Mr. Postman, a protégé of Marshall McLuhan and the author of such books as Amusing Ourselves to Death , is considered one of the country's foremost media educators and was a key architect of N.Y.U.'s communications department. He has spent 41 years at N.Y.U., the last 13 years as chairman of the department. He intends to remain as chair until a new department head is found-he'll be sharing the role with faculty member Deborah Borisoff-and will continue to teach afterward.

"I've been chair for 13 years, and I did what I was hoping to do, which was help make the department into what it has become," Mr. Postman said. "We've hired a lot of new people, and the department has grown tremendously. Now the idea is to get a chair with different energies and points of view who can take it in a new direction."

Mr. Postman's decision comes on the heels of Tom Goldstein's spring 2002 departure as the dean of Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism. Columbia recently-and controversially-suspended its search for a new J-school dean after Lee C. Bollinger, the new university president, decided the school should first re-evaluate its focus and priorities.

The twin departures of Mr. Goldstein and Mr. Postman mean that N.Y.U. and Columbia are likely to be in competition for talent. Though Columbia and N.Y.U. have different academic ideologies, both schools are considered among the country's finest for journalism and media education, respectively.

"I think it's quite likely that Columbia and N.Y.U. will end up tussling over certain people," said one N.Y.U. faculty member. "There aren't that many folks out there who fit the bill."

And the rivalry between Columbia and N.Y.U. may become more intense if the former school shifts-as has been speculated following Mr. Bollinger's announcement-to a more academically oriented journalism program. Already there have been defections: Recently Todd Gitlin, a well-known media-ecology, sociology and journalism professor, announced that he was leaving N.Y.U. for Columbia.

N.Y.U. has known about Mr. Postman's departure as chairman for some time. Two years ago, insiders at the communications department quietly began to discuss life after Mr. Postman, who had just started his 11th year as chair. The idea of a department leader other than Mr. Postman was hard for some of his colleagues to swallow, given his status and unusually long career at the school. Mr. Postman founded the department's media-ecology program in 1970 at the suggestion of McLuhan, his friend and mentor.

Under Mr. Postman's guidance, the program grew in size and prestige, catapulting Mr. Postman from obscure academic to prolific "technoprophet" by the time he took over as chair in 1989. The program Mr. Postman created as a tiny, family-like graduate collective had ballooned into a group of over 1,000 undergraduates and graduates by the year 2000.

But some faculty members said that the program had outgrown Mr. Postman's casual, paternal style of leadership. "It was like a small town that suddenly discovers it's a city," said Mr. Gitlin. "You can't run it out of the mayor's back room anymore."

To date, there has been no official announcement from N.Y.U. about Mr. Postman's decision. But in late July, an ad appeared in The New York Times announcing a search for a chair and senior faculty member for N.Y.U.'s Department of Culture and Communication. Though no front-runners have surfaced to date, faculty sources at N.Y.U. believe that Ann Marcus, the dean of the Steinhardt School of Education and the person who will oversee the search, would like to snare a well-known outsider for the job.

"She is quite sensitive to that fact, and would definitely like to get somebody very visible and assert the school's interest in keeping the department a high-profile department," one N.Y.U. professor said.

Ms. Marcus declined to specify potential candidates. But faculty members pointed to the scope of N.Y.U.'s advertised search as evidence that university officials aren't interested in picking from within. While N.Y.U. regularly places job ads in academic trade papers like The Chronicle of Higher Education as well as The Times , several professors said that chair searches rarely appear in these listings-and then only when a university wants to attract an elite candidate.

But not everyone thinks that a media mogul or star academic is ultimately going to get the N.Y.U. job. In an interview with The Observer , Mr. Postman said the department needed someone who could cope with the program's administrative burden rather than an intellectual icon.

"If you go back 15 years, when we were trying to establish what we stood for, it helped to have a chair who was well-known," Mr. Postman said. He added: "If you find someone who publishes a lot, is well-known and respected, and then also is a good manager … that's something special."

Mr. Postman acknowledged that a rivalry between the Department of Culture and Communication and the Graduate School of Journalism was not out of the question. Only a year ago, the idea of Columbia's journalism school and N.Y.U.'s communications department vying for star faculty would have seemed unlikely. Although both programs are well-known and well-respected, the former was largely a boot camp for young writers and editors, while the latter was a breeding ground for future academics.

It is a difference in purpose that some, including Ms. Marcus, maintain still exists.

"We're preparing thinkers and scholars. We really hope that our doctoral candidates will become faculty members," Ms. Marcus said. "We're not aspiring in the direction of preparing practitioners."

This is why Mr. Bollinger's July 23 announcement about suspending Columbia's search raised certain eyebrows at N.Y.U. Citing a "yawning gulf between the various visions of what a modern school of journalism ought to be," Mr. Bollinger said he would convene a task force to examine the school's academic mission.

Though Mr. Bollinger didn't get into specifics, those inside and outside Columbia have speculated that the new dean wants to move the school in a more academic direction. It also led faculty at N.Y.U. to think that their school may soon find itself in competition for talent with Columbia. "Before Bollinger made his position clear, I would have thought that the two places ran no risk of competing with each other," one N.Y.U. faculty member said.

Columbia officials insist that no conclusions have been made about the journalism school's direction. But in the wake of Mr. Bollinger's announcement, acting J-school dean David Klatell made a statement reassuring alumni and students that writing, reporting and editing would remain the foundation of the program.

Until Mr. Bollinger called off the search, Columbia officials were seriously considering two prominent journalists to head the journalism school: Alex S. Jones, from Harvard University's Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, and James Fallows, The Atlantic Monthly 's national correspondent. Mr. Klatell told The Observer that Mr. Bollinger had dinner with both candidates and explained his decision to them, but that neither one was actually out of the running.

Could either Mr. Jones or Mr. Fallows surface at N.Y.U.? While Ms. Marcus said she hadn't spoken to Mr. Fallows or Mr. Jones, several N.Y.U. professors said that neither would have any trouble fitting in at the communications department. Mr. Jones has serious ties to academia, namely through Harvard (which N.Y.U. has increasingly competed with), while Mr. Fallows has a high-profile publishing track record. Mark Crispin Miller, a media-ecology professor at N.Y.U., said his students even discussed Mr. Fallows' recent book, Breaking the News .

Meanwhile, uptown, a group of professors in the Columbia journalism school now wonder if Mr. Bollinger's committee will propose changes to attract students who might otherwise enroll in communications schools.

"I can't really think of anyone in the school who would like us to be like N.Y.U., or for that matter any other communications program," one Columbia journalism professor said. "But some of us are resigned to the fact that any changes will have less to do with pure journalism, and more to do with very scholarly pursuits like those going on in media ecology. My guess is that they basically want us to churn out more academics."

Mr. Postman said he wouldn't mind such a change, even if his department has to work harder to snare students and faculty.

"I'm glad to see our friends at Columbia are starting to think that way," he said.

An incoming instant message from my niece appears on my screen. I hit the respond button, and we exchange exclamations. This relatively new America Online technology, so quickly becoming young people's preferred method of communication, doesn't exactly lend itself to whole sentences, and I find myself feeling nostalgic for the more, well, literary technology of e-mail. I type that I have been reading Neil Postman, a guy who has done more thinking than most about the question of what's lost every time a new technology enters our lives. My last question to her is whether she thinks that we might ever write to each other again, as in ink on paper, envelopes, stamps and all that. It's not likely. We are just no longer letter-writing people, plain and simple.

A professor of culture and communication at New York University, Mr. Postman has been thinking about the effects of technology on our culture for several decades now. This has not made him sanguine. In fact, he believes (like Aldous Huxley) that our society is in a race between disaster and education. He has devoted his career to explaining the disaster (Literacy debased! Participatory democracy steamrolled!) and to aiding the cause of education. His latest book, Building a Bridge to the 18th Century , is his most ambitious attempt yet to help America survive the future.

Mr. Postman is best known for his near-apocalyptic view of the role that television plays in our lives. In Amusing Ourselves to Death (1986), he attacked the "enemy with a smiling face" that has brought spiritual devastation to America. In Technopoly (1991), Mr. Postman took aim at the computer, which, he claims, is a solution to a nonexistent problem–and a threat, as well, to individual autonomy.

In these and other works, Mr. Postman addressed the disaster side of the Huxleyan equation; elsewhere he devotes himself to the education side. The underlying theme of The End of Education (1995), for example, is that the best hope for preserving the promise of a democratic society in the post-industrial age is education that teaches skepticism. Central to this mission must be the strong and precise use of language. Mr. Postman wants to defeat the propaganda of commercial advertising and puncture hypocrisy by pushing on soft language until it collapses; he wants to teach children to do the same.

In Building a Bridge to the 18th Century , the impending disaster familiar to Postman readers is set in stark relief by comparison with the beguiling charms of the 18th century. Mr. Postman argues that our society should be regrounded in the ideas and principles of the Enlightenment.

The chapter headings in the new book–"Education," "Language," "Technology," "Children," "Information"–read like a best-hits of his past work. Somehow, however, there is a comfort in the repetition, as though Mr. Postman were a preacher intoning the same phrases over and over again. We readers are incorrigible sinners who nevertheless relish the satisfaction of listening every Sunday to hellfire and brimstone.

But there's more in the new book than the repetition of earlier themes. Mr. Postman, a self-confessed "enemy of this century," has clearly found new depths of inspiration by going back and comparing, point by point, our contemporary world with the 18th century. He treats us to Thomas Paine's beautiful prose and points out that Paine, an autodidact, was able to sway an entire population through the strength of his writing. What does it say about Paine's culture, and what does it say about ours, that, as Mr. Postman implies, Paine wrote better than any of the current faculty at N.Y.U. (and could no doubt be better understood by the public)?

Mr. Postman keeps up a barrage of ideas, notions, provocations. He tells us what God's death means for our survival; why, with respect to religion, Albert Einstein and John Stuart Mill had the right approach; why progress is an idea whose time has passed but must come again; how Einstein and his fellow physicists beat the deconstructionists to the punch on understanding the social construction of language; why newspapers are more essential than ever; how the book is necessary for the maintenance of civilized values; why children appear both in 14th-century painting andon20th-century TV as small adults, and why this should concern us; when the quest for fame started. And on and on. If not a feast, it's certainly quite a buffet.

Unfortunately, a glibness occasionally creeps into his arguments. Are Socrates, John the Baptist, Jesus, Muhammad and Moses really all examples of what can happen to someone who challenges the "narrative" of a culture? A certain grandiosity mixed with a busyness of style undermines his strength. On the first (short) page of the introduction, he refers to Gertrude Stein, Marshall McLuhan, Kierkegaard, Bill Gates and George Santayana. He's likely to illustrate a point by listing five poets, say, who had the same idea; one would suffice. And yet a writer with this many ideas bouncing around his head is soon forgiven.

To be Postmanian for a moment, what's the message of his medium? With this book especially, Mr. Postman would seem to be wandering deep into the territory of moral exposition, though within the compass of social science. At one point, when he's writing about the Romantic poets and Shelley's essay "In Defense of Poetry," Mr. Postman suggests that the Holocaust could be traced to a lack of poetry in German society or, more precisely, a lack of the love that is most powerfully engendered by poetry. "It is," he argues, "poetic imagination, not scientific accomplishment, that is the engine of moral progress." But what of Mr. Postman himself? Is this his poetic imagination at work? Shouldn't Mr. Postman really be a Romantic poet?

The answer is that Mr. Postman, though he has much in common with Romantic malcontents like the Southern agrarians or G.K. Chesterton, is true to the age in which he lives. The message of the medium is that we live in the post-industrial age, and in our time our moral thinkers sometimes hold positions like chair of media ecology in the Department of Culture and Communication at N.Y.U. One can be sure that Mr. Postman appreciates the irony: Only a society as "advanced" as ours could have produced a scholar like himself–and yet he has spent his career attacking the culture that created him.

He is at any rate uncomfortable with the name of his discipline. He insists that social scientists are deceptively named because there is no science in what they do. They are storytellers; and the great ones, like Freud, Max Weber, William James, B.F. Skinner, Lewis Mumford and McLuhan, are among the greatest storytellers of our era. And as stories demand a poetic imagination, we can understand better how Mr. Postman views his work. In Building a Bridge to the 18th Century , he has written a story well worth reading.