In the course of co-editing this volume on “Academic Brands,” the world suffered a once-in-a-century pandemic, the Black Lives Matter movement forced a national reckoning with racial injustice, and my oldest child applied to college. Our family dallied with US schools from coast to coast, public and private, rural and urban, research universities and liberal arts colleges. Each tour (or Zoom information session)Footnote 1 coyly revealed elements of a school’s brand – its assemblages of identity and values on display for purchase, for the mere price of a Tesla every year for four years. Some schools give thanks to the Native Americans on whose land the campus sits. Brochures and social media showcase multiethnic student bodies. One school boasts scholar athletes; another flaunts quirky geniuses unicycling through campus. Elite universities that admit 5 percent of applicants tout their generous financial aid. University Instagram filters reveal much more than who is socially distancing responsibly. University brands riff off other brands. Every school proclaims itself Hogwarts.
Brands are the lingua francaFootnote 2 through which individuals, celebrities, politicians, cities, and more distinguish themselves in a brand new world.Footnote 3 Universities are no exception. Indeed, university brands are among the world’s most recognizable and valuable brands, as Haochen Sun argues in his contribution to this volume.Footnote 4 Harvard rivals Hermès in prestige and exclusivity – and is certainly more elusive than the purchase of a tie or scarf.Footnote 5 This volume is the first to interrogate university brands as a distinct and influential form of branding. The chapters herein explore the brand as media and mediator, the filter through which the modern university perceives, represents, and ultimately remakes itself.Footnote 6 How does the brand as a vehicle of self-fashioning transform the university? Furthermore, how do university brands reveal the peculiar nature of the brand itself?
But first – what is a brand? As a professor of trademark law, I have argued that brands transcend that narrow legal category. Where trademarks provide information – signaling the source of a product or service – brands commodify meaning. “[T]he brand is a social currency, a way in which people bring meaning to various exchanges,” Celia Lury wrote in her foundational book, Brands: The Logos of the Global Economy (2004).Footnote 7 Another influential early investigation of brands, Adam Arvidsson’s Brands: Meaning and Value in Media Culture (2006), describes them as the “fusion” of “aesthetics and economics.”Footnote 8 Brands commodify the communicative sphere of human life – the lifeworlds in which we play, experience, love, learn, and feel. Brands “become valuable through their ability to manage and program human communication and appropriate the ethical surplus – the commons – that it produces as a source of value.”Footnote 9 Brand value derives from the sacred rituals, mythologies, stories, and emotions of life itself.Footnote 10 Brands translate aesthetic feelings – joy, belonging, pride – into tradeable market commodities, bringing meaning into markets, yet also distorting the sacred acts of life itself.
The university as a site of enormous brand value should not be surprising. The more transformative the life experience, the more valuable the commodity.Footnote 11 The university “experience” far surpasses the four years typically required for a degree. University brands mediate identity from cradle to grave: from onesies for newborns that feature a parent’s alma mater to university-branded caskets.Footnote 12 Indeed, university brands represent the complete colonization of life. Today the brand goes far beyond a school name, coat of arms, logo, colors, or a mascot. The university brand seeks to capture and commodify as completely as possible the aesthetic value in belonging and participating in an academic community and its storied past. For all life’s pleasures, big and small – from intellectual transformation to social and emotional awakening, from sports games to all variety of university-branded kitsch – trademark laws are increasingly stretched and deployed to profit off the endorphins associated with memory and membership. The crux of trademark doctrines, from initial interest and post-sale confusion to sponsorship and endorsement confusion, is to keep all of the surplus value of a brand – its aesthetic meaning – for the profit of the brand holder alone. The aesthetic move in property seeks to capitalize on all thought and pleasure associated with one’s alma mater.
In the experience economy mediated by brands, the commodification of human experience becomes, in turn, the new medium in which life itself is created and enacted. Life is mediatized, to use the word of cultural studies. Brands are a vehicle through which individuals create and perform the lifeworld. As Arvidsson puts it, “With a particular brand I can act, feel and be in a particular way.”Footnote 13 The aesthetic university is a stage on which transformative life experiences are enacted, recast, and traded. One becomes a Harvard woman or man not by merely studying at Harvard, but by performing the brand and reshaping it from the inside. This is the sense in which the social theorist Bruno Latour describes human beings as “hybrids” of the techno-cultural worlds in which we live; as individuals we are formed by our media while simultaneously developing our agency through them. Students and faculty over generations re-enact the meaning of the university brand, from debates about tuition, debt, and access, to the institution’s historic entanglements with slavery and white supremacy. Praise or critique takes place through celebrating or shaming not the university, but its brand meaning. This endeavor is prominently on display in the current moment of racial reckoning as universities rename buildings, tear down statues, and revisit curricula for their role in perpetuating systemic racism.
To be sure, the commodification of the aesthetic university raises a number of concerns. The university experience is considered a central part of a good life, but whose life? In the United States today, most people cannot afford the experience of a four-year college. Students coming from high-income families are six times more likely to complete a college degree than those from low-income families.Footnote 14 Access to elite colleges is even more skewed. Two-thirds of students at Harvard come from the top one-fifth of income earners. Furthermore, long-standing requirements for admission to elite schools, including high standardized test scores, themselves correspond with income.Footnote 15 In his book The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good, the philosopher Michael Sandel argues that while we have been touting “education, education, education” as the mantra of opportunity, in truth, a lack of access to higher education has led to stalled economic mobility and generations of Americans who have bought into the myth of merit at the expense of their own self-esteem and dignity.Footnote 16 To make matters worse, universities are becoming luxury goods, with institutional rankings corresponding with the most exclusive admissions policies.Footnote 17 Deven Desai in this volume proffers that branding may be a tool to help institutions distinguish themselves in the global flow – with public institutions emphasizing their role as engines of social and economic mobility, for example.Footnote 18 My co-editor Mario Biagioli disagrees, arguing that branding measured by metrics – which emphasize student test scores first and foremost – forces schools into a cookie-cutter mold.Footnote 19 There is some movement on this front. In May 2020, the influential public university system of California announced it would phase out standardized test scores, with the aim of ushering in a more diverse student body.Footnote 20 And calls to forgive college debt are gaining steam.Footnote 21 At present, though, academic brands in the United States, at least, function more like exclusive luxury goods and services, fueling at best, ambition, at worst, greed, corruption,Footnote 22 and widening social disparities.Footnote 23
In the meantime, the global lockdown due to COVID-19 left many paying full price for “the college experience” only to get a mere nugget of it – that is, academics – online. How does this pandemic-mediated experience compare to the ongoing expansion of universities into online and global campuses, which Paul Berman explores in this volume?Footnote 24 In the latter, the co-ed experience is left behind altogether in favor of the “auratic” experience of the university’s brand alone. Universities exploit association with the “aura” of the university in numerous ways – from seemingly endless tuition and fee hikesFootnote 25 to the low salaries paid to adjunct faculty, who receive value through affiliation with the university.Footnote 26
Others perceive university brands as an oxymoron. For Mark Bartholomew, the university is synonymous with truth, rationality, and the production of knowledge.Footnote 27 Brands, in contrast, are about emotion and feelings. Worse still, like the “black art” of advertising,Footnote 28 university brands obscure truth with the Veritas shield. The brand as filter creates an alternate reality, or alternate facts. A study of university catalogs, for example, found that students of color were overrepresented in images.Footnote 29 As the legal scholar Nancy Leong describes:
Asians made up 3.3% of enrolled students but 5.1% of portrayed students, and blacks made up 7.9% of enrolled students but 12.4% of portrayed students. Put another way, the percentage of blacks and Asians portrayed in viewbooks is more than 50% higher than the percentage of blacks and Asians enrolled in schools. Moreover, the researchers found that such overrepresentation is widespread: 75% of schools in the sample appeared to overrepresent black students in their materials. These disparities suggest that schools are motivated to capture the likenesses of black and Asian students in their viewbooks, which in turn suggests an institutional attempt to capitalize nonwhiteness by converting it into a recruitment tool.Footnote 30
A black student at the University of Wisconsin, Diallo Shabazz, successfully sued his school in 2000 for photoshopping him into a picture of students at a football game. The University admitted to including Shabazz in the photograph because of his race.Footnote 31 While universities may argue these images are aspirational, reflecting values and commitments, a more cynical view is that the university cares more about image than truth.
Joshua Hunt’s contribution to the volume bemoans that in some cases the university has become all marketing. He writes that by 2018 at the University of Oregon, Nike’s sponsorship of the university eventually meant that communications, public relations, and marketing staff “numbered more than the combined faculty of the school’s departments of history, economics, and philosophy.”Footnote 32 Sponsorship raises the question of whose identity university brands are promoting. How is the university’s mission of promoting access to knowledge and the pursuit of truth compromised by its dalliance with corporate sponsors and the commodification of athletics? Hunt’s contribution suggests the interests of women students may be compromised to protect the reputation of lucrative male sports teams.Footnote 33 How do universities recruit women students when their successful sports teams inadvertently create a macho, exclusive brand? Obsession with brand control may unduly override the plural commitments of a university – in particular, to the flourishing of a diverse student body. Hunt argues that the University of Oregon’s ability to respond to sexual assault and other grievous charges against student athletes was compromised by Nike’s sponsorship of student athletes. The critique of branding as myth-creation and fiction-over-fact has a parallel in critiques of identity politics. As the premier philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah writes, identities are “lies that bind.”Footnote 34 University brands fuse identity and branding, a potentially corrosive concoction that hoodwinks.
At the core, the essays in this volume interrogate how the medium is altering the message of what the university is and aspires to be. Jeremy Sheff argues that university brands are akin to geographical indications, with fans seeking to benefit the home team – what Sheff likens to “boosterism.” He, too, like Hunt, is concerned that this gives donors outsized control over the university’s mission.Footnote 35 Indeed, what is the university’s mission in the age of brand marketing? The essays herein explore how tensions arising from privatization and escalating tuition costs, enormous endowments and low spending rates, #MeToo, athletics scandals, controversial Title IX and sexual assault policies and compliance, and the myth of meritocracy and social mobility create cognitive dissonance and ethical tensions for Brand U. “We can’t compartmentalize academic branding and assume it will have little effect on the university’s public mission,” Mark Bartholomew argues.Footnote 36 And Haochen Sun suggests that universities should affirmatively counteract the effects of branding, for example by investing luxury-price-tag tuition dollars into scholarships to promote access for diverse students and to support public-facing research.Footnote 37 We must also contend with the “taint” on the university when ignominious donors, from Isaac Royall, Jr. in the eighteenth centuryFootnote 38 to Jeffrey Epstein in the twenty-first, seek to rebrand themselves by basking in a university’s aura.Footnote 39
Finally, this volume explores what branding collegiate experience reveals about the nature of the brand itself. How distinctive or generic are university brands? Do academic brands display traits and functions that differ significantly from other corporate brands? Are universities like other corporate “brand bullies,”Footnote 40 or even worse? Are students, scholars, and alumni co-creators of the university brand, and if so, how might this be different from the relationship between consumers and producers outside the university? This collection of essays is intended as an important start in addressing these questions, but is by no means the final say. These contributions do, however, reveal three qualities that university brands most exemplify, though to some extent they are shared by other brands as well: kinship, exclusivity, and sites of reckoning. I briefly consider these here, while also suggesting them as potential areas of future research for trademark and brand scholars on the commingling of markets and meaning in the artifact of the brand. Scholars have yet to fully grapple with the commodification of aesthetic experience, including that of life’s most transformative experience: education. Are university brands a contagion or a recursive tool for promoting engagement with all of one’s senses with the university? How do we reconcile the cognitive dissonance of brands themselves? Is a world without brands dull and less human? Can brands be democratic? Is brand recursion an inevitable feedback loop in the social construction of the world? These are some of the questions future scholars may wish to explore, with a focus on better understanding the following three features of university brands that emerge in this volume.
Kinship. University brands more than brands for other goods and services derive value from social relations, memory, and belonging over the life cycle. Arvidsson writes that:
it is this relational network that makes up the core of [the brand’s] productive utility as an everyday tool. When I use a brand, the network of meaningful social and aesthetic relations that has been established around it enables me to perform a certain personality or relate to a certain group of people. What brand owners own is the privilege of guarding and deriving value from this relational network.Footnote 41
Brands are all in the family. To be sure, the underbelly of belonging is exclusion, social hierarchy, homogenization, and erasure of individuality.Footnote 42 At the same time, brands are a site of dynamic “aesthetic production”Footnote 43 creating a feedback loop between producers and consumers who are continually updating brand meaning with new information and values. Arvidsson explains that “What consumers pay for is access to the communicative potential of the brand, the possibility of inserting the brand in their own assemblage of compatible qualities.”Footnote 44 In Chapter 2 of this volume, Celia Lury highlights the next turn in university brands, that is, the emergence of what might be seen as a contradiction in terms – a personalized generic brand: MyUniversity. As Lury demonstrates, university brands offer a complex vehicle for self and group definition. Now the ultimate goal is a university that helps you brand yourself.
Exclusivity. Despite increased attention to the high costs of higher education – public and privateFootnote 45 – and crippling student debt,Footnote 46 university brands paradoxically grow in value by virtue of their exclusivity. In his contribution to this volume, Haochen Sun notes that the world’s most selective universities, which accept just 4–5 percent of applicants, have many of the qualities of luxury goods.Footnote 47 Like Louis Vuitton bags and Rolex watches, the price tag of admission is, in the broadest terms, elusive. But Veblen goods in scarves and handbags are one thing; higher education is another matter. What does it mean for universities, the engines of social and economic mobility, to have become largely the sanctum of the rich and well-educated? While interdisciplinary study of luxury goods has begun,Footnote 48 we need more work specifically focused on the university as a luxury and “hyper luxury”Footnote 49 good.
Sites of reckoning. More recently, university brands have revealed themselves as sites of historical reckoning. Yale’s Calhoun College, originally named after John Calhoun, a prominent nineteenth-century alumnus and outspoken white supremacist and proponent of slavery, has been renamed after Grace Murray Hopper, a woman alumna, mathematician, computer scientist, and Navy rear admiral.Footnote 50 Following the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police in May 2020, Princeton renamed its public policy school and one of its residence halls, both of which long adorned Woodrow Wilson’s name.Footnote 51 Wilson, who served as Princeton’s president beginning in 1902,Footnote 52 was known to have been a proponent of segregationist policies. He was believed to have supported the ideology of the Ku Klux Klan,Footnote 53 and discouraged enrollment of African American students during his tenure as president.Footnote 54 At the University of Oregon, two statues known as the pioneers were toppled by a group of demonstrators amidst ongoing protests for racial justice.Footnote 55 The statues, which symbolized white supremacy against Native Americans, were an ongoing source of controversy.Footnote 56 The Rhodes Scholarship – one of the world’s most competitive academic scholarships, enabling postgraduates to study at the University of Oxford – has also been under fire to rebrand.Footnote 57 It is named after Cecil Rhodes, a British imperialist who annexed large areas of land in southern Africa and started the De Beers diamond company.Footnote 58 In a movement called “Rhodes Must Fall,”Footnote 59 those calling for the university to rename the scholarship and take down a statue of Rhodes cite his imperialist beliefs and oppression of southern Africans, which they argue paved the way for Apartheid.Footnote 60 To date, the University of Oxford has indicated that the statue would be better served in a museum but has not made an indication that the name of the scholarship would be changed.Footnote 61 In 2018, there was a call for the scholarship to be renamed the Mandela Scholarship.Footnote 62
Martha S. Jones led a research team that discovered that the namesake of Johns Hopkins was not, as lore had it, an abolitionist, but rather, had enslaved four individuals who tended to his comforts in his home and were used as collateral for loans. Jones shared that her discovery elicited shame, which directly affected her willingness to wear the university’s logo with pride:
The historian in me took in these revelations as raw facts – until the last time I pulled on my university sweatshirt. It fits just right, with a high collar stitched from soft, thick cotton. It has kept me warm on chilly mornings. It has helped keep me grounded over long months of Zoom teaching. When I glanced down and saw JOHNS HOPKINS stitched in white across my chest, I remembered my connection to the students who appear on my screen for class. One arm sticking out of the right sleeve, I stopped and slid the thing back off. It was a small gesture of reckoning but a sincere one.Footnote 63
My own university, Georgetown, has grappled with the fact that early Jesuit leaders financed the University’s operations from enslaved labor and later the sale of 272 enslaved people, including men, women, and children.Footnote 64 This Roman Catholic order, formally, the Society of Jesus, has pledged $100 million to descendants of the enslaved people and to finance racial justice initiatives, the most significant reparations to date by an American university, and indeed, by any major institution.Footnote 65 And, of course, in this volume Janet Halley recounts the historic gift from an enslaver, Isaac Royall, Jr., to Harvard College, to endow the first Chair of law at what would eventually grow into the Harvard Law School.Footnote 66
The brand as an object of meaning is not static. It is, in Lury’s words, “an object in movement.”Footnote 67 This “complex artefact”Footnote 68 is propelled in time by the convergence of multiple actors and systems, from producer and consumer to community members, the institutions of advertising, the law, and the court of public opinion, to name just a few of the multiple forces at play in shaping and reshaping brand meaning. Halley vividly demonstrates the vicissitudes of the Royall name and its heraldic shield through 300 years of history: from the British loyalist Isaac Royall, Jr. falling out of favor during the American Revolutionary War; to charges made against him as an enslaver of human beings by a woman named Belinda, an enslaved person whom he freed in his will; to the benefactor’s rehabilitation through his bequest to Harvard in 1815; to the student campaign “Royall Must Fall” to abolish the Royall shield as the de facto Law School logo 200 years later.Footnote 69 The brand – presented in three acts, from the man, to the heraldic shield, to the modern trademarked logo – is the stage on which each new generation of political actors “performs.” The dramatis personae in Halley’s gripping story include a formerly enslaved woman, Belinda, centuries of Harvard Law School deans (including an aspiring Supreme Court nominee), generations of law faculty, and more recently, international graduate students from South Africa and Black Lives Matter activist students. As Halley tells it, “Fights over meaning abounded” and the stories take on lives of their own, becoming real, however un-fact-checked.Footnote 70 There is room yet for prequels and sequels.
Concerns about the ability of stakeholder engagement in brand meaning to produce genuine reform are on display in Halley’s compelling history. The ultimate decision of the Harvard Corporation to abandon the Royall shield/logo/trademark was the “easy way out,” she believes.Footnote 71 To date, none of the thoughtful, challenging demands of student activists to decolonize the curriculum have been addressed. Is rebranding merely symbolic lip service, or will refashioning the university’s imagery affect more deeply who is included, supported, respected, and recognized in the university? The symbols that wallpaper our halls matter. The fall of racist brands during summer 2020 – from Washington’s National Football League team to Aunt JemimaFootnote 72 – may seem like corporate whitewashing, but in truth, these logos have long been the target of equality activists who recognize how culture industries’ production and circulation of images shape, perpetuate, and maintain racial hierarchy and white supremacy.Footnote 73 Brands are zeitgeist – the look and feel of the times. I see the abandonment of the shield as a required step to make the halls of Harvard Law more welcoming to diverse members. Indeed, the School should go further to interrogate the messages it sends to all who experience (or are subjected to) its aesthetic decor, from students to faculty to staff, from the unending portraits of white men that adorn the halls to the names of buildings and endowed Chairs. At the same time, the Harvard Law School “brand” goes well beyond these artifacts, to include the 1L experience,Footnote 74 and more. Moving to this experiential terrain, perhaps Harvard Law (and peer schools that often seek to copy this luxury brand) will start to reconsider how structural inequality is embedded in legal education, from rethinking Socratic pedagogy to studying how doctrine and scholarship perpetuate white supremacy. The school should do this in conversation with its students and other community members asserting their desire to “reclaim” the Harvard brand.Footnote 75
In this volume, we have considered many of the cognitive difficulties of university branding. What are the implications of contesting meaning in this most meaningful domain, the university, through the artifact of the brand? The critiques notwithstanding, there is, perhaps, an important way in which the university brand connects with the university’s broader mission. From the humanities to social and behavioral sciences, the university is the site for understanding who we are as human beings. This endeavor includes understanding human rationality and our yearning for aesthetic experience, art, narrative, belonging, and meaning itself. The brand may be the university’s best hope yet of affirming the humanities. Brands reject the notion that reason is “the only authority for the university.”Footnote 76 In contrast, the “primary task” of aesthetic theory, as John Dewey urged, is “to restore continuity between the refined and intensified forms of experience that are works of art and the everyday events, doings, and sufferings that are universally recognized to constitute experience.”Footnote 77 Failure to engage aesthetic experience in everyday life, Dewey warns, deprives us of something essential because aesthetic perceptions “are necessary ingredients of happiness.”Footnote 78 The aesthetic university makes life more meaningful. It is a stage for telling and retelling stories of who we are, collectively and individually in a space that matters to us. Starbucks learned this some time ago. Its brand “is not about the coffee.”Footnote 79 It’s about the stories in the cup. The university brand is a site for claiming and reclaiming the meaning of the university and of education itself. Social movements from #blackatharvard to the introspection over the luxurification of higher education exposed in the Varsity Blues scandal demonstrate the nimble tool of the brand to convey membership, exclusion, hope, and heartache. Brands re-enact life itself, once more with feeling.
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