Nov 19, 2022·edited Nov 19, 2022Liked by Joshua Doležal
Although it is not specifically linked to higher ed, I think branding and cultural identity have become synonymous, as well. One's race or sexual identity becomes a brand, so to speak, under Capitalism. Like a brand, one's cultural identity must be articulated, defended against competitors, and, most importantly, continuously produced.
I thought of you while deleting a more pointed critique of Kendi and DiAngelo, but I had them in mind with the reference to hardening academic camps. The culture of branding invites that kind of rigidity. Anti-racism is a concept that corporate-minded admins can understand, whether they approach it as a PR liability that they want to avoid or as one of those token "values" investments that is easily measured or that demonstrably aids the larger institutional branding effort. It aids the institutional brand more to give Kendi a platform than to do the same for a Glenn Loury. Kendi reminds me of the Puritan Mary Rowlandson, who was so rigid in her Calvinism that she could only attribute the kindness that her indigenous captors showed to her during King Phillip's War to God's providence. She was so committed to the notion that providence explained everything that even her suffering was "strange providence" -- God chastising her because he loved her. Not even the death of her infant child could shake that view. Likewise, I can't imagine Kendi ever seeing an incentive for admitting that he was wrong. He would have to tarnish his own brand, perhaps by being granted the authority to institute his frightening Department of Anti-Racism, before reconsidering that his binary construction of the world is flawed. Otherwise, the brand works incredibly well the way it is.
Your deep Am Lit references never cease to amaze me.
Yes, the culture of branding can result in a Kendi or DiAngelo. But just as concerning is the fact that African American thought is so much richer than most DEI reading lists allow for. (The subject of my next Between post.) In other words, Kendi isn't inevitable, but his broad strokes and emphatic tone have recognizable appeal.
Thank you for sharing this thoughtful essay! I especially liked the quote “The single story hurts universities when brand hierarchy requires picking winners and losers from various academic departments or exploiting faculty for marketing purposes.” This is sad, but true!
A brilliant piece, just awesome from start to finish. Oh, you got me started ... I hate branding, won't buy anything NIKE for many reasons, including branding over and over. I won't "just do it" or "swoosh" and I live in Oregon.
Sadly, college students today grew up on branding and probably don't know anything else. I'm old enough to have gone to college before magazine rankings or branding, it was definitely find your own way. I liked the school, learned from some good profs, had my ups and downs, eventually graduated and look back on my time with equal fondness and frustration. That's life.
I saw an online ad today, I'm probably misquoting it, "SEC: It's just better here" or something like that. Better in football and one university is decent in Vanderbilt. The rest are just OK. Get over yourselves ... and your brand.
Ah, well, brand saturation is one thing I cut from an earlier draft. I live in State College, which means I hear the Nittany Lion roar everywhere around town. I think even if I rooted for PSU I'd find the sheer redundancy of it tiresome. Same thing with seeing the same commercials while streaming on Hulu or elsewhere. At some point it seems that brand saturation yields diminishing returns if it fosters real hostility toward a company.
As I mentioned in another post, I think branding has subsumed more expansive and nuanced concepts like identity, culture, or symbolism. The profit motive cheapens everything.
I've actually been waiting for someone from the peanut gallery to point out that I recently released a logo and will be moving some content behind a paywall. Surely I'm engaging in a little branding myself? That may be true on some level, but I'm finding that I'm bad at branding because I grow tired of moving in one narrow lane. Grievance sells on platforms like Substack, and I don't want to be writing screeds against academe every week. Artists who are good at branding can dominate a marketplace, but I prefer the older notion of an artist as someone who evolves, who has a style or voice that matures over time, and who is on some level unpredictable. Otherwise, don't we end up singing, with Kurt Cobain, "I feel stupid and contagious -- here we are now, entertain us?"
What I don't get is outside of English and History majors and some select others is that I'd say most college students don't read, aren't curious about the world, and know little about literature, art, U.S. and World History, Economics. world politics, etc., stuff they should be required to learn and if not, told to leave college. It can't just be a constant football game/drunk fest, can it? And if that's all it is, why are college presidents so spineless in that they won't change these cultures? When they all caved into college athletes getting paid, I was done with big time college sports. Anything to protect the brand, I guess ... and of course the presidents don't want to lose high 6-figure or 7-figure admin jobs.
There is some of that, but it's been there ever since I've been teaching. And I've written about anti-intellectual trends that go back to the colonial period (incidentally, public universities only exploded after the demise of Puritanism). I remember making breakfast one morning when I was in graduate school, and NPR played a clip from the Beach Boys' "Surfin' USA," with the line "tell the teacher we gone surfin', surfin' USA." It pretty much summed this all up. At the time I was a wilderness ranger in the summers and had just recently lived in Colorado, where I skied three times a week. So part of me was thinking, What if the teacher wants to go surfing?
I would say that over a 16-week semester, I was typically able to win my students over to what we were doing. But I nearly always started in a deficit for the reasons you describe, and that hole got deeper the closer I came to resigning. When the college leaders began reinforcing the transactional idea of college as job training, there really seemed to be no leg left to stand on in advocating for traditional literature courses, especially surveys that tried to introduce historical periods or philosophical/artistic eras like the American Renaissance.
My feeling is that students actually do want this kind of thing, they just have rarely been exposed to the *real* thing. I'm basing that on my ability over twenty years of college teaching to move the needle with almost every class I taught, and most frequently with non-majors. When young people are given permission to take ideas seriously, to engage in Burke's idea of the endless conversation, and to think about their national history, they generally enjoy being treated like adults. However, what they often get before college is a diluted version (fragments for reading comprehension, etc.) or YA books that have almost nothing to do with history or literature. I argued with a student once about this -- an Education major -- who thought that giving resistant students books about things they liked was the way to make them like reading. Give the kid a book about football, for instance. My feeling was that the kid could spot a cheap imitation when he saw it and would rather play football than read some knock-off imitation of the actual sport. The kid really needed a dose of Greek or Roman mythology, or something like Washington Irving. So many farm kids in Iowa and Nebraska got deeply into Crevecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer, even though before taking my class they would have scoffed at the idea that a French immigrant would have anything to teach them about American history or rural culture. But I see that I'm lecturing by now, and I apologize!
Here you get more at specific and far-reaching evils in contemporary education, Josh. From my perspective, your best essay yet, which is saying something given the fine many others I’ve read of yours so far. Thank you again.—Dave
Thanks for reading, Dave! I put some time into this one. Hard not to feel like I'm tilting at windmills, but as always I hope that what I put out there is of service to a larger conversation.
Nov 15, 2022·edited Nov 15, 2022Liked by Joshua Doležal
I'll never forget going to Costco and seeing a logo very much like the one used by our previous employer on a wheel of cheese. We'd paid a couple hundred thousand for someone to design it. If I hadn't thought branding was ridiculous before, I did after seeing the Cheese Lion.
Well, I cut another potent anecdote about our former employer, which is that that United Methodist Church popularized the tagline "Open hearts, open minds, open doors" at least ten years before we paid consultants five or six figures to come up with "Open arms, open minds, open doors." You'd get an F for plagiarism if you did that in composition.
Maybe the accompanying slogan needs to be "don't think for yourself." However, I must slightly disagree with you because as you are well aware, symbolism is a powerful tool for evoking emotions. I mostly disagree with the inane symbols & mantras they over-use & how much they pay for them. Is gullibility a brand? I think it is here in Iowa.
Ah, but symbolism is not necessarily interchangeable with branding. Branding commodifies symbolism. Symbols are not reductive. They can be elusive, ambiguous, even incomprehensible (such as the Trinity). Similarly, culture and identity are not synonymous with brands. Culture and identity certainly can include some insider/outsider dynamics, but they are more fluid and nuanced than brands and often express value in non-monetary ways. This may need to be a separate post.
Although it is not specifically linked to higher ed, I think branding and cultural identity have become synonymous, as well. One's race or sexual identity becomes a brand, so to speak, under Capitalism. Like a brand, one's cultural identity must be articulated, defended against competitors, and, most importantly, continuously produced.
Appreciated the piece.
I thought of you while deleting a more pointed critique of Kendi and DiAngelo, but I had them in mind with the reference to hardening academic camps. The culture of branding invites that kind of rigidity. Anti-racism is a concept that corporate-minded admins can understand, whether they approach it as a PR liability that they want to avoid or as one of those token "values" investments that is easily measured or that demonstrably aids the larger institutional branding effort. It aids the institutional brand more to give Kendi a platform than to do the same for a Glenn Loury. Kendi reminds me of the Puritan Mary Rowlandson, who was so rigid in her Calvinism that she could only attribute the kindness that her indigenous captors showed to her during King Phillip's War to God's providence. She was so committed to the notion that providence explained everything that even her suffering was "strange providence" -- God chastising her because he loved her. Not even the death of her infant child could shake that view. Likewise, I can't imagine Kendi ever seeing an incentive for admitting that he was wrong. He would have to tarnish his own brand, perhaps by being granted the authority to institute his frightening Department of Anti-Racism, before reconsidering that his binary construction of the world is flawed. Otherwise, the brand works incredibly well the way it is.
Your deep Am Lit references never cease to amaze me.
Yes, the culture of branding can result in a Kendi or DiAngelo. But just as concerning is the fact that African American thought is so much richer than most DEI reading lists allow for. (The subject of my next Between post.) In other words, Kendi isn't inevitable, but his broad strokes and emphatic tone have recognizable appeal.
Thank you for sharing this thoughtful essay! I especially liked the quote “The single story hurts universities when brand hierarchy requires picking winners and losers from various academic departments or exploiting faculty for marketing purposes.” This is sad, but true!
Thanks for reading!
A brilliant piece, just awesome from start to finish. Oh, you got me started ... I hate branding, won't buy anything NIKE for many reasons, including branding over and over. I won't "just do it" or "swoosh" and I live in Oregon.
Sadly, college students today grew up on branding and probably don't know anything else. I'm old enough to have gone to college before magazine rankings or branding, it was definitely find your own way. I liked the school, learned from some good profs, had my ups and downs, eventually graduated and look back on my time with equal fondness and frustration. That's life.
I saw an online ad today, I'm probably misquoting it, "SEC: It's just better here" or something like that. Better in football and one university is decent in Vanderbilt. The rest are just OK. Get over yourselves ... and your brand.
Ah, well, brand saturation is one thing I cut from an earlier draft. I live in State College, which means I hear the Nittany Lion roar everywhere around town. I think even if I rooted for PSU I'd find the sheer redundancy of it tiresome. Same thing with seeing the same commercials while streaming on Hulu or elsewhere. At some point it seems that brand saturation yields diminishing returns if it fosters real hostility toward a company.
As I mentioned in another post, I think branding has subsumed more expansive and nuanced concepts like identity, culture, or symbolism. The profit motive cheapens everything.
I've actually been waiting for someone from the peanut gallery to point out that I recently released a logo and will be moving some content behind a paywall. Surely I'm engaging in a little branding myself? That may be true on some level, but I'm finding that I'm bad at branding because I grow tired of moving in one narrow lane. Grievance sells on platforms like Substack, and I don't want to be writing screeds against academe every week. Artists who are good at branding can dominate a marketplace, but I prefer the older notion of an artist as someone who evolves, who has a style or voice that matures over time, and who is on some level unpredictable. Otherwise, don't we end up singing, with Kurt Cobain, "I feel stupid and contagious -- here we are now, entertain us?"
What I don't get is outside of English and History majors and some select others is that I'd say most college students don't read, aren't curious about the world, and know little about literature, art, U.S. and World History, Economics. world politics, etc., stuff they should be required to learn and if not, told to leave college. It can't just be a constant football game/drunk fest, can it? And if that's all it is, why are college presidents so spineless in that they won't change these cultures? When they all caved into college athletes getting paid, I was done with big time college sports. Anything to protect the brand, I guess ... and of course the presidents don't want to lose high 6-figure or 7-figure admin jobs.
There is some of that, but it's been there ever since I've been teaching. And I've written about anti-intellectual trends that go back to the colonial period (incidentally, public universities only exploded after the demise of Puritanism). I remember making breakfast one morning when I was in graduate school, and NPR played a clip from the Beach Boys' "Surfin' USA," with the line "tell the teacher we gone surfin', surfin' USA." It pretty much summed this all up. At the time I was a wilderness ranger in the summers and had just recently lived in Colorado, where I skied three times a week. So part of me was thinking, What if the teacher wants to go surfing?
I would say that over a 16-week semester, I was typically able to win my students over to what we were doing. But I nearly always started in a deficit for the reasons you describe, and that hole got deeper the closer I came to resigning. When the college leaders began reinforcing the transactional idea of college as job training, there really seemed to be no leg left to stand on in advocating for traditional literature courses, especially surveys that tried to introduce historical periods or philosophical/artistic eras like the American Renaissance.
My feeling is that students actually do want this kind of thing, they just have rarely been exposed to the *real* thing. I'm basing that on my ability over twenty years of college teaching to move the needle with almost every class I taught, and most frequently with non-majors. When young people are given permission to take ideas seriously, to engage in Burke's idea of the endless conversation, and to think about their national history, they generally enjoy being treated like adults. However, what they often get before college is a diluted version (fragments for reading comprehension, etc.) or YA books that have almost nothing to do with history or literature. I argued with a student once about this -- an Education major -- who thought that giving resistant students books about things they liked was the way to make them like reading. Give the kid a book about football, for instance. My feeling was that the kid could spot a cheap imitation when he saw it and would rather play football than read some knock-off imitation of the actual sport. The kid really needed a dose of Greek or Roman mythology, or something like Washington Irving. So many farm kids in Iowa and Nebraska got deeply into Crevecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer, even though before taking my class they would have scoffed at the idea that a French immigrant would have anything to teach them about American history or rural culture. But I see that I'm lecturing by now, and I apologize!
Here you get more at specific and far-reaching evils in contemporary education, Josh. From my perspective, your best essay yet, which is saying something given the fine many others I’ve read of yours so far. Thank you again.—Dave
Thanks for reading, Dave! I put some time into this one. Hard not to feel like I'm tilting at windmills, but as always I hope that what I put out there is of service to a larger conversation.
I'll never forget going to Costco and seeing a logo very much like the one used by our previous employer on a wheel of cheese. We'd paid a couple hundred thousand for someone to design it. If I hadn't thought branding was ridiculous before, I did after seeing the Cheese Lion.
Well, I cut another potent anecdote about our former employer, which is that that United Methodist Church popularized the tagline "Open hearts, open minds, open doors" at least ten years before we paid consultants five or six figures to come up with "Open arms, open minds, open doors." You'd get an F for plagiarism if you did that in composition.
Compare for yourself.
https://www.umnews.org/en/news/united-methodist-open-hearts-tagline-wins-award
https://brand.central.edu/brand-foundation/#pillars
Maybe the accompanying slogan needs to be "don't think for yourself." However, I must slightly disagree with you because as you are well aware, symbolism is a powerful tool for evoking emotions. I mostly disagree with the inane symbols & mantras they over-use & how much they pay for them. Is gullibility a brand? I think it is here in Iowa.
Ah, but symbolism is not necessarily interchangeable with branding. Branding commodifies symbolism. Symbols are not reductive. They can be elusive, ambiguous, even incomprehensible (such as the Trinity). Similarly, culture and identity are not synonymous with brands. Culture and identity certainly can include some insider/outsider dynamics, but they are more fluid and nuanced than brands and often express value in non-monetary ways. This may need to be a separate post.
One I'll look forward to reading!