<http://www.nytimes.com/>
Those of you who take the New York Times saw this today, but in case you
missed it...enjoy evaluating your customers (Yale):
New York Times, April 26, 2006
Brand U.
By STEPHEN BUDIANSKY
I RECENTLY did some research for a satirical novel set at a university. The
idea was to have a bunch of gags about how colleges prostitute themselves
to improve their U.S. News & World Report rankings and keep up a healthy
supply of tuition-paying students, while wrapping their craven
commercialism in high-minded-sounding academic blather.
I would keep coming up with what I thought were pretty outrageous
burlesques of this stuff and then run them by one of my professor friends
and he'd say, Oh, yeah, we're doing that.
One of my best bits, or so I thought, was about how the fictional
university in my novel had hired a branding consultant to come up with a
new name with the hip, possibility-rich freshness needed to appeal to
today's students. Two weeks later, a friend called to say it was on the
front page of The Times: "To Woo Students, Colleges Choose Names That
Sell." Exhibit A was Beaver College, which had changed its name to Arcadia
University. Applications doubled.
I also had created a character, a former breakfast-cereal executive who
returns to his alma mater as vice president for finance (to give something
back) and tries to get everyone to call the students customers. It turns
out Yale was already doing that.
I knew that Tom Lehrer, the great satirical songwriter of the 60's, had
said he had to give up satire when it kept being overtaken by reality. The
final straw, he said, was Henry Kissinger winning the Nobel Peace Prize.
My final straw came when a friend at Case Western Reserve University (now
referred to as Case, after their consultant concluded that all great
universities have single-word names) sent me a packet of information on the
university's new showcase undergraduate seminar program. Called SAGES (this
supposedly stands for Seminar Approach to General Education and
Scholarship), the program offers as an essential component of its core
intellectual experience an upscale cafe that serves Peet's Coffee and is
"staffed by baristas whose expertise in preparing espresso is matched only
by their authoritative knowledge of all things SAGES."
As the program's Web site explains (complete with footnotes, bibliography
and quotes from the urban theorist Jane Jacobs): "In the bustling
personal-but-impersonal rhythms of campus activity, as in the streets of a
big city, proprietors of public establishments occupy a special position...
The SAGES cafe staff are patently not interested in providing grades or
passing judgment." And, not only that, but "there are no compromises that
would undermine the quality of our drinks.... Our chai latte is made not
from a bottled concentrate, but from a fresh-brewed base made from scratch
every day on site."
As a model of pandering to students in the guise of lofty academic purpose,
I thought that was pretty hard to top. Then I started reading the 92-page
guide Case has created for teachers of these seminars.
If students fidget, talk or walk out of class, the guide advises seminar
leaders not to "manage" such behaviors, but to explore their underlying
causes. Instructors must remember that to such characteristically American
cultural beliefs as the importance of morality, rationality and personal
responsibility, there are equally valid alternatives that must be respected.
Instructors must be wary of spurious objectivity, such as a 0-100 grading
scale; much better is a 0-5 scale, or, best of all, a check, check-plus,
check-minus scale. And finally, if students do not contribute to
discussions at all, seminar leaders should "make space for silence."
It's enough to drive a satirist to something stronger than chai latte.
Stephen Budiansky is the author, most recently, of "Her Majesty's Spymaster."
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