A dictionary of Marshall McLuhan’s quotations

The radical deficiency of American intellectual life vis-a-vis the new tasks of revaluation, synthesis, and exploration, is its lack of communal sense. This is true even of the academic scene. But outside the academic world there is certainly no likelihood of finding the leisure, the erudition or the disinterestedness for the work at hand. The first step, therefore, is to perform a basic overhaul job on the academies. To redirect the energies of the American college from the immediate goal of preparing students for a local commercial society to preparing students for the fullest kind of citizenship, such as is actually demanded of us as a condition of present survival — that is the task.
From McLuhan’s 1947 Proposal to Robert M. Hutchins, to launch an interdisciplinary seminar and associated journal (later, accomplished narrowly by the Ford Foundation Grant with the Exploratons groups and the journal Explorations: Studies in Culture and Communication).
Year: 1947
↪ Also at #6423, #7038
Compiled by William Kuhns
© 2026, The Estate of Marshall McLuhan