mr. lawrence tisch, who also has the controlling stock of cbs. one might wish to say, if one were in a nasty mood, that cbs owns nyu, but it's not really that way. nyu is doing very nicely compared to some of the other big eastern and private universities like columbia and yale, about whom your audience perhaps has heard are plagued with financial difficulties. c-span: how big is your department? >> guest: we have 24 full-time professors and i'd say 700 or 800 students. new york university, i should add, has many departments of communication, including its famous tisch school of the arts, which produces all of the young and now famous movie directors. but we have discovered that the field of communication is a fast-growing one and will continue to grow. it's pretty obvious to many young people that among the best ways to study any society is to study its communication systems, its message systems. in fact, you could almost define a culture by merely describing what are its dominant modes of communicating with itself -- not only human to human, bu