This art icle was downloaded by: [ ALison Hearn] On: 13 April 2015, At : 05: 09 Publisher: Rout ledge I nform a Lt d Regist ered in England and Wales Regist ered Num ber: 1072954 Regist ered office: Mort im er House, 37- 41 Mort im er St reet , London W1T 3JH, UK International Studies of Management & Organization Publicat ion det ails, including inst ruct ions f or aut hors and subscript ion inf ormat ion: ht t p: / / www. t andf online. com/ loi/ mimo20 The Politics of Branding in the New University of Circulation Alison Hearn Published online: 06 Apr 2015. Click for updates To cite this article: Alison Hearn (2015) The Polit ics of Branding in t he New Universit y of Circulat ion, Int ernat ional St udies of Management & Organizat ion, 45: 2, 114-120, DOI: 10. 1080/ 00208825. 2015. 1006007 To link to this article: ht t p: / / dx. doi. org/ 10. 1080/ 00208825. 2015. 1006007 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTI CLE Taylor & Francis m akes every effort t o ensure t he accuracy of all t he inform at ion ( t he “ Cont ent ” ) cont ained in t he publicat ions on our plat form . However, Taylor & Francis, our agent s, and our licensors m ake no represent at ions or warrant ies what soever as t o t he accuracy, com plet eness, or suit abilit y for any purpose of t he Cont ent . Any opinions and views expressed in t his publicat ion are t he opinions and views of t he aut hors, and are not t he views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. 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Term s & Condit ions of access and use can be found at ht t p: / / www.t andfonline.com / page/ t erm s- and- condit ions International Studies of Management & Organization, 45(2): 114–120, 2015 Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 0020-8825 print/1558-0911 online DOI: 10.1080/00208825.2015.1006007 Downloaded by [ALison Hearn] at 05:09 13 April 2015 ALISON HEARN The Politics of Branding in the New University of Circulation Abstract: This short article reviews contemporary forms and practices of university branding and marketing, and links these to the broad-based neoliberal structural transformations taking place in all aspects of university education around the globe. It argues that the ascendance of university branding and marketing practices is both symptomatic and constitutive of the new raison d’être of universities, which is to serve as points for the circulation and reinvestment of overaccumulated finance capital. Given the university’s new role as private business, corporate entity, and investment bank, we can no longer imagine that its branding and marketing practices are politically or ideologically neutral; indeed, the position we take in relation to university branding efforts has broad implications for the future of free research and education around the globe. In the past few decades, capitalism’s mode of production has become ever more flexible, ephemeral, and virtual. Knowledge and symbolic products, including branding and marketing, have become central points of accumulation (Holt 2006) and finance capital, ascendant at the turn of the century, continues to dominate in spite of the major economic crises it has precipitated. At the same time, new forms of social media have inaugurated the rise of a reputation economy, where aggregated reputation, generated by branding and promotion online and off, threatens to displace all other forms of value (Schwabel 2011). A neoliberal political ideology underpins these developments, positioning the state as advocate and protector of “strong property rights, free markets and free trade” (Harvey 2005, 2) and insisting Alison Hearn is an associate professor in the faculty of Information and Media Studies, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario N6A 3K7, Canada; tel.: 647-898-2518; e-mail: ahearn2@uwo.ca. 114 Downloaded by [ALison Hearn] at 05:09 13 April 2015 THE POLITICS OF BRANDING 115 that market exchange is “an ethic in itself, capable of acting as a guide to all human action, and substituting for all previously held ethical beliefs” (Harvey 2005, 3). Poised at the forefront of knowledge generation and at the intersection of state and market, universities today are inextricably bound up with these developments. Administrators adopt branding practices in earnest, while student debt rises, salaries stagnate, and working conditions grow increasingly precarious under the imposition of austerity agendas. In this brief essay, I argue that the practices of university branding cannot be separated from their political and economic contexts, or from the academic values they are slowly displacing. Situated in relation to broader structural transformations in higher education taking place around the globe, university branding and marketing practices are inherently political. In the wake of chronic underfunding of public universities by the state and the 2008 financial crisis, the costs of education have been shifted almost entirely onto students and their families. Universities have been forced to go into the business of doing business, launching aggressive efforts to attract, retain, and leverage students as targets “for the extraction of revenue” (Slaughter and Rhoades 2004, 279). Thus, while students are increasingly indebted— the amount of student debt in the United States is now over 1 trillion dollars (Martin and Lehren 2012)—colleges and universities view them as both customers and commodities, whose attention and buying power can be sold to private interests. The internal operations of universities have also undergone fundamental changes. Not the least of these is the entrenchment of an audit culture, involving the perpetual measurement and evaluation of teaching outcomes and research outputs and the quest for efficiencies, displacing academic values and faculty judgment. Demands to produce research with monetizable results, the unceasing mantra of innovation, the preoccupation with techno-science, the administrative use of information and communications technology for the integration of faculty into client self-service systems, the casualization and fragmenting of academic labor, the erosion of faculty self-governance, the growth of branch plant campuses overseas, and the overt courting of high-fee paying international students are other symptoms of the neoliberalized global university (Ross 2009). University marketing and branding practices are at the center of these transformations. While competition between universities is nothing new and reputation has always been instrumental to a university’s survival, what is new is “the self-consciousness with which a university’s corporate image has come to be managed, the administrative prominence this task assumes, and the objectification, and indeed monetization, of academic reputation itself as a brand” (Wernick 2006b, 566). In North America and the United Kingdom, the numbers of dedicated chief marketing officers employed by Downloaded by [ALison Hearn] at 05:09 13 April 2015 116 HEARN (CANADA) universities is on the rise, and, in the last decade, the number of professional marketers who now specialize in selling higher education has at least doubled (Glazer and Korn 2012). The amount of money spent on marketing, branding, and students recruitment efforts, which grew by over 50 percent in the 2000s (Luettger 2008), is expected to keep climbing as messaging platforms expand into social media and online venues (Miley 2009). It is estimated that most nonprofit universities in the United States currently spend between 1.5 to 5 percent of their budgets on marketing and branding, while for-profits spend 22 percent. In the wake of profound cuts to the states’ block grants in the United Kingdom, universities there may soon be spending 20 percent of their budgets on marketing (Matthews 2012). These days, numerous different forms of university branding and marketing can be found on and off campuses. The most obvious is the delineation of a clear university brand to support student recruitment. Rebranding campaigns cost in the millions of dollars (Miley 2009, 6), include a pithy new logo, color scheme, brand identity and message, and are often accompanied by strict instructions to ensure “message discipline” (Pulley 2003). Advertising in traditional media is being displaced by online initiatives that microtarget potential students via social media. Universities employ call centers to manage inquiries and conduct targeted telemarketing campaigns to solicit possible “clients.” These efforts are often outsourced to independent companies, such as Plattform or Education Sales Management, that also offer search engine optimization and other forms of online reputation management services. Several private “lead-vending” companies, such as Course Advisor, sell bundles of “leads” on potential students to universities by creating an online directory of university programs and collecting information about visitors to the directory. Other companies, such as Compass Knowledge, offer additional telemarketing to help “convert the leads”; each program listed in the directory comes with its own team of “enrollment advisers” who work independently of the university they are ostensibly representing (Blumenstyk 2006). A brand is a value-generating form of property in its own right, and, as such, universities sell and subcontract their brand and logo as forms of “rentable property” (Wernick 2006a). From thongs, to hoodies, to tumblers, sales of branded university merchandise amounted to 4.6 billion U.S. dollars last year (Love 2012). Indeed, universities with a high amount of reputational capital, such as Oxford and Harvard, have started their own fashion lines to be sold off campus in the general retail market (Grynbaum 2009). Of course, university brands can also “escape their bounds” and be pirated or used illegally. Here, another private enterprise has arisen to address the problem: Collegiate Licensing Company, which represents over 200 colleges and universities, brokers the sale of trademarks to other businesses and polices any unauthorized use of a university’s name Downloaded by [ALison Hearn] at 05:09 13 April 2015 THE POLITICS OF BRANDING 117 (Love 2012). Universities also control and generate income from several subbrands, such as those attached to sports teams or affiliated arts groups (Neumark 2012). Another inflection of university branding involves the campus and its students as both vehicles and targets for the marketing campaigns of external businesses and brands. It is estimated that over 10,000 American college students have been targeted and paid hundreds of dollars to be “brand ambassadors”’ for companies, such as Red Bull or HP. This is in addition to the corporate advertising now evident all over campuses, the plethora of named university buildings and services, and the direct sponsorship of campus events by private companies. American retail giant Target, for example, recently provided free buses to take freshmen to its store to shop as part of an intro week “Midnight Madness” party (Singer 2011). Students leveraged as captive markets are the basis for universities’ lucrative deals with a variety of corporate interests, such as Coca Cola or Starbucks, who pay top dollar for campus exclusivity rights. Adding insult to the injury of student debt, “student IDs are now adorned with MasterCard and Visa logos, providing students who may have few assets with an instant line of credit and an identity as full-time consumers” (Giroux 2008, 149). Many university sports teams also sign sponsorship contracts with private sportswear companies, which often include nondisparagement clauses, preventing any representatives of the university from criticizing the sponsoring corporation for the duration of the contract and effectively overruling any claims to academic freedom. Finally, nonprofit university campuses now serve as sites for for-profit schools and educational services. For example, Navitas is a private, for-profit Australian enterprise that helps low-performing international students get accepted into universities by training them for a year on a parent university campus; upon completion of the program, the student is guaranteed entry into the parent university. Simon Fraser University and Carleton University in Canada and the Universities of Massachusetts and New Hampshire in the United States currently house branches of Navitas on their publicly funded campuses. University branding and marketing practices are both symptomatic and constitutive of the broader structural changes in higher education. The use of subcontracted private businesses to handle recruitment and student services obviates meaningful collegial governance and works to undermine faculty expertise in this area. The unrelenting interpellation of the student as a rational sovereign consumer defines university experience as a lifestyle choice, the university as a service provider, and education as a commodity, rendering student/customer satisfaction paramount. However, should student satisfaction really be the primary measure of pedagogical success? As Stefan Collini (2010) contends: “I would hope the students I teach come away with certain kinds of dissatisfaction (including with themselves: Downloaded by [ALison Hearn] at 05:09 13 April 2015 118 HEARN (CANADA) a ‘satisfied’ student is nigh-on ineducable), and it matters more that they carry on wondering about the source of that dissatisfaction than whether they ‘liked’ the course or not.” Positioning students as customers and education as a commodity also results in the deskilling of the professoriate; constantly pressed to reassure students that the class will produce job-getting deliverables, professorial curricular expertise is routinely undermined. Marketing and promotionalism have infected research efforts as well. In the pharmaceutical industry, for example, marketing agencies ghostwrite academic articles and then solicit established scholars to endorse the findings. Critics estimate that this promotional literature, posing as research, makes up about 50 percent of articles in the field of psychopharmacology (Healy 2004, 61–65). Finally, branding and marketing play a central role in the university’s quest for favorable rankings in such publications as U.S. News and World Report or the Times Higher Education Supplement. Branding efforts, which work to abstract a heterogeneous and complex institution into a pithy image or slogan, feed this reputational marketplace in which the categories of reputation or peer assessment factor heavily. Paradoxically, many universities use the categories for university adjudication established by these external publications as blueprints for their future. The practices of branding and the ranking they encourage, then, work to displace long-established academic values, producing “a spectacular economy of education, in which abstract rankings become images of educational institutions and the exchange values of these spectacular images replace the use values of the institutions themselves” (Chang and Osborn 2005, 340). Given these wide scale structural transformations, what comprises the university’s primary function today? In a recent essay, Brian Whitener and Dan Nemser (2012) argue that the purpose of the contemporary university “is no longer education but circulation” (165) of overaccumulated finance capital. They identify four different locations within the university, “which operate as sinks, or pools for investment and accumulation: student loans, construction contracts, research and development and endowments” (166). To this list, I would add the proliferation of often-outsourced marketing, branding, and recruitment initiatives reviewed above, the role of which is to stoke the market in student debt, construction, and research by generating student enrollment. Far more than achieving “meaningful differentiated positioning” (Annandale 2011)1 within a field of other brand identities, the function of university branding is to legitimate and perpetuate the university’s new role as a site for the circulation and accumulation of global finance and knowledge capital. We must beware of using the term “university branding” as some kind of “neutral descriptor of events and processes” (Kaneva 2011), as this only serves to reproduce entrenched ideological positions and practices, rather Downloaded by [ALison Hearn] at 05:09 13 April 2015 THE POLITICS OF BRANDING 119 than to expose branding’s constitutive role in them. As we have seen, the practices of university branding are deeply enmeshed with sets of political and economic forces that are currently crisis-ridden and failing. The position we take in relation to university branding efforts, given their material and economic effects, has broad implications for the future of free research and education around the globe and links us to the struggles against student debt and austerity that have been taking place in Athens, London, Montreal, Mexico City, Santiago, Los Angeles, New York and beyond over the past several years. If we are to have any hope of reclaiming the university as a site for meaningful intellectual freedom, contestation and debate, then professors, students, and staff must assert its necessary open-endedness and nonrepresentability within and against dominant neoliberal capitalist logics and work together to imagine the university anew. Notes 1. 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