Follow-Up on the Cinephiles: Episodes in the History of Postwar Popular Film Education

Being an intellectual is not the same as being an academic." 1 These words envelop bell hooks's affinity toward popular culture and education.As distinguished university professor, public intellectual, and popular educator, she asks to what extent intellectuals need the academy and vice versa: Does the university still need intellectuals?Taking a time-out from teaching in higher education, hooks points to an enigmatic juncture between universities today and their place in society.Corporate university infrastructures corrupt intellectual freedom and sustain what hooks calls the university's "anti-intellectual culture": "my integrity was as much at risk in the academic world as it had been in the non-academic work world, where workers are expected to obey authority and follow set rules." 2 Increasingly so, universities worldwide are taken by neoliberal logic in which teaching is progressively conceived as assembly-line work, student debt skyrockets, and education becomes effectively commodified.Taking a more radical stance, then, popular education can reversely be conceived as "antiacademic culture" that tailors to individuals whose sociopolitical situation and mental or physical special needs exclude them from institutionalized education.Popular education facilitates, in hooks's words, "spaces where teaching