excommunicated from the academy. These ideas do 
not deserve a hearing, they’re not put forward in a 
proper way, the man won’t defend himself. When 
he won’t say, “Oh yeah, I made a mistake about 
that, now I’d better revise my system.” Instead he 
said, “What system? We don’t need a system.” 
With that move, what happened was that students 
were discouraged from reading McLuhan—there 
was a whole movement that simply sneered at 
McLuhan. I mean it was a kind of ridicule, and 
McLuhan was well aware of this. But at the same 
time that was going on in the universities at the 
end of the ’60s and in the early ’70s, what you had 
was a continued circulation of his ideas within