The university, as the seat of a closed, hermetic and hierarchical community, is the place of the campus novel - a literary genre that developed in the United Kingdom and the United States in the 1950s. It is an example of the novel environment that by using different techniques of postmodern literature, it describes and criticizes the academic community, existing stereotypes about academic and educational trends, dilemmas and fears of intellectuals, as well as contemporary problems of the "outside" world or universal problems. Those issues were also reflected in the American campus movies which appeared at the turn of the century, and because of the largest number of students and citizens with higher education in American history and the significant funds allocated to them for entertainment, reached the peak of its popularity in the 1990s. They make an attempt to reflect the American, rarely British, academic reality and although the image is sometimes inaccurate or even incomplete, it impacts considerably, thanks to the development of modern media and the Internet, the perception of higher education, mainly American, by contemporary audiences in America but also throughout the world. The purpose of the paper is a multi-aspect look at the picture of university life and the institution of the university in contemporary academic novels and movies.