^{. . .} Pop culture studies turns 25 ^{. . .}
When Ray Browne founded the first department to study "Star Trek" semiotics and cartoon aesthetics, he expanded the boundaries of academic study forever.

BY DAVID JACOBSON | Somehow you expect Ray Browne to look a little bit more, you know, radical. Maybe an earring as big as a migration tag or one of those Einstein quantum 'fros. After all, he's the godfather of popular culture studies; the founder and still editor in his emeritus years of the Journal of Popular Culture, filled with dense analyses of slam-dancing, country music and computer games; the co-founder of the Popular Culture Association, whose 1,000-plus scholars annually present papers on everything from R.E.M. lyrics to porno flicks; the professor who was punted from the English department at Bowling Green State 25 years ago because he was "disgracing the university," but who promptly established the only graduate program and undergraduate major in popular culture in our galaxy; the guy whose career, by his own account, constituted "a kind of class-action suit against conventional points of view and fields of study in the humanities."

But there he is, in all his photos, stolid and blandly groomed, looking like the office manager of some midsized widget company. Yet his embodiment of the average Joe is utterly appropriate. After all, Browne's fundamental notion is that academia should pay the same kind of serious attention to the "common, everyday culture" of the masses -- from sitcoms to bestsellers, from rap to lawn ornaments -- as it traditionally has to elite stuff.

In the quarter century since Browne founded the popular culture movement, it has had wide influence. But no other school has followed Bowling Green State and established a full department, not to mention a library bursting at the seams with romance novels and "Star Trek" memorabilia, and a busy press publishing the history of American skinheads and collections of soap opera criticism. And even when it's studied under English or mass media, popular culture remains plenty controversial, mocked by the same media that feeds off it, derided by traditionalists hurling jeremiads about pandering and raising important questions about what is worthy of academic attention.

When he boldly confronted tradition, Browne wasn't dabbling in the era's academic anarchy so much as honoring his own roots and character. He was raised by a free-thinking agnostic father in the heart of the Bible Belt -- a poor kid in rural Depression-era Alabama who never stopped questioning privilege. In the Army, he saw plenty of the stockade, because "I did not have enough 'Sirs' in my vocabulary," he writes in "Against Academia," his brief memoir and history of popular culture studies. So it's not surprising that, while Browne cut his academic teeth on more traditional literature and folklore, he ultimately rebelled.

Browne was among the unwashed masses who poured through the college gates sprung open by the G.I. Bill. Like later generations of women, minorities and gays, some of those newcomers noticed that their own culture, in this case that of the vast lower- and middle-class majority, was largely ignored by academics.

To the extent that popular culture was being examined back then, it was through the telescopic lens of history or with the long, cold tongs of the social sciences. But Browne insisted on also looking at contemporary material and applying to it the kind of close, comparative analysis that had previously been reserved for highbrow culture.

Browne and his cohorts insisted that there were alternative and significant aesthetics afoot below the esoteric radar of traditional scholars.

"People make choices as to what book to read or movie to see, and just as regularly evaluate the experience: This was a good thriller, this is a great party song," writes BGSU pop culture professor Jack Santino in summarizing the program's "socio-aesthetic approach." "These aesthetic criteria are generally unarticulated, it is the task of the researcher to identify them."

Of course, the same folks in and out of academia who criticize postmodern theorists for trivializing the object of study, reducing Shakespeare to a commodified text, also rip pop culture scholars for studying trivial objects, approaching video games as if they held the depths of Shakespeare.

In fact, Browne's most radical argument may be that you can teach critical thinking and gain as good a liberal arts education using pop materials as with the old highbrow ones. "There's just as much glory and virtue in being a Madonna person as in being a Hemingway person," he says. "If you want to study culture through Madonna, it seems to me that's a marvelous opportunity."

While a department of popular culture plopped down amid the cornfields south of Toledo might seem like an intellectual Christo project, it made political sense. If Browne was the catalyst, the administration at relatively unknown Bowling Green State was also open to an unorthodox department that might put them on the academic map.

N E X T_ P A G E .|. Living in a house that a Montgomery Ward kit built