<P> In the early 1950s, McLuhan began the Communication and Culture seminars at the University of Toronto, funded by the Ford Foundation . As his reputation grew, he received a growing number of offers from other universities and, to keep him, the university created the Centre for Culture and Technology in 1963 . He published his first major work during this period: The Mechanical Bride (1951). The work was an examination of the effect of advertising on society and culture . He and Edmund Carpenter also produced an important journal called Explorations throughout the 1950s . McLuhan and Carpenter have been characterized as the Toronto School of communication theory, together with Harold Innis, Eric A. Havelock, and Northrop Frye . During this time, McLuhan supervised the doctoral thesis of modernist writer Sheila Watson on the subject of Wyndham Lewis . He remained at the University of Toronto through 1979, spending much of this time as head of his Centre for Culture and Technology . </P> <P> McLuhan was named to the Albert Schweitzer Chair in Humanities at Fordham University in the Bronx for one year (1967--68). While at Fordham, he was diagnosed with a benign brain tumor, and it was treated successfully . He returned to Toronto where he taught at the University of Toronto for the rest of his life and lived in Wychwood Park, a bucolic enclave on a hill overlooking the downtown where Anatol Rapoport was his neighbour . In 1970, he was made a Companion of the Order of Canada . In 1975, the University of Dallas hosted him from April to May, appointing him to the McDermott Chair . </P> <P> Marshall and Corinne McLuhan had six children: Eric, twins Mary and Teresa, Stephanie, Elizabeth, and Michael . The associated costs of a large family eventually drove him to advertising work and accepting frequent consulting and speaking engagements for large corporations, IBM and AT&T among them . In September 1979, he suffered a stroke which affected his ability to speak . The University of Toronto's School of Graduate Studies tried to close his research centre shortly thereafter, but was deterred by substantial protests, most notably by Woody Allen . Allen's Oscar - winning motion picture Annie Hall (1977) featured McLuhan in a cameo as himself; a pompous academic arguing with Allen in a cinema queue is silenced by McLuhan suddenly appearing and saying, "You know nothing of my work ." This was one of McLuhan's most frequent statements to and about those who disagreed with him . </P> <P> He never fully recovered from the stroke and died in his sleep on December 31, 1980 . </P>

Who is credited with coining the term sociology