Scholars spend as much time with `The Love Boat' as with Shakespeare.

Byline: Robert Trussell

It was a long, hard slog, but Donald Duck has achieved parity with Prince Hamlet.

In academic halls from Berkeley to Bowling Green, young scholars and their instructors spend as much time tackling the history of shopping, television and comic books _ in other words, popular culture _ as they do analyzing Homer, Shakespeare and Milton.

"I read a paper the other day by an anthropologist, and he was doing a study of Donald Duck," said Ray Browne, the 82-year-old godfather of the academic popular culture movement. Anyone in touch with the real world, Browne said, should be able to "admit the importance of Donald Duck and Disney."

From his home in Bowling Green, Ohio, Browne looks out on American universities and sees the results of seeds he cultivated long ago: scholarship devoted to virtually every cranny of pop culture.

In the last couple of years respected universities have awarded doctorates for dissertations on an amazing range of cultural phenomenon. They include a study of "the figure of the murderous lesbian in 1990s film"; consumer response to pop-up advertising; the "iconography of Clint Eastwood"; Playboy magazine; "the making of modern American manhood" by novelist Edgar Rice Burroughs through his pulp hero Tarzan; teenage girls' shopping habits in the '50s; and "women's rights rhetoric" in country music videos in the '90s.

In September, 18 scholars gathered at Yale University to examine Michael Jackson's "iconic career and celebrity status." Called "Regarding Michael Jackson: Performing Racial, Gender and Sexual Difference ...