McLuhan and the "new science" of the university

This article aims to investigate Marshall McLuhan's reflections on the university in relation to the evolution of the different media eco-systems and, in particular, its transformation in the era of electronic communication. McLuhan had occasionally dealt with the University system in some passages of The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) and Understanding Media (1964). However, it is especially in The Laws of Media: The New Science (1988) that we find the foundations of an interpretation of university history inspired by the heuristic model of the tetrad, concerning the hypothesis that every cultural innovation fuels a complex dynamic made of "enhancement, obsolescence, retrieval, reversal". McLuhan did not elaborate the specific tetrad he had planned. Our analysis on this topic starts from where he stopped. What does the mass university of the XX century enhance? What does it make obsolete? What does the university retrieve that had been obsolete earlier? And, finally, what does it tend to turn into? In line with McLuhan's media paradigm, these key words inspired the interpretation of the changes that the university institution have undergone in the recent past in accordance with the student movements and the tecno-cultural shifts of the global village society.