Second, watching television is the most-done activity after sleeping and work. Despite the rise of the internet, television will be this century the primary way to transmit ideas. Even if, like me, you are at heart a dry-as-dust researcher, what you do in your academic life is to promote new ideas. Well, TV is the modern forum for those.We can run away from this. We can grumble under our breath about TV having a stream of jackasses and charlatans on it, assert that we only listen to the Today programme on Radio 4 and would not sully our PhD-honed minds with anything else, and mutter that it is only revered journals such as the American Economic Review that count I sympathise. But unless you are a one-in-10-million genius, the world will pass you by and leave your thoughts unopened in the waste paper basket. Moreover, television is not going away, so it is imperative that scholars as a group learn to exploit it.TV will never entirely replace journals and monographs But it is a rich medium that we currently ignore.

Just because our teachers trained us to look down on it is no reason for us still to do so The Americans have already moved intellectually. It is hard to turn on CNN in a foreign hotel bedroom without finding a loquacious US academic. Yet even US universities have not decided how to cope with television’s reach. We are all learning.How, this century, should TV shape the activities of Britain’s universities? The key issue, it should be stressed, is not about pleasing research councils or the fashionable notion of “dissemination”. There are more important fish to fry.First, universities should use TV as a channel for the communication of discoveries to researchers and students.

Television channels, especially along the internet wires, are now cheap to run and are bound to proliferate. Strange though it sounds, I believe The University Channel is not far off. Maybe the Sky Uni Conference Channel and Quantum Mechanics Channel 3 will follow.A second avenue for the future will be to use TV as a way to attract potential students. The young put lots of effort into choosing a small set of universities, but the final choice is then a close-run thing This means that small advantages matter. Although it is unpleasant to face it, television watchers drink in the brand names and labels they see on the screen.