Branding will be the end of us

The sinister history of a popular obsession

James Naylor was branded as a blasphemer by the British government in 1656. From Britannica.

On Monday, November 7, just before Election Day, Inside Higher Ed published an essay by David Rosowsky, E. Gordon Gee, and Stephen Gavazzi under the portentous headline “What the People Want.” 

The broad strokes of the argument are these: that universities are bad at branding, that they need to craft brand messages that resonate more deeply with their local communities, and that rectifying this shortcoming will win back the public trust in higher education. To illustrate the point, the authors cite a study by Gee and Gavazzi that reveals how Joe Public would allocate the university budget if granted that authority. In that hypothetical scenario, people from all political backgrounds agree that teaching ought to be the first priority for spending. Research and community engagement are roughly equal as lower priorities. The coauthors believe their study offers university leaders a playbook for winning more support from state legislators.

Today, I’ll focus on the damage that branding is doing to higher education. The obsession with precise messaging recalls some of the darkest chapters in our national and global history. Finally, I intend to apply a little close reading to the study cited above. It is not at all clear how the authors or their survey participants define teaching, and the current debate about whether higher education is a public good or a public threat shows that there is no agreement about what should be taught or how it should be taught. If this is so, then Rosowsky, Gee, and Gavazzi offer a false narrative of unity. 

Branding is reductive

To their credit, Rosowsky, Gee, and Gavazzi distinguish between “owning and living” a brand and the more disingenuous practice of “purchasing and pushing” one. However, I could not disagree more strongly with their claim that “a university’s message, properly crafted,” is necessarily synonymous with branding. As they suggest, the branding game follows the binary logic of capitalism, trying to isolate the lever that “separates one university from thousands of others, elevating it above competition and distinguishing it in a crowded field of institutions with similar goals.” 

It’s true that many schools seem trapped in zero sum admissions wars. When I taught at a small private college in Iowa, I sang its praises to visiting students. But increasingly I felt that my employer had more in common with other private colleges in Iowa than not, and that instead of leveraging gimmicks to compete with each other, we ought to join forces. Our admissions staff would sometimes try to educate us on the brand message and help us hone our elevator pitches, so we could “win” more of these enrollment face-offs. We needed every tuition dollar, to be sure, and no one felt the pinch of those budget imperatives more than faculty in the humanities. But I got into higher education to help students, and I told them that their college experience would depend more on good relationships than on rankings. In a way, that was a pitch for my college, which was not overly selective and prized its close-knit community. But if a student found a better fit somewhere else, I wished them well. Wanting what is best for another human being does not always mean closing the deal. 

An employee at Buick could never think this way. Losing a customer to Toyota is unequivocally a defeat. But Buick can play the branding game well because it only sells cars and SUVs and operates purely by a profit motive. If you go to work at Buick, you better believe in the brand or play like you do until you go to work for a competitor.

But most universities are not for-profit institutions, and most faculty are not company people. I cannot imagine the heartburn that Michael Thaddeus gave to corporate-minded admins at Columbia University when he publicly claimed that his employer juked its stats to rise in the U.S. News & World Report rankings. But he is a mathematician and a scholar, and his chief loyalty is to the truth. As it should be. I am not the first to say that rankings are a blight on higher education, but even those who say so often see branding as more benign. The two are symptoms of the same malady.

Perhaps the most sinister aspect of branding is its goal of reducing institutional identity to a single thing — a logo — which stands for a message that employees are encouraged to rally around. Sometimes this message is broad, like the University of Nebraska’s slogan, “In our grit, our glory.” 

But reducing identity to a single thing means marginalizing those who don’t feel that the brand represents them. What if you question whether a university ought to aspire to glory, as opposed to excellence or service? What if you don’t see yourself as particularly gritty and prefer a word like maturity or even refinement? Do you still belong at the University of Nebraska? Gadflies like me who realize that “grit” and “glory” are really code words for “football,” and that the brand identity at Nebraska and at many other institutions is buoyed or tarnished depending on how the boys play on Saturday, can join Michael Thaddeus at the table for personae non grata. 

The reductive nature of branding makes it boring. Nearly every university pumps a song through its loudspeakers on Game Day that was produced by Zombie Nation and that bears the nonsensical title “Whoa Oh Oh.” And the opening dong of ACDC’s “Hell’s Bells” has been played so many times on third down that it has lost all power to rattle anyone’s nerves. But otherwise intelligent people somehow believe that this tedium can promote distinction in the fine arts, the theoretical sciences, and the other myriad disciplines a university exists to sustain.

A university should be large, contain multitudes, and encourage disagreement among its members. Human beings are not made to chant the ooommm of the brand.

Branding is violent

What does it say about us that our most popular buzzword is synonymous with “stigma”? For most of human history, branding was what someone else did to you as a mark of shame or degradation.

To be branded, in the purest sense, is to be burned. In the Old English, the word signifies fire or an object ablaze. Germanic and Norse variations — brandaz, brandr, brond — imply destruction, either literally by fire or implicitly by weapons tempered in the flame. Branding livestock dates back to ancient Egypt, and the dehumanizing practice of burning brands onto people to mark them as slaves, criminals, or heretics was commonplace in ancient Greece, ancient Rome, and medieval Europe. When the British Parliament convicted James Naylor of blasphemy in 1656, he not only had a “B” burned into his forehead, his tongue was skewered by a sizzling iron. Slavers continued this barbaric practice in North America for four hundred years.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie makes no mention of corporate brands in her classic TED Talk, “The Danger of a Single Story,” but her critique of colonialism, which impacted her education as an African child and her university experience as an adult, reminds us that Great Britain, like other imperial powers, had a brand and a catchy slogan: “The sun never sets on the British Empire.” Forgive me for reworking Rosowsky, Gee, and Gavazzi a bit, but England quite successfully separated itself from hundreds of other countries, elevated itself above the competition, and distinguished itself for more than four hundred years from other monarchies with similar goals. That colonial history created the prejudice that Adichie sets out to deconstruct. As she says, “The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.” 

The single story hurts universities when brand hierarchy requires picking winners and losers from various academic departments or exploiting faculty for marketing purposes. One of my colleagues in Iowa, a Modern Languages scholar from Ghana, was frequently asked to pose with students in his soccer gear. He usually complied, but he once confided to me, “I’m a professor, not a soccer player.” My colleague had a habit of laughing off his hurt, but there is no doubt that he felt he’d been falsely branded. 

Brands are dogmas, dangerous for their rigidity and for their insistence on clear insiders and outsiders. MAGA is a powerful brand for this reason. And I can think of no more potent logo, in terms of crystallizing identity and purpose, than the swastika. Hitler had no trouble staying on message. Neither does a Communist politburo. Such singularity of purpose ought to be terrifying, which is why Dr. Robert D. Hare, a Canadian forensic psychologist, famously diagnosed the modern corporation with nearly all of the characteristics of a psychopathic individual. 

Branding can backfire. Activists coined the term “woke” only to have it burned back into their foreheads. If an academic idea becomes as clear and precise and unyielding as a brand, then it can be more easily attacked. In fact, I wonder if the hardening of academic camps has been driven, in part, by brand obsession at the top of the university power structure. Departments and disciplines that can unify themselves around strident messages are more likely to keep their funding than those who remain more heterogenous and loosely defined. But the etymology of branding suggests that boiling identity and purpose down in this way requires playing with fire. One seeks to stamp one’s brand onto the marketplace, but if there are dozens of hot pokers waving around in the public square, one is sure to emerge with some blisters and permanent scars. 

I have been asked while traveling in Europe and Central America to explain how my country could have elected both Barack Obama and Donald Trump. To a corporate consultant, this must seem like a brand disaster. Make up your mind, people! Who are you? What do you stand for? But that messiness, which is fundamental to democracy, also lies at the heart of a university. When institutions try to consolidate their identity into an elevator pitch, they hew closer to the ideals of a monarchy than to a republic that occasionally changes shape as it expresses the will of the people. 

Branding is dishonest

The title of the piece that triggered this week’s post is “What the People Want.” The authors claim that instead of promoting traditional measures of quality, such as the Pulitzers, Nobels, and MacArthurs that often accompany excellence in scholarship and art, universities ought to listen carefully to people who don’t care about these things. In fact, it’s not that a university ought to more effectively communicate its own values to the public, it's that the university ought to remake its academic culture in the image that a largely anti-intellectual community prefers. What the “average community member” wants, the authors argue, is affordability, “degree programs that can lead to meaningful employment; … support structures and mechanisms to ensure student success; …programming of value to the community; …affordable arts and athletics offerings …; [and] …community and infrastructure improvements.” To insist on anything else is “tone-deaf, if not arrogant.”

I taught many service-learning courses over the years, and I wholeheartedly agree that a college ought to engage its surrounding community. In fact, one principle of community-based learning is respect for non-academic expertise. Students in my classes learned a great deal about sustainability by volunteering at a fair trade store and developing educational materials for the Department of Natural Resources. But that respect is not always mutual. There were a great many people in the local community who did not give a fig about Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac or Mary Oliver’s House of Light and who would have thought, if they’d known about it, that my discussion of Tim DeChristopher’s act of civil disobedience was tantamount to brainwashing. By the time I left academe, it was not at all clear that the average community member in my rural Iowa town would have found any value in an American literature survey which included a discussion of indigenous origin stories alongside the book of Genesis. 

Rosowsky, Gee, and Gavazzi claim that they have stumbled upon teaching as a cornerstone for bipartisan policy. But people in their study were only given three choices for allocating taxpayer funding: teaching, research, and community engagement. In fact, participants were explicitly told that “non-taxpayer monies already covered basic operating costs and other expenses (student housing, dining services, recreation, etc.).” That qualification alone ought to render the study moot, because even flagship public institutions struggle with enormous deficits and ongoing concerns about enrollment. And most of the schools that are losing millions of dollars on athletics every year are doing so out of base operations and are not recouping those losses through donor support. 

Teaching sounds more like work than research or community engagement, which is likely the simplest explanation for the survey results. But how might participants have responded if they knew that teaching science meant studying vaccine effectiveness? If they knew that sociology courses examined gender as a social construct? Would a bipartisan consensus hold if survey respondents knew that Sharon Olds’s “Satan Says” was on the syllabus? 

I suspect that more than anything, the average American wants teaching to be more like shop class: here is how to build this bench, here is how to get this job building benches. There’s nothing wrong with such a trade, unless it’s used as a foil for subjects that lack a clear return on investment or that seem impractical. I love teaching Ralph Waldo Emerson because he so thoroughly rejects the conformity and compliance that many students have learned as pawns of social media. To hell with the brand, Emerson says, “Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.” But Emerson also acknowledges the consequences of self-reliance: “For nonconformity the world whips you with its displeasure.”

We live in a country of banned books, anti-teaching legislation, and counter-protest. A marketplace where everyone is waving their red-hot irons, trying to burn their ideas into everyone else’s flesh.

To assume that an institution can cohere around a single message is particularly naive in a climate when personal brands are on the rise. College athletes can become millionaires overnight by securing brand endorsements. Or you can achieve the same by monetizing your popularity. If you have your own brand, then every game day, season change, and workout becomes the backdrop to it. An ESPN highlight means cash, and an injury or a game where you don’t see the field could mean missing out on four, five, or six figure gains.

Transactional relationships mark the end of team culture. A colleague of mine who spends his time coaching university executives recently wondered aloud whether university presidents might also be prioritizing their own personal and professional brands over the wellbeing of the universities they lead. And why not? If everyone is using everyone else, looking to align their brand with others that might give them a boost, there is always the transfer portal, the next executive gig, and the golden parachute that’s always attached. 

Unless you are a prospective student without hundreds of thousands of Instagram followers. Or a professor in a discipline that the average community member either does not understand or openly disdains. Or even an average community member with no real power or influence. If you are one of them, the brand does not speak for you. You are the body upon which the brand was made to be burned.