations industry, nication's leading lights are unknown