College Films Resources

This website is intended to serve as an educational reference tool for higher education and student service professionals interested in utilizing college films as a learning tool for college students.  That said, over the years I’ve been using the following definition to very broadly define college films as a unique genre:

college film (n.) – a genre of motion pictures that focus upon institutions of higher education and/or individuals that are members of these academic communities

To reference this definition of college films, refer to the relevant stylebook for your project or use the following suggested citation and replace “month day, year” with the date you copied the quote:

Miller, H.S. (July 2004). College Films Website. Retrieved month day, year, from http://www.college-films.com/.

The following websites are not intended to be an exhaustive listing, but are rather some suggested starting points for additional research.  Similarly the annotated bibliography below describes several texts that might be helpful to someone researching college films or film studies.

The Internet Movie DataBase (IMDB) is in my opinion the most comprehensive movie reference on the Internet.  With over 300,000 movie entries and over a million entries for cast and crew, IMDb is an easy place to start any research on a particular movie.

The American Film Institute (AFI) website has useful information about movies that have won awards or have been recognized in other ways as being classic films.  It is an especially good resource for the old silent era films.

Yahoo! Movies is another comprehensive web database of movie information and includes search engine links to additional film lists/databases.

Tim Dirks’ Greatest Films/FilmSite.org continues to be recognized as a unique resource with a variety of essays and film information.

In an April 19, 2003 segment from “Weekend Edition” NPR’s Linda Wertheimer interviews film critic Elvis Mitchell about college films.  They discuss how college films haven’t been the same since Animal House exploded into American culture and how there have been some consistent themes over the years.  In NPR’s 2002 “Present at the Creation” series, segments featured Animal House in the July 29, 2002 episode and The Graduate in the December 9th episode.

Forney, D.S., and Cawthon, T. W. (Ed.) (2004). Using the Entertainment Media to Inform Student Affairs Practice, New Directions for Student Services, No.108, New York: Wiley Periodicals.

Forney and Cawthon’s monograph describes the ways film, television, music and print media can be used to inform student affairs practice.  They give examples of specific themes and suggestions for programs that could be adapted for any campus interested in using pop-culture media to enhance student learning.  They also describe some of the intellectual property rights and legal issues to consider when using commercial entertainment media.

Hinton, D.B. (1994). Celluloid Ivy: Higher Education in the Movies 1960-1990. Metuchen, N.J.: The Scarecrow Press.

Hinton argues the film industry portrays higher education in such a consistently negative manner that public support for colleges and universities is being seriously undermined.  He also suggests faculty and administrators can watch college films to learn about the expectations and imagery college students may bring to the campus.  By focusing on college films from 1960-1990, Hinton draws evidence for his “image problem” thesis using qualitative analysis of selected films.  However, in a book review published in the Journal of Higher Education (Vol. 66, No. 6) by Kevin Jones, Hinton is criticized for not being more rigorous in his analysis and conclusions.  Jones argues that Hinton is so focused on the public relations angle, he fails to fully appreciate or recognize the many positive aspects of these films and how some of them accurately document higher education’s shortfalls.

Langer, M. (Winter 2006).  “Screen Universities: Hollywood Goes to College.” Academic Matters, 22-24.

The author observes that fictional higher education in the movies has a lot of advantages over the real thing, at least from his perspective as a professor.  He also describes the ways faculty members have been depicted in college films over the years and that these portrayals often reflect the perceptions of the day.  From the zany professors with an obscure or useless research agenda to the subversive, anti-social revolutionary professors, the movies tend to paint with very broad brush strokes for these stereotypes.  Still he notes that these movies are important in that they provide first impressions of academic life for the public.

Nelmes, J. (1996). An Introduction to Film Studies (Third Edition).  New York: Routledge.

You won’t find anything in this text about college films; however, you will find a comprehensive reference volume for film studies.  In fact it is one of the leading introductory texts in film studies programs.  The editor of this volume, Nelmes is a screenwriter and professor teaching film studies at the University of East London.  Nelmes’ 500 page text provides an overview of the history and study of film, as well as an overview of the modern film industry, international cinema and national cinemas, a glossary, index, and bibliography.

Seyforth, S.C., and Golde, C.M. (September-October 2001). “Beyond the Paper Chase: Using Movies to Help Students Get More Out of College.” About Campus, 6(4), 2-9.

The authors describe a first year student seminar of 20 students they co-taught in a residential college at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  Entitled “The College Experience as Revealed Through Film” this seminar explored seven college-focused themes with associated films as texts.  One of the authors posted the syllabus for the course at http://chris.golde.org/syllabi/ils198/.  The instructors utilized a “constructive-developmental pedagogy” taken from Baxter Magolda’s writings to structure the course.  The article describes some of the students’ observations as well as some of the class discussions.  The authors note that their pedagogical approach and the use of college films proved to be effective tools for teaching freshmen and helped them become stronger students.  After teaching this course, the authors were better able to appreciate their students’ experiences at their college.

Somers, P., Tucciarone, K., Austin, J., Keene, B., Packnett, G. D., and Stoll, L. (2006). “Dying to Get In: Cinematic Views of College Choice.”  College & University, 81(4), 39-44.

The authors explore how college films depict the college choice and admission processes and how these depictions compare to research literature on college choice.  Using eight college films that include college choice processes and spanning the years 1993-2004 as source material, the researchers conducted a content analysis using a framework of eleven specific themes suggested by research literature.  The authors report that these films do in fact represent all of the themes described in the literature to some degree, albeit some elements receive less attention than others.  They also describe how these films are focused exclusively on the college choice and admissions processes of traditional college-aged students and ignore the challenges facing many other college students.

Umphlett, W.L. (1984).  The Movies Go to College: Hollywood and the World of the College-Life Film.  Cranbury, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.

Umphlett’s thesis is that the “college-life” film is an important and consistent indicator of the trends and changes in American culture.  He insists that as a genre the “collegiate film” is particularly well-suited to comment on American culture and society because the act of attending college is a unique expression of American individualism and transformation. In addition, films in this genre have been consistently produced since the early days of cinema featuring some of the leading actors and filmmakers of their generations.  For all these reasons, Umphlett believes “collegiate films” are as legitimate and important a film genre as the better known western, gangster or sci-fi genres.  The text describes a sampling of the “college-life” films organized more-or-less by decade from 1915 through the 1970s.