Hand in glove: UMass
and the m-word
Would we do it for widgets? In a word, no. But we do it with
joy for UMass, an enterprise we embrace without reservation and
which so manifestly needs and merits the blessings I won't claim
they're unmixed that the m-word bestows.
The "m-word" is, of course, "marketing." On the basis of fifteen years' experience at UMass, I can tell you this word was until recently rarely heard in these parts. Marketing was something we might teach, in the School of Management and some scattered departments elsewhere. It was not something most of us cared to think we did. The distrust and distaste provoked by the marketing mentality may be more visceral in academia than in any realm except health care, or religion both of which, in its idealism, academia resembles.
Two aspects
of the bugbear of marketing in education are raised in this issue of UMass.
One we raised ourselves, in the essay "Should the Humanities Be Saved?"
by philosophy professor Lynne Rudder Baker. Professor Baker describes three
current threats to the integrity of higher education, and of this scary trio
we find the "market model of education" easily the most menacing.
Call that the death-of-civilization-as-we-know-it aspect. The other aspect call it the "Eeeeugh, gross" problem surfaces in letters sparked by our fall issue.
On the cover of that issue, you may recall, we enlisted the superlative offices of the Minuteman Marching Band to "roll out" a 676-square-foot, brightly painted canvas version of the new UMass logo. And while the cover story went to the award-winning band, we also devoted four pages to the university's "visual identity" project, of which the logo is a part. More than one reader found not only the new logo, but our coverage of it, disgusting.
Is it some kind of weird cognitive split that leads us to both relish the marketing mentality and disdain the market model? To publish essays on the danger of the latter and gross out our readers with our practice of the former? Perhaps, but to us it makes perfect sense.
Here's how we see it. In communicating the very real strengths, identity, and needs of this campus, the sophistication and audience-awareness of the marketing mentality are not only appropriate but indispensable. When it comes to what strengths should be maintained, what identity fostered, and which needs met, we agree with Professor Baker that anything so wholesale as a market model is a threat. Because education is not first and foremost about manufacturing and sales about widgets. It's about something that might help us decide which widgets; it's about wisdom.
Yet especially here, at a public, land-grant institution, education is also about opportunity, and about the application of knowledge to society's problems. Those values require a very active interest in the society that supports the campus. The mechanics of that interest asking what's needed, striving to be of use can reject the impoverished expectations of the market model while working hand-in-glove with the marketing mentality. At least, so it seems to us, as we work to make this magazine work for UMass.
-Patricia Wright
