From Alternet: http://www.alternet.org/education/how-our-universities-have-been-turned-corporate-marketing-centers
Universities that once prided themselves as being centers of free thinking are increasingly dominated by corporate-think, turning their institutions into sales centers.
By Jim Hightower
January 11, 2013
The “ivory tower” of academia has become overshadowed by a new edifice on campus that is reaching ridiculous heights: the tower of mammon.
As public universities have been driven by budget-whacking lawmakers to seek ever-more private funding, schools that once prided themselves as being centers of free thinking are increasingly dominated by corporate-think, turning their institutions into sales centers.
“A lot of schools are taking a much more corporate approach,” exulted a PRexecutive who works with top university administrators, marveling that “a CMO didn’t even exist on most campuses 10 years ago.”
A what? A chief marketing officer, whose job is to peddle the place like it’s a new model of car or line of cosmetics. As explained by the CMO of the University of California system, “the changing funding landscape” requires universities to sell themselves to moneyed elites, which means academic institutions must rework what he calls “their visual identities.” In the snappy new parlance of university commercialism, this is “rebranding” — an attempt to modernize the image of venerable institutions by adopting corporate-styled logos, slogans and other marketing fluff.
Forget intellectual pursuits, we’re talking about pursuing buyers, in the brave new academic marketplace. This results in colleges resorting to the same kind of ridiculous come-ons that hawkers of consumer products often barf-up.
Iowa’s Drake University, for example, rebranded itself a couple of years ago with the slogan “Drake-plus.” That was intended to sell students and donors alike on the clever equation that Drake-plus-you would equal remarkable results — even excellence. This could have been just another bit of inane but innocuous PR puffery — except that the school’s marketing geniuses chose to reach for graphic artistry. Rather than going with the boring literalism of “Drake-plus,” they rebranded with a more hip, abstract design, substituting the letter “D” to refer to Drake and punctuating it with the plus sign.
Continue reading at: http://www.alternet.org/education/how-our-universities-have-been-turned-corporate-marketing-centers
