Part I - Are Academic Brands Distinctive?

1 Distinctive Excellence The Unusual Roots and Global Reach of Academic Brands

Mario Biagioli

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The study of academic brands intersects trademark law with critical university studies around questions both empirical and conceptual, from rather mundane things like universities’ trademark policies and lawsuits over T-shirts and hoodies carrying university insignia all the way to the complex cultural, political, and economic tensions that frame the conflicted identity of the modern university. Straddling the line between knowledge and business, public and private, or between its local ties to the state and its reach toward the global economy of higher education, the modern university seems to have found in brands a tool to construct a coherent and attractive image, if perhaps only skin deep, of itself, its role, and its “excellence.”

When and Why

The contours of these developments can best be traced through some general questions. How has the self-representation of universities, colleges, and polytechnics changed over time, and at what point do we see a shift in focus from individual insignia to comprehensive brand strategies managed by marketing and communication offices?¹ Is that transition reflected in a stylistic change of the marks from scholarly insignia to corporate logos, from ponderous seals and Latin mottos (“Fiat Lux,” “Veritas,” “Rerum Cognoscere Causas”) to agile modern marks? Often consisting of just one single noun or acronym – Harvard, Michigan, UCLA, NYU, SciencesPo, LSE, etc. – modern university marks can fully convey their comprehensive brands without even mentioning the term “university.”²

Was the turn to branding driven by an attempt to strengthen the ties with students and parents as potential future donors, or was the university simply following the lead of its brand-conscious corporate partners? Either way, has the university’s turn to branding merely followed established trends or can we find something more specific to it, something inherently tied to the university and its history, like, for example, the US universities’ unique investment in sports (see Chapter 8) and the consequent engagement with the media, the world of merchandising, and audiences that have quickly grown beyond campus, embracing a national and even international public?³ Is it the nexus of sports and media that introduced a brand mentality into the university, perhaps together with that peculiar form of sports stats we now call academic rankings? And has something as mundane as Sky Sports’ decision to include US college games in their all-reaching broadcast network been instrumental in turning those academic brands into a global phenomenon?⁴

Or did it start at the other end of the geographical scale, in the local gift shop? Has the tradition of selling branded sweatshirts, umbrellas, coffee mugs, rings, and shot glasses functioned as a humble “brand incubator” where the university learned the importance of developing relations with alumni, students, and parents through souvenirs and wearable memorabilia that could also communicate the brand to other admirers in the making? Or was it just a way to generate some additional revenue, like the gift shops we have to traverse before we are allowed to exit an art museum? To put it differently, did universities start to aggressively enforce their trademarks to protect their merchandise revenue (see Chapter 7), or to control their “identity” and defend their brand from dilution? And if there was a transition from the former goal to the latter, when did a counterfeit T-shirt morph into a threat to a university’s identity?

One could take a very different perspective, if only as a heuristic experiment. Could it be that prestigious academic institutions have not actually turned to branding but have instead exemplified luxury brands before that concept even existed – “Oxford,” “Yale,” or the “École Normale Supérieure” having always functioned as signs of social distinction and identity for students, alumni, and even the nation as a whole rather than as simple providers of educational services? Not unlike nineteenth-century corporate trademarks, older universities seem to identify their brand with vintage, which is unsurprising given that universities are among the oldest of corporations. Harvard, for instance, claims to be “the oldest corporation in the Western Hemisphere,”⁵ and a few other universities secured international name recognition several centuries before any of today’s brand-based businesses even existed. Could it be that the ability of brands to lend distinctiveness to their goods and services and provide “identity narratives” to their purchasers is something that the names of some universities have been doing since the late Middle Ages, thus prefiguring the very function of the modern brand?

Expanding Markets, Pivoting Origins, Stretching Identities

Like other corporations offering an expanding range of different products and services, modern universities have much to gain from developing distinctive brands.⁶ (Research in higher education, for instance, frequently models the university–alumni relationship in terms of “brand loyalty.”⁷) At the same time, the goal of university branding is not just to attract donors, high-achieving students, and corporate partnerships but also to give a sense of unity and identity to their increasingly diverse portfolio of goods and services that now extends well beyond their traditional pedagogical mission: for example, art museums, technology parks, sports and sports-related merchandising, technology licensing, executive education, hospitals, book publishing, extension courses, distance learning programs, and so on.

The geographical spread of the services offered by the modern university is as conspicuous as the increasing diversity of their nature. More than ever, the university is trying to reach beyond the traditional physical boundaries of its campus. As we see among luxury brands (see Chapter 6), the trend toward academic branding is visibly tied to globalization, in this case the conspicuous transformation of higher education into a global market in which universities compete for foreign students (who often pay higher fees), while also franchising their brands to satellite campuses and partnerships like NYU Abu Dhabi, Yale-NUS, MIT-Skoltech, and so on. (This is a trend that premier museum brands like the Guggenheim and the Louvre have also been pursuing, pointing to the emergence of a global market for “cultural brands,” not just academic ones.)⁸ Even when the ambitions are less than global, the mobilization of academic brands is still associated with the university’s attempt to reach beyond its physical campus. Examples are the development of online distance learning programs that crucially rely on the brand to offset possible doubts about their pedagogical value (see Chapter 4), or the use of brands like “Stanford” or “UCLA” with strong associations to top medical schools and hospitals to leverage a university’s entry into broader regional health care markets.⁹

What prestigious universities share with famous museums like the Louvre or the Guggenheim (but not with other corporations with equally distinctive brands and global recognition) is that, until recently, they have been physically unmovable, and for good reasons. Corporations can relocate both their headquarters and production facilities (the latter virtually anywhere in the world), but universities and museums have drawn most of their distinctiveness from their history in the places where they have grown,¹⁰ creating a resemblance between their brands and the “terroir” that geographical indicators try to capture (see Chapter 5).¹¹ A trademark relates a good or service to an origin, but not literally so. It needs to connect the good to a source to guide the customer through his/her purchasing choices, but it would be irrelevant to that function of the trademark to disclose the precise identity or physical location of that origin: “We may safely take it for granted that not one in a thousand knowing of or desiring to purchase ‘Baker’s Cocoa’ or ‘Baker’s Chocolate’ know of Walter Baker & Co., Limited,” or of where Walter Baker & Co. may be located.¹²

But it is commonly known that the Louvre is based in Paris, the Uffizi in Florence, the Guggenheim in New York, Oxford in Oxford, and Cambridge in Cambridge. In several cases, they have been occupying the same buildings for centuries – buildings that prospective students or visitors could find pictured in print media and now online, imagining themselves visiting or studying there.¹³ Far from incidental, the locations of these institutions are intertwined with both the experience of their brand and the genealogy of its appeal. Universities and museums become distinctive through accumulation in one place: by bringing works of art from different places and periods to one museum building; many books and manuscripts in different languages and on different topics to one library; and many distinguished faculty and top-performing students to one campus. While most corporations can sell and ship their goods anywhere in the world, tourists and students have traveled to very specific places to enjoy the services of academic and museum brands – brands that could have hardly come into being outside of those locations and without their specific historical roots to them.¹⁴

“Enjoyment,” however, means something quite specific in this case. It does not refer primarily to purchasing a branded good to take it home or wear it, but rather to paying tuition or admission in order to spend time in a cultural institution, admire its collections, use its libraries, learn, do research, meet other people, etc. Though universities and museums may include gift shops, they do not function like shops. Nor can universities be easily treated as sites of so-called experiential purchasing, “the manufacturing of experiential consumer practices, that is, [the] consumption of non material objects.”¹⁵ Like going on a cruise, the college experience involves expenditures and emotions, but obtaining an academic degree requires work and the fulfillment of requirements that the student has modest control over. Academic curricula allow for choices but are not a buffet. Recent studies of brand identification in higher education suggest that in fact buffets are not the point. The main long-lasting source of alumni allegiance is “recalled academic experience,” not “recalled social experience.”¹⁶ Among those who feel connected to their alma mater, the memory of parties fades away faster than that of transformative educational experiences – experiences the student had to work for, not just pay for.

At the same time, the recent transformation of those local institutions imbued in local sociocultural charisma into internationally recognized brands through the globalization of higher education (or, in the case of museums, the emergence of mass tourism) has also created the conditions of possibility for them to branch out from their original locations. I argue, however, that universities could not have franchised prior to becoming academic brands because an earlier geographical spread would have preempted the development of the very brand that eventually enabled their franchising. The university changes constantly through generational flows of students, faculty, administrators, curricula, and programs, and yet it is perceived to remain “one” by staying physically put, by growing around its first buildings, which always remain (if still standing) part of the campus. Unlike other corporate trademarks, therefore, a university’s mark always points to a real physical point of origin, even when that location is not explicitly featured in the mark. There would be no academic brand without an original campus. (That might also explain why it is difficult to imagine a successful university mark becoming generic and losing its ability to function as a trademark.)¹⁷

Unsurprisingly, mobility means something quite specific in the case of the university. NYU’s expansion to Abu Dhabi, for instance, exemplifies a form of movement that is conceptually closer to grafting than to franchising. Unlike restaurant chains (or corporate headquarters) that can be located virtually anywhere because they are specific to nowhere, in the case of prestigious universities and museums the “original plant” stays back in Paris, New York, or Cambridge, while the “brand cuttings” are spliced onto other newer institutional stocks, in other locations, where more people may enjoy their fruits. All that a restaurant chain’s brand can convey is the consistency of its menus and ambience, but university and museum satellites deliver a little bit of the real thing – for example, some courses taught by faculty from the original campus, or some artwork from the original collection. It’s a chain, but it’s original. What spreads is not just the brand as a sign different from other signs but also some unique things and persons – something “auratic” – that come from the brand’s place of origin. (A satellite Louvre museum featuring only photographic reproductions of artwork on display in Paris would not work, in the same way that a satellite campus of a major university would not be attractive if all that the two shared was a course catalog.)¹⁸ The exhibits at the Louvre Abu Dhabi do not need to include the Mona Lisa, and Yale does not need to ship its Nobel Prize winners to Singapore, but something more than the brand as sign, something material and from the center – a “cutting” – needs to be grafted onto the new branches, or perhaps just sent to the satellite campus for a little while.¹⁹ A mere “university chain” – that is, a centerless chain identified only by its mark and perhaps by the trade dress of its buildings – would just look like another for-profit college populating nameless strip malls.

If I have stressed the specificity of academic brands it is because it does not seem to match entrenched views about the function of marks and its historical trajectory. In his seminal 1927 article, Frank Schechter argued that:

The signboard of an inn in stage-coach days, when the golden lion or the green cockatoo actually symbolized to the hungry and weary traveler a definite smiling host, a tasty meal from a particular cook, a favorite brew and a comfortable bed, was merely “the visible manifestation” of the good will or probability of custom of the house; but today the trademark is not merely the symbol of good will but often the most effective agent for the creation of good will, imprinting upon the public mind an anonymous and impersonal guaranty of satisfaction, creating a desire for further satisfactions. The mark actually sells the goods.²⁰

Schechter contrasted the premodern “Golden Lion” signboard with the function of modern trademarks, stressing the difference between marks that consumers took to signify known specific services and goods provided in a specific place by specific individual providers, and marks that no longer signify the consumers’ goodwill in specifically localized services. Modern trademarks become the means through which business can create such goodwill by signaling to customers that any inn in any location bearing that sign will provide them with the quality of services they are accustomed to, whether or not they have stopped there before. Scholars may describe or locate this transition differently, but few would disagree with Schechter that it has happened, and that it established the roots of what has eventually grown into the brand economy.²¹

Surprisingly, however, academic brands still function very much like the “Golden Lion” or “Green Cockatoo.” They have become global brands of academic excellence, and yet they remain essentially tied to specific campuses and to the services that specific, known individuals like a university’s distinguished faculty provide. Contrary to Schechter’s otherwise remarkably accurate forecast of the future of trademarks, the “Green Cockatoo” (sub specie Oxford) has become a global brand, signifying both goodwill and its own value as a floating signifier of academic excellence.²² It has gone global by remaining essentially local and thus playing two signifying functions (or signifying two kinds of value) at the same time.

From Bildung to Excellence

Academic branding goes hand in hand with broader neoliberal management and cultural trends like the erosion of the university’s traditional (if inconsistently upheld) nonprofit stance, or the perception of education as a product with students as its consumers, but there may be more to it than that.²³ The recent expansion of the university’s activities and services as well as its new global ambitions have created a broad identity crisis across academic institutions. Even those universities that proudly claim their status as public institutions feel compelled to frame their “publicness” as a distinctive brand element:

The University of California is located wherever a UC mind is at work. At any given moment, people in the UC community are exploring, creating and advancing our shared experience of life in California and beyond. These [brand] guidelines ensure we express these shared values with every communication. In short, this site helps us all “Speak UC.”²⁴

For better or for worse, brands have become the university’s idiom of self-representation and marketing, but probably also the medium through which the so-called university of excellence – private, public, elitist, or inclusive – has come to think about itself. Trademark scholars have shown that brands function as discursive tools that allow consumers to construct or project their identities as self-styled narratives tied to the purchase and display of specific branded goods and the claim to values deemed to be associated with them.²⁵ The university appears to engage in a comparable process of self-fashioning. As the head of the UC Marketing Communication Department puts it, the goal of an academic brand is “to create a coherent identity that would help us tell the UC story in an authentic, distinctive, memorable and thoughtful way.”²⁶ The relation between branding and narrating the university does not stop at the level of corporate strategy but trickles all the way down to mundane fund-raising practices, where the university reaches out to potential donors by presenting them with students’ poignant stories of personal challenges followed by sterling professional successes that were enabled (and, it is implied, could only have been enabled) by that very unique university.

In The University in Ruins (1997), Bill Readings argued that the emergence of the now-pervasive discourse of excellence signaled a radical shift in the nature and function of the university and its relationship to the state.²⁷ The university of excellence – the one we inhabit – is the successor to the nineteenth-century German research university that, functioning as the educational wing of the state, was meant to lead its students to Bildung. More than the development of professional skills, the Humboldtian university was meant to support a process of individual and cultural development aimed at attuning the students’ sense of self to a specific culture. It was part of a clear educational program framed by the nation-state’s view of what culture and nation should be and sought to mold its students to produce a certain kind of citizen and civil servant. Assumptions about culture and nation went hand in hand with assumptions about education, curriculum, the students’ social background, and the function of the university, enabling one to think of the “quality” of the university as an index of how well it performed this state-specific function.

According to Readings, this framework came to an end in the late twentieth century with the distinct weakening of the relationship between the university and the state, which enabled or caused the university to become a more open and flexible system or, as some say, an entrepreneurial one. Even in those cases where the state still provides some financial support, there is no longer a unified notion of Bildung that the university is expected to deliver on behalf of the state. (Readings did not mention brands, but the current tendency among public universities to downplay the name of their state in their main mark (“Berkeley”) embed it into a logo-like acronym (“GaTech,” “ASU,” “UCLA”) or treat it more as a geographical indicator than a sociopolitical partnership (“Michigan,” “Cal”) seems to index a change in the connection between the state and the university.)

The university has also slowly opened up to students with more diverse cultural and ethnic backgrounds, new fields that extend well beyond the traditional liberal arts, and forms of professional training that were previously deemed non-academic. In the UK and Germany, for instance, the strong traditional distinction between universities and polytechnics or Hochschulen has been abolished. At the other end of the spectrum, artistic training, which used to be housed in academies, is now commonly offered by the university. The multiplication of new fields exemplified by adding “studies” after a seemingly endless range of different questions or materials – cultural studies, gender studies, media studies, innovation studies, border studies, etc. – is yet another illustration of this pedagogical shift from a unified Bildung toward an ever-expanding range of questions and constituencies.

Taken together, these transformations have led to the substitution of the concept of quality with that of excellence. We no longer have a unified notion of education and its goals that can comprehend the many fields we now see, each with their own specific goals and modes of evaluation.²⁸ The landscape of the university’s constituencies has also significantly expanded, further complicating the judgment of what counts as an appropriate curriculum.²⁹ The concept of excellence has emerged in response to this predicament in order to create the impression that something like a unified notion of quality can be found across its many different instantiations, including future ones, despite the patently different criteria used to assess such excellence. Being excellent means that you are “great” at doing what you do no matter what that is – a notion of quality so pliable as to be applicable to any and all of the university’s services, including parking.³⁰ Excellence acknowledges the utterly local notion of quality while simultaneously intimating that quality is equally present in all of its local manifestations – una et multipla. (Paradoxically, the same lack of fixed reference that makes excellence so pliable and effective can also bring it dangerously close to genericness. No matter what they do, all universities can now freely or shamelessly cast themselves as “institutions of excellence”).

Academic brands aim to transform the evanescence of academic excellence into an asset, filling the gap left behind by the disappearance of a unified idea and function of the university while capitalizing on the possibilities this opens up. The discourse of excellence has framed the university’s move to diversify its scope well beyond that of its institutional ancestors, and while we can no longer define what the university is or does, we can brand it and thus create the effect of unity in its absence. It is as if two virtualities, when superimposed, create the optical illusion of an actuality. Excellence projects a form of quality that can only function by having no unitary definition, while the academic brand projects itself as the unitary origin of that excellence. That “origin,” however, is virtual. It only exists as a trademark, a sign defined as: “any word, name, symbol, or device … used … to identify and distinguish his or her goods … from those manufactured or sold by others and to indicate the source of the goods, even if that source is unknown.”³¹ The university may be confused about its mission, but it’s precisely this identity crisis that is turning it – whatever “it” may be – into an increasingly valuable brand.

Branding by Numbers?

The relationship between the discourse of excellence and the turn to branding can be traced to today’s widespread reliance on metrics for evaluating academic work (see Chapter 3). This may seem paradoxical given that bureaucratic number-crunching looks hardly comparable to the graphic simplicity and immediacy of a logo, or the inherently qualitative storytelling that brands promote. The symbiosis of brands and metrics, however, is rooted in the complementarity of their differences and in the fact that metrics have come to be treated as the best way to manage the assessment of excellence. As a result, university rankings have become inextricably tied to brand-building.

For centuries, the peer evaluation of colleagues’ research has been one of the distinctive features of the academic world. Today’s supporters of metrics argue, however, that the parameters for the judgment of quality based on peer review are too opaque, prone to bias, and deploy different field-specific standards of evaluation. Instead of chasing after something as undefinable as quality, they have successfully proposed to focus on quantifiably salient features of the work, like assessing its post-publication impact as measured by the citations it receives. A citation is treated as a distinct event, not an opinion. Positive or critical, the citation happened. And being reliably recorded in an article’s footnotes and references, citations can be easily added up and elaborated to produce a variety of indexes. Quality has been turned into excellence, and in this case excellence has been made measurable by using “publication impact” as its proxy.³²

Excellence is inherently field-specific and thus potentially incommensurable across the spectrum of academic disciplines and genres. But if one can make excellence look measurable through proxies, then the university can have its cake and eat it too, holding on to the specificity and locality of excellence while also implying that excellence can be objectively assessed (and used to make sound decisions) across different disciplines, institutions, and contexts. Furthermore, if one agrees that excellence can be translated into numbers even in the most difficult of scenarios involving the notoriously elusive evaluation of research excellence, it follows that it’s easy to assume all other forms of university excellence are also quantifiable, with even less difficulty, covering pretty much anything the university does or will do. Finally, unlike judgments of quality, assessments of impact can be scaled up, using aggregate metrics of the impact of the publications of individual scholars to measure the impact of departments, schools, and universities. And then rank their relative “excellence.”

Metrics and brands are two complementary ways of capturing academic excellence and communicating it not only to the insiders of a given field, but especially to non-specialists. Brands reduce the customer’s search costs and, likewise, metrics can be helpful to those who need to make decisions about a publication or a product whose production process or technical details they know little or nothing about, all the way down to students and parents trying to decide where their tuition money should go based on metrics-based university rankings. Being associated with numerical figures, metrics has the look of objectivity, while brands do not. Still, the main metric outcome of academic evaluation – rankings – is effective precisely because of the ubiquitous and endless public and private conversations and commentaries it constantly fuels. If metrics did indeed get things right, we would not need all the competing rankings we have, nor would they be discussed, questioned, or compared as actively and pervasively as they are – as numerical tea leaves.³³ In sum, from the academic consumer’s point of view, metrics, rankings, and brands are part of the same conversations and decisions. Rankings are made of numbers, which makes them “look numerical,” but are viewed, used, and discussed as qualities.

The establishment and function of brands significantly overlap with those of reputation – the construction of a product’s quality as knowable and reliable by connecting it to a reputable provider or origin. The same applies to academic rankings (especially those of U.S. News & World Report, assiduously followed by US universities).³⁴ While expressed in numbers, rankings like USNWR rely primarily on the qualitative reputation that universities and departments earn from key academic opinion leaders such as upper administrators from other institutions. (They do not measure reputation the way measuring tapes measure the length of wood planks, but rather simply bestow a quantitative look to qualitative judgments of distinction.) Both brands and rankings are about creating an effect of distinction in the eyes of the beholder – a distinction that is then stabilized by spreading its recognition to other people, often through networks of consumers, including the students themselves. Additionally, both academic rankings and brands are becoming increasingly effective and valuable as a result of the globalization of those markets. Students and their families rely on academic rankings and their branding effect to choose among hundreds of universities they have little or no direct knowledge of. At the same time, those same universities use metrics when trying to identify and hire top faculty talent from places that may be beyond the reach of traditional recruitment networks based on name recognition. A thousand citations, it would appear, speak louder than a letter of recommendation. Similarly, universities rely heavily on metrics during the student admissions process, carefully evaluating whether an applicant’s “ranking” – their scores on the SAT, GRE, LSAT, etc. – will contribute to or diminish both the school’s brand and its own ranking.

The global branding game, however, is not played on an even field. Up-and-coming universities that have not yet established a global reputation face an additional challenge as they try to become more distinctive: there are too many of them, and they may be geographically too far removed to be known by opinion leaders in countries “that matter.” It is therefore interesting that some newer global ranking systems (especially those developed in Asia, like the Academic Ranking of World Universities, ARWU) do not privilege reputation by opinion leaders (like the USNWR does), but instead emphasize quantitative metrics (faculty productivity, journal impact factors, etc.).³⁵ This suggests that numerical ranking has become a way to build academic brands when and where emergent universities are still unknown to the “opinion leaders” of the Global North, either because they are still emerging or because they are too far away and outside of the cognoscenti sphere, or both. Metrics and rankings function as branding by numbers – converting numbers into reputation for those institutions that do not yet have prominent reputations. They can also work the other way around, converting the reputation that known academic brands have in the eyes of opinion leaders into numbers that are then translated into rankings.

For instance, a university that is ranked between 400th and 500th globally has only an miniscule chance of developing a valuable brand anytime soon, or even of having its name known and recognized outside of its region. However, if that same university manages to have its faculty achieve a strong publication output in relatively reputable journals, it will quickly start to move up in rankings like the ARWU that focus on quantitative performance indicators, not qualitative reputation. Eventually it may be able to break into the top 200, and then perhaps even the top 100, at which point it may develop some name recognition precisely by having its name seen by the millions of people from around the world who pore over those rankings, assiduously comparing them to see who is moving up and who is heading down. (But very few people read the entire ranking list, so universities outside the top 100 are probably not likely to have their name seen by many, thus condemning their emergent brand to dwell in the shadows a while longer.) And if, hypothetically, an up-and-coming university was lucky enough to make it to the top twenty (which is exceedingly difficult, given the first-entrant advantages of older institutions), its brand would become strong and distinctive enough to endure just based on the reputation it would have gained through the very rankings that brought it to the attention of academic leaders in the first place, and whose opinions will feed both the brands and the future rankings of top universities.

I propose we think of these rankings – the ranked lists of university names on a screen or page – as global billboards. Not only are these rankings accessed and assessed nonstop by millions of people, but, while inherently and directly derived from metric evaluations of the “excellence” of hundreds of universities, they are experienced as visual objects, as ranked “logo walls.”³⁶ More than a gateway to branding (which I have argued they also are), global rankings may be the petri dish in which academic brands grow, the screen on which a university’s name will be seen and recognized in relation to others that precede and follow it on the list. Metrics and brands are therefore two technologies of distinctions that are seamlessly spliced together, even sharing the same medium: the ranked list – a list that while looking “objective,” functions in fact as material for conversations and interpretations, even disputes, among its users. In the same way that consumers of luxury goods will disagree in their evaluation (that is, the ranking) of this year’s Fendi, Chanel, or Hermès collections, so too will the students (and their parents) who are considering which Ivy League university is “the best.” Rather than destabilizing the brands, however, these conversations and disagreements over whether the ranking of a certain university is correct (or correct in certain rankings and wrong in others) are in fact constituting and reinforcing them by teasing out the things that make a particular university “so special” and different from others.³⁷

Branding – and Rotting – from Within

One distinctive feature of academic brands is that they tarnish from within, that is, they can be damaged by some of the same associations that made them distinctive to begin with. An example of this is the controversy, studied by Janet Halley, surrounding Harvard Law School’s seal, the design of which was borrowed from the family crest of an eighteenth-century slave owner from a slave-trading family and early key donor – Isaac Royall, Jr. – whose 1781 bequest went to fund Harvard’s first Chair in Law, thus seeding the establishment of the law school itself (see Chapter 9). An association that had been seen as seminal to the school’s beginning (and then to the distinctiveness of its ancestry-fed brand) has now turned against it.

Notice that this is different than a corporation harming its reputation by producing defective goods like, say, Boeing damaging its brand by selling crash-prone 737 Max airplanes. Nor is the harm to the Harvard Law School brand comparable to the tarnishment that actors external to the Coca-Cola Company caused by manipulating its mark “Enjoy Coca-Cola” into “Enjoy Cocaine.”³⁸ It also differs from the Proud Boys’ recent use of Fred Perry polo shirts or yellow kilts by Verillas – an LGBT-owned brand. While these brands were dismayed to see their products become part of the Proud Boys’ unofficial uniform, they had no cause of action against them given that the shirts and kilts were lawfully purchased, and the brand itself had not been manipulated.³⁹ All they could do was pull those items off their racks to prevent further purchases. As with the Royall scandal at the Harvard Law School (HLS), this controversy did not follow from recent actions by the brand owners or because of any substandard quality of the goods and services involved, but resulted from the radically new (and politically opposite) associations that the consumers – the Proud Boys and HLS students, respectively – attached to or rediscovered in the brands well after their original establishment.

A crucial difference, however, is that Fred Perry and Verillas could end those associations by stopping the sale of these goods: “We decided we really didn’t want their money,” says the owner of Verillas.⁴⁰ But Royall is not an unwanted customer the Harvard Law School can disassociate itself from by simply pulling a product off its shelves. He did not buy anything from them but, over two centuries ago, provided a gift that helped to build a school that in 1936, in a gesture of retroactive gratitude (or in an attempt to construct its own heraldic prestige), decided to reinforce the relationship with Royall by adopting his family crest as its logo.⁴¹ As loudly and thoroughly as HLS may now repudiate or reduce the visibility of that association (see Chapter 9), it cannot be easily undone because it is literally constitutive of the brand. If trademarks like “Harvard Law School” function as signifiers of origin, then Royall’s gift and name constituted the origin of the origin or, so to speak, the goodwill behind the goodwill. Simply removing the Royall seal from all HLS buildings, merchandise, and stationery will not erase that origin.

Compared to conventional brands that grow from the inside – from the design and management of distinctive marks supported by goods and services of reliable quality – academic brands gain a significant portion of their distinctiveness from literally incorporating the names and distinctiveness of individual or corporate donors. (That strategy would be distinctly counterproductive for common corporate brands, unless carefully framed as an occasional “collaboration”). From endowed Chairs to named buildings, institutes, fellowships, conference centers, hospitals, museums, and sport facilities, the university is made more distinctive and prestigious not only by taking the donors’ money to pursue excellence and distinction, but by borrowing their distinction – their names – as well. Perhaps we could think of a campus as a surface on which different marks are inscribed, a scaled-up logo wall with the many names and marks of its individual and corporate donors functioning like the tesserae of a larger mosaic – the university brand.

But while it would be tempting to see this as an accumulation of endorsements – the way companies strengthen their brands by having their products endorsed by famous people – the university does not pay for these “endorsements” but is actually paid by and for receiving them. It may look like a strange quid pro quo where it is not clear who is advertising whom, but it works well precisely because of that. The donors seek to present the institution’s acceptance of their gift as having gained a place on that peculiar logo wall we call a campus. At the same time, academic brands thrive on those donations not only economically but also semiotically, their distinctiveness feeding off the corporate or individual distinctiveness of the donors. Brands branding brands. What we find in the university, therefore, is not just one brand (or one that, like Supreme, enters into brand collaborations with other companies) but rather a full-fledged “kinship network of marks,” some big some small, all articulated on or around the main university brand.

The distinctiveness of the academic brand grows in part from the way these names signal a connection between the university and people and corporations that matter – distinctive actors that are believed to be discerning enough to recognize how good the university is, and rich enough to donate to it, thus establishing or reinforcing a “relationship.” The distinctiveness of the academic brand, therefore, is not exclusively rooted in the quality of the goods or services being provided by the university, but in the quality of the relationships that develop on or around them. Curiously, even if one does not recognize the name of the donor after whom something is named, the very fact that that thing has been gifted or endowed conveys the message that the university is important, or important enough.

The presence of donors’ marks, names, or brands conveys “brandedness,” that is, that the university is distinctive because of these other marks that are associated with it, even though one may not be able to recognize the specific names one is looking at on the façade of a building, attached to a university Chair, a fellowship, or to one of the several centers and institutes listed on a university’s website.⁴² (The analogy here is with jackets overloaded with multiple Western brands – many not just copied but plainly made up – that Indian youth in Chennai buy because of the stylishness they associate with the sheer quantity of logos displayed on these clothes, despite the fact that they can hardly recognize them.)⁴³ This points to a seemingly paradoxically constructive relationship between genericness and distinctiveness in academic brands (see Chapter 2). A donor’s name that is not recognizable by a viewer is by definition not distinctive, at least in the eyes of that viewer. It stands for, and can be replaced by, the name of any other unrecognizable donor. And yet, the bare presence of that name, however unrecognizable to many people, creates an effect of distinctiveness, like an unknown signature on a painting.⁴⁴

Kinship networks of marks are not always happy ones. In addition to the controversy at the Harvard Law School, Oxford’s struggle to hold on to its world-famous Rhodes Fellowship while acknowledging the white supremacist views and ardent imperialist commitments of its founder, Cecil John Rhodes, indicates that more university brands are suffering from the changing political connotations of formerly distinction-producing associations.⁴⁵ (Other universities are now establishing “naming committees” to review such scenarios, suggesting that they are becoming the new normal.⁴⁶) The debate on these issues has been primarily focused on the racist dimensions of these marks, which are the most offensive. That focus, however, has deflected attention from what these controversies can teach us about the specificity of academic brands, that is, the way their distinctiveness feeds on their associations with distinctive partners – past and present – and how the meaning of those associations is always in the eyes of the beholder.

Companies can sustain their brands by tweaking their look and by modifying their goods and services in response to customers’ appreciation or criticism of their quality, but universities – especially older ones – have fewer options. They may partially modify their curricula in response to critiques of the brand’s association with donors that have become unacceptable, and they may also end the relationship with those donors provided they are recent and/or peripheral enough to the brand.⁴⁷ But the Royall endowment is or has become too close to the genealogical roots of HLS to be simply excised. What can be reworked – partially and with difficulty – is not so much the product beyond the brand but the associations that make up the brand.

Brands before Brands?

The emergence of the brand economy has gone hand in hand with a trend toward the propertization of marks. Originally trademark did not protect a property right in the mark but an exclusive right to use that mark in commerce in relation to specific goods and services.⁴⁸ The legal protection of trademarks was justified on the grounds that the relationship between a good and a mark conveys information about the good’s origin, which helps to protect the consumer from fraud and to minimize his/her search costs while simultaneously incentivizing the producer to invest in the good’s quality and reliability so as to maintain and grow the consumer’s goodwill. However, with the rise of the brand, the protection of the relationship between goods and marks has been effectively rearticulated as the protection of the mark itself as a thing of value. At the same time, consumers come to seek brands in and of themselves, almost independently of their material embodiment. One no longer buys a T-shirt with a large Nike logo on it because one expects it to be of good quality due to the fact that it is made by or for Nike. Instead, consumers buy it because they appreciate the logo for what identity it enables them to construct and project by wearing it. As a prominent logos-centric fashion designer put it:

[A logo] is a symbol and, as symbols do, they attach people to each other, and the logo makes a statement, a transformative statement from person to person, letting them know that you have arrived. This is who I am. This is the statement I want to make. And the logos I have used are always associated with high-end brands, so the statement is like, “I qualify for this. Just look at me. Because I am.”⁴⁹

No mention is made here of what piece of clothing the logo may be attached to – an absence that, far from accidental, points to the fact that clothes are simply the different media through which the logo is expressed rather than the goods whose origin the logo signifies.

Crucial developments in trademark law have accompanied this shift in the semiotics of the trademark and the emergence of brand economies. Since 1996, in the US, trademark infringement is no longer exclusively limited to a likelihood of consumer confusion – the consumer being swindled into buying a knockoff – but has been expanded to include the dilution of marks even in the absence of consumer confusion.⁵⁰ Even when the consumer is fully aware that s/he is buying a knockoff (and is not therefore the victim of fraud), the law now assumes that the mark itself is semiotically harmed by these knockoffs, its ability to signify distinctiveness being weakened by their circulation. It is as if the mark itself, not the consumer, becomes the victim.

To sociologists, anthropologists, and cultural studies practitioners, however, what is striking about the transition from older trademark regimes to the brand economy is the dramatic change in the role and agency of the consumer. At some level, all consumers are now influencers. Consumers buy, display, and talk about branded goods not because they take the brand to signify the quality and reliability of those goods, but because the brand provides them with the means for self-fashioning and identity-making.⁵¹ This does not need to be a passive, uncreative process like, say, a customer decking themselves out in Gucci from head to toe, thus virtually becoming a walking billboard. Consumers’ engagements with brands they purchase can enable all sorts of innovative bricolages, personalizations, and narratives which articulate the brand’s meaning and associations in different ways, some of which may, in fact, be advantageous and welcome to the brand owner. (The analogy with fan productions is quite evident.⁵²)

Also clear is that those who expand the brand in different directions may straddle the line between consumers and appropriators. A fitting example is Gucci’s recent appropriation of Dapper Dan’s previous appropriations of Gucci’s designs from the late 1980s, which eventually contributed to the shutting down of his Harlem boutique.⁵³ A “special relation” – and a Gucci collection that “homages” the former pirate – has since grown between them,⁵⁴ showing that a brand articulation that is considered unwelcome and damaging in a certain market and cultural environment may turn rather valuable when conditions change.⁵⁵ (The Harvard Law School case provides an example of the same kind of change but in the opposite direction, where one vintage brand is subsequently recast as unacceptable by a different generation of consumers/students who, as a result, try to change it.)

But no matter whether the brand is expanded, redirected, or criticized, or whether these interventions are rejected or prosecuted at some point in time and adopted or even celebrated at others, the fact remains that they are all the work of consumers or fans of various types, animated by different goals and subject positions. The law does not recognize their complex agency and, with few exceptions, their contribution goes unremunerated even when adopted by the original brand owners and integrated into the brand’s further expansion.⁵⁶ (Dapper Dan is a rare exception, not the rule.)

This is particularly clear in the case of university brands. According to the Harvard Trademark Program: “Harvard University is one of the most widely known and respected trademarks of any kind. The commercial fruits of this fortunate reputation are largely attributable to the contributions of many generations of faculty, students and staff, and therefore should be allocated for the benefit of the University as a whole.”⁵⁷ Notice, however, that while faculty and staff are paid for their contributions, students pay tuition to the university, if less so today than in the past. And while generations of students are acknowledged to have contributed to the “fortunate reputation” of the Harvard brand, the “commercial fruits” of the brand they have helped build go to “the University as a whole,” which, despite its expansive characterization, does not in fact include them in any legally meaningful fashion.

While there are obvious identity-making dynamics involved in the consumption and the reworking or hybridization of brands by consumers, some have seen the emergence of the brand economy as a sign of a fundamental shift in the ways value is produced under capitalism. Adam Arvidsson has argued that while Marx identified manufacturing as the site of value production (thus treating consumption as passive), the brand economy, while obviously capitalistic in logic, has shifted the site of value creation from production to consumption.⁵⁸ It is the consumers who create the value of the brand not only by purchasing and consuming but by engaging and transforming it – a view that is effectively endorsed by business research pointing to the co-construction of brands.⁵⁹ As in the so-called platform economy, consumers work, and their work and engagement can be tracked, extracted, and monetized by the brand owner. These trends grew visible in the 1990s, but what has gone unnoticed is that academic marks may have anticipated them by several decades.

A trip back to the gift shop suggests that the names of universities have always shared in the brand function. Students, prospective students, parents, and tourists who purchased branded umbrellas, coffee mugs, T-shirts, calendars, and other merchandise did not do so because marks like “Yale” made them think these were particularly well-made umbrellas, mugs, or color-fast shirts made of top-quality cotton. What motivated their purchases was a desire to get something with the “Yale” logo on it – something they could wear or use, showing to themselves and others that they had a relationship (actual, future, or just confabulated) with that school.⁶⁰ In sum, the merchandise purchased at a distinguished university’s gift shop were the medium that carried the brand and made it publicly visible – a brand the purchaser claimed a relationship to – rather than goods whose quality was signaled by the mark.

And while students have treated university-trademarked goods as brands avant la lettre, their role has also gone beyond that of ambassadors or embodied advertisements of the brand. As reflected in the quote from the Harvard Trademark Program, generations of students have contributed to the Harvard brand (and, by extension, to the brand of all universities of excellence) in the same way that consumers now contribute to the articulation of the brands they purchase. Starting in the 1970s, the MIT catalog prominently featured images of students – happy, thoughtful, badly dressed, poring over instruments in labs, standing in front of blackboards covered with formulae, or relaxing on the lawn.⁶¹ By contrast, there were no such photos – and indeed no illustrations of any kind – in the printed information about the programs and courses of traditional Italian universities that I perused at the time; they contained only descriptions of curricula and lists of courses. Still operating within a version of the Humboldtian model described by Readings, the Italian university was of the state and by the state. The students were state subjects, not partners.

In hindsight, that MIT catalog exemplified an emergent trend that has since become pervasive in the US and globally: the conspicuous presence of students in virtually any kind of public representation of the university. One could say that this reflects nothing more than an advertising strategy aimed at prospective students and their parents – providing appealing pictures of happy, smart, tuition-paying students. (Even fake universities and diploma mills now hire actors to play the role of students in their fraudulent advertisements, confirming that a university can only be visually conveyed by images of students, not just pictures of buildings or descriptions of curricula.⁶²)

I suggest, however, that such representations are evidence of something more important and specific: the university’s mobilization of students not just to advertise but to constitute its brand. Students do not function as customers but as usually paying partners who build their own “special” university experience as they work toward their degrees – a very special experience that is enabled, and in turn supports, a very special university and the brand that captures that uniqueness. The fact that the university seems to have adopted the logic of the brand even prior to the development of the brand economy is not evidence of our administrators’ uncanny ability to forecast the future of capitalistic modes of consumption. It points, instead, to the fact that while the university can be said to “provide” an education, the nature of education is such that the university cannot provide it as a paid service like, say, a haircut.

An education is framed and supported by the university and its faculty and staff, but it has to be produced by the student – unless that university is a diploma mill. At the same time, the students (or some other entity on their behalf) have to pay to work toward their education.⁶³ Education is a strange non-good that has to be produced by the student. This is also what makes each education – and thus each university experience – different. Unlike two cars, two pens, or two computers, two educations cannot be alike, even if two students have taken exactly the same courses, with the same professors, in the same academic terms. This is because educations are not produced on an assembly line but by individual students who are bound to work differently and choose different paths.

In other words, the logic of education is structurally analogous to that of the brand in the sense that both rely on the engagement and contribution of the consumer to achieve the self-fashioning or construct the identity that they seek – to tweak the brand to make it theirs or, with a lot more work, to become a different person, an educated one – by way of a specific path through the university and its programs.⁶⁴ In turn, the collective effect of all these very individual educational and experiential paths is the further development of the university brand.

Academic or not, the brand thrives on the fit between itself and those who buy and develop a relation with it – a mutually reinforcing process of identification that may also involve exclusionary practices.⁶⁵ (As we saw, Verillas was not happy to see its brand associated with the Proud Boys.) The university relies on some filtering techniques (such as the use of so-called performance indicators) to avoid admitting students they do not see as likely to contribute to the brand. But as any parent of college students has learned, universities also try very hard to deploy more positive forms of matching, emphasizing what “type” of student the university “looks for” or what students would be best suited to “become themselves” at that university. Neither the university nor the student needs to be really distinctive, and it does not matter whether the match is made in heaven or just made up. The effect of distinctiveness comes from the intersection of the university looking for “its kind of student” (which, however, could be quite undistinctive) and the student whose university, while perhaps also undistinctive, becomes “MyUniversity” once s/he enrolls. The hybrid produced by crossing two generics is distinctiveness in the form of what Celia Lury calls a “personalized generic” (see Chapter 2).

Conclusion

Universities today build their brands through a variety of forms of “excellence,” which are not always tied to the valorization of their vintage. Stanford, for instance, has been remarkably successful at anchoring its brand not in tradition and pedigree but in innovation, “disruption,” and the celebration of entrepreneurial values over traditional academic ones. Those obvious differences in brand style notwithstanding, I argue that what makes the university so receptive to brand culture and economy is that, in some constitutive sense, it was always already one, well before its recent adoption of corporate managerial culture. The nature of that thing called education has framed the interaction between the university and its students as a form of brand-building, the students making the university what it is, and vice versa. Very different brands can be built on that platform. Even the story Stanford tells about itself – its brand – hinges on the entrepreneurial achievements of some of its early alumni (like William Hewlett and David Packard), which are retold to cast the university as always having supported and continuing to support a uniquely entrepreneurial culture.⁶⁶ It was that culture, we are told, that enabled it to seed and support Silicon Valley, whose uniqueness now mirrors that of the university.⁶⁷

2 One of a Kind Like You The University as a Personalized Generic

Celia Lury

What helps create a truly meaningful brand? A flawlessly articulated purpose? A killer logo? A leadership team that really understands the value of brand? Complete internal alignment? Oftentimes, the interplay of many different brand elements work together to create cohesive and lasting meaning. But one element that is gaining value in the world of branding is personalization.

Right now, personalization is “in” with brands. Mass consumption and mass production are becoming things of the past. These days, brands that matter and resonate with people are the ones that feel like they’re authentically made and designed just for you. It’s the age of personalization.¹

Who knew there were so many hidden depths to “he,” “she,” “it,” “they” and other pronouns? Interesting, right? Pronouns are multi-taskers, working busily to point us in different directions, freeing us from the catastrophe of repeated nouns.²

Introduction

The term MyUniversity is in relatively common use in the UK: many universities use it, or a variant, to describe the portal they require students and their staff to use in order to access information about their studies. Swansea University uses the name MyUni, with a heart replacing the dot above the “i,” and a webpage describing MyUni as “The Home of Current Students,” with the banner headings Your University, Support and Wellbeing, MyUniHub, and Student news. Kingston University has a My University log-in for students; my own institution has MyWarwick. Exeter University has MyExeter, Leicester University has a MyUoL app, while Bristol University has a My Students log-in for members of staff. Glasgow University has MyGlasgow Staff and MyGlasgow Students alongside MyGlasgow News, and at the time of the pandemic (as I write) it added Glasgow Anywhere, implying that “your” Glasgow can be found anywhere.³ Edinburgh University has MyEd, which is described as “the University of Edinburgh’s web portal. It is a gateway to web-based services within and beyond the University and offers a personalised set of content with single sign on to key University services such as Learn and Office365.”⁴ This phenomenon is not confined to the UK: Groningen University has a portal named My University while the University of Minnesota Twin Cities has a portal named MyU, which it describes as “the University’s enterprise portal. The University community uses MyU to access a variety of personalized services and information.”⁵ There is also a Chinese computer game called My University 我的大学, which simulates university life, allowing the player to try out the effects of a series of decisions, including course choice.⁶

The joining of words (MyUniversity), the combination of upper and lower case letters (MyUniversity), the use of abbreviations (MyU and MyUni), and graphic symbols (such as the heart) are characteristic of both Internet language (McCulloch 2019) and brand names and logos (Holt 2004; Lury 2004; Arvidsson 2005). But the ubiquity of MyUniversity undercuts any claim to distinctiveness – a characteristic frequently described as essential for brands – while “my” (the first person possessive personal pronoun) appears to promise a more individualized experience than is typical of branding. If MyUniversity is not a brand, what is it? How can MyUniversity be both ubiquitous and “just for you”? The proposal this chapter makes is that MyUniversity is best understood as an example of personalization: that is, MyUniversity is a personalized generic.

What might this mean? The adjective “generic” is described in the Online Etymology Dictionary as originating in the 1670s, and its meaning is given as:

“belonging to a large group of objects,” formed in English from Latin gener-, stem of genus “race, kind” (from PIE root *gene- “give birth, beget,” with derivatives referring to procreation and familial and tribal groups) + -ic. Hence “of a general kind, not special.” In reference to manufactured products, “not special; not brand-name; in plain, cheap packaging,” is from 1953 of drugs; of groceries, etc., from 1977.⁷

In relation to this definition of generic, it might seem that a personalized generic is an oxymoron. But in what follows here, it will be suggested that while MyUniversity is a response to “the proliferation and policing of similarity” (Hayden 2013: 615), “‘parity situations’ – the saturation of markets with sameness and similarity” (Hayden 2013: 617), and the prospect of an “increasingly generic future” (Greene 2014: 1) – and as such might appear to be an instance of unbranding (Greene 2014) – this reading alone risks misunderstanding the opportunities and dilemmas offered by personalization to universities seeking to generate value and difference.

So, What Is Personalization?

While it might be a bit much to describe the current era as the age of personalization (a lot else is going on after all), personalization is an increasingly widespread phenomenon in the UK, the US, and elsewhere. Personalizing practices permeate everyday life – we are invited to participate in personalized medical, health, and care services, receive personalized customer experiences, and find our way with maps that are continuously updated with information about our movements. We are individuated in the rankings of Airbnb and Uber, and can travel on trains and planes at personalized prices. We pose for selfies, share personal data in networks with friends and strangers, and create multiple personae in social media (Vargha 2009; Turow 2011; Prainsack 2017; Prey 2017; Moor and Lury 2018). Indeed, Kris Cohen suggests that we are witnessing the emergence of a personalization industry, by which he means “the automation and financialization of personalization at industrial scales and speeds, although with decidedly postindustrial organizations of labor” (2019: 168).

In a study of recommendation algorithms, which we take to be a paradigmatic instance of contemporary forms of personalization,⁸ Sophie Day and I (Lury and Day 2019⁹) propose that personalization is a form of atypical individuation. To do this, we draw on a Simondonian understanding of individuation in which the individual does not pre-exist the process of individuation, and the individual is not confined to natural persons; so, for example, a technology, a cancer, or a university may be individuated (Simondon 2017). We identify three noteworthy characteristics of personalization as a mode of individuation, captured in the familiar address: “people like you like things like this.” First, the address can be reversed, that is, in practices of personalization, not only do “people like you like things like this,” but “things like this like people like you,” too. Second, the implementation of each form of address is interlinked with the other in recursively organized pathways¹⁰ – a sequence of relations of “liking” and “likeness” – to specify a “you.”¹¹ The sequencing may take the form of the spatiotemporal relations of gift and commodity exchange, including those of generation, but also, significantly, operates in the rerouting of social reproduction through the epistemic infrastructure and associated political and economic milieus that support datafication (Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier, 2013; Kitchin 2014). The nature and organization of this sequencing – of relations of liking and likeness – qualifies the “you.” Third, the “you” that is specified is simultaneously singular and plural, an individual and a collective,¹² that is, personalization organizes the relations between the individual and the collective as a kind of distributed (dispersed and stratified) reproduction (Murphy 2017). In doing so, it promises a new mode of togetherness: as Kris Cohen suggests, “[Personalization’s] slogan could be the political is personal” (2019: 189).

MyUniversity: “One of a Kind” and “A Kind of One”

MyUniversity displays all three characteristics which Day and I identify in our account of personalization. To start with the obvious: the use of an address in the form of “Students like you like universities like this” is commonplace. In their promotional practices, universities routinely deploy well-established forms of recommendation, including those forms associated with personification, in the literary sense of using personal qualities or a person to signify a thing or an abstraction. But rather than using imagined persons or celebrities as figures of personification, as is common in commercial advertising and branding, universities are typically personified – in the prospectus, advertising, and on the website, for example – by images of “ordinary,” anonymous individuals who, the viewer is invited to assume, are already students: students who are “like” them. The implication of this form of address – if we continue to pursue the similarity with other forms of personalization – is that if you are “like” these individuals, have a resemblance to them, are similar in some way or other to them, you will also “like” – that is, prefer – the university (to other universities). And if the preference is reciprocated (that is, if a student’s application is accepted), “you” as an individual come to be part of a collective – “(y)our” university becomes MyUniversity.

The reverse form of address – “Universities like this like students like you” – is not only what drives recruitment and acceptance procedures, but now also extends to what happens once students arrive. It, too, is implemented through a form of personification, but in the anthropological rather than literary sense of this concept. In his understanding of personification, Chris Gregory (1982), for example, builds on the established thesis that an objectification process predominates in a commodity economy, while a personification process predominates in a gift economy: that is, both things and people assume the social form of objects in a commodity economy while in a gift economy they assume the social form of persons. In other words, commodity exchanges objectify social relations between people, and in such exchanges persons appear in or as a quantitative relation – for example, a fee – between objects exchanged (successful completion of assessment for a university degree). Gift exchanges personify social relations and the gift appears as a qualitative relation – for example, as teaching and learning – between persons (students and academic staff). In such relations, Gregory argues, persons are placed in a state of reciprocal dependence as part of an exchange order. He says: “the distinction between value and rank epitomizes the difference between commodity exchange relations and gift exchange relations. The former emphasizes quantity, objects, and equivalence; the latter emphasizes quality, subjects, and superiority” (1982: 50−51). While the operation of circuits of both commodity and gift exchange have long characterized British and North American higher education, sometimes but not always as part of a brand identity, personification is being supplemented in new ways by the rise of the personalization industry. More specifically, it is enhanced by the ways in which the use of the portals described above – often introduced by universities to enable them to communicate with students in a more personal way – is exploited in practices of “customer relationship management,” the history of which as described by Zsuzsanna Vargha (2019) is one of the most important back-stories to the emergence of personalization.

By looking at industry literature archives, and conducting interviews with business practitioners, Vargha (2019) identifies three overlapping trends – in marketing theory, enterprise technology firms, and accounting methods – contributing to the emergence of personalization. In the 1980s, she says, a new paradigm of relationship marketing emerged as a critique of transactional marketing. Emphasis was placed on the long-term value of customer retention and satisfaction rather than on sales transactions. The same period saw the development of a suite of new products by information systems providers. This facilitated the scaling up of integrated customer information and tracking in the mid-1990s, and fed the growth of customer data analytics that characterized the latter part of the decade. Third, there was an innovation in management accounting called activity-based costing – in which the focus is not on product profitability but customer profitability, that is, the rating of customers in terms of the profitability of their personal profiles. These three trends, Vargha says, combined in customer relationship management (CRM), that is, a suite of techniques for the management of relations with potential as well as current actual customers, typically using data analysis about the history of customers’ purchasing to drive sales growth, and often emphasizing customer retention.

CRM builds on established forms of market segmentation (Arvidsson 2005), which are integral to the growth of branding. However, what distinguishes CRM, as Vargha explains, is the assumption that it makes sense to differentiate individual customers based on their current or expected profitability, and then to maintain and build “personal” relationships with what are called profitable customers.¹³ This has long been the work of the alumni or development offices in universities, even if the language of profit was not employed. However, CRM enables such “personal” relationships to be integrated into university provision at a more fundamental level, and not only with the wealthy or influential. Significantly, CRM is a step beyond traditional forms of market segmentation, which typically divides the market in relation to what are seen as the pre-existing (sociodemographic, lifestyle, or psychological) characteristics of natural persons. To identify individual customers, CRM software builds customer profiles and recommendations, and tracks interactions with those individuals through the collection and analysis of “personal” data.¹⁴ What is new is not only the ability to identify all students (and academics) individually and (re)aggregate them into categories of various kinds (typically in relation to a variety of performance metrics), but that these categories emerge from the analysis of aggregated personal data (not a prespecified individual). In this analysis, “Students like you” are brought into relation with “Universities like this,” and their (composite) qualities (such as, for example, the likelihood of completing a degree) emerge in that relation.

While there is little doubt that universities are becoming increasingly datafied (Williamson et al. 2020), it is hard to know exactly how widespread the use of CRM is in UK universities. However, it seems likely that most have some kind of system in place: there is a national network for CRM managers in higher education (HE) institutions,¹⁵ and the company Tribal Dynamics claims to have worked with 80 percent of the UK higher education sector,¹⁶ while another – Pythagoras – describes itself as having worked with 30 percent of UK universities. On their website they say: “Built on Microsoft Dynamics 365, Evolve HE maximizes existing investment in Microsoft technology. Our solution establishes a CRM foundation that enables universities to achieve a step change in their adoption and deployment of student relationship management solutions.”¹⁷ Pythagoras provides a variety of services, including “replacing and consolidating legacy solutions” to provide “a single view of each student,” managing “end-to-end student recruitment and marketing activities through cross-channel campaigns,” and maximizing “domestic and international student conversion through dedicated online accounts and student portals.” Their “add-on modules” include Recruitment, Events and Marketing; Application Management; Applications Portal; On Course; Alumni, Fundraising and Sponsorship; and Research and Enterprise (see de Juan-Jordán et al. 2018 for a survey of the uses of CRM in higher education). All these services allow for the possibility that the personal data of students may be constantly recalibrated in relation to a variety of university aims and external demands, placing students in a constantly changing state of dependence with each other, as well as with academics.¹⁸ In this regard, the personification practices of CRM function as a mechanism, not of exchange value but, as Gregory puts it, of exchange order.¹⁹

In such practices, there is a shift in how the (two-way) relation between individual and class or kind is established. On the one hand, the student is identified – personally – as “one of a kind.” But this “one” is not an individual, unitary and independent; instead, this “one” is “one of a kind,” reciprocally dependent on other “ones” in an exchange order. And the ordering of the “one” student’s (or academic’s) reciprocal dependence on others can be reconstituted at discrete intervals, with each recorded interaction (via the portals mentioned above) along multiple pathways of personalization. Indeed, the optimization of a university in relation to multiple (internally and externally generated) demands may have consequences for students before they are accepted as well as after they leave the university, potentially putting each “one of a kind” student in multiple timelines. As Adrian Mackenzie describes, “while individuals were once collected, grouped, ranked, and trained in populations characterized by disparate attributes (socio-economic variables, educational background and qualifications, nationality, and so on), today we might say that they are distributed across populations of different kinds that intersect through them. Individuals become more like populations or crowds” (2016: 116).

On the other hand, in the implementation of these analytics, the (generic) university is itself reconfigured.²⁰ No longer a kind comprised of independent or individual ones, MyUniversity is a “kind of one,” the constantly shape-shifting outcome of the recursive implementation of what Mackenzie calls distributive numbers or joint probability distributions. And the reconciliation of priorities in MyUniversity is inevitably complex: “The particles, maps, images and populations figure in a baroque sensibility as curves that fold between outside and inside, creating partitions, relative interiorities and exteriorities” (Mackenzie 2016: 131). For example, the timelines mentioned above work backwards and forwards: they may inform whether an applicant’s “liking” or preference for a university is reciprocated (and how that reciprocity is expressed – in terms of the conditions of the offer that is made, access to accommodation, a scholarship or not, and so on), a reciprocity which may, in fact, depend on the anticipation of the applicant’s likely future once they leave the university.²¹ And how the MyUniversity of students maps onto or is co-ordinated with the MyUniversity of academics is complex, as “measures of student performance, sentiment, engagement, and satisfaction are also treated as proxy measures of the performance of staff, courses, schools, and institutions as a whole” (Williamson et al. 2020: 354). The reconciliation of “(y)our” with “my” is hard to achieve. Nevertheless, however the priorities are reconciled (or kept in tense suspension), in the practices of personalization, MyUniversity is constantly individuated as the interrelationship of “one of a kind” with “a kind of one,” as articulated so precisely in the UC Davis pennant illustrated below (Figure 2.1).²²

Figure 2.1 One of a kind like you.

(photo of UC Davis pennant by Celia Lury)

To add one further observation: the personalization processes described here are dependent on a process of computer-assisted data collection made possible by platformization (Gillespie 2010; Helmond 2015; Poell et al. 2019). In the case of Pythagoras the platform is Microsoft Dynamics 365, a Microsoft Power Platform.²³ For some critics, what is important about platforms is their programmability: “Definitionally, a ‘platform’ is a system that can be reprogrammed and therefore customized by outside developers – users – and in that way, adapted to countless needs and niches that the platform’s original developers could not have possibly contemplated, much less had time to accommodate” (Andreesson 2007). What is perhaps significant for an understanding of the politics of MyUniversity as a personalized generic, however, is the general definition of platformization as “the process of constructing a somewhat lifted-out or well-bounded domain as a relational intersection for different groups” (Mackenzie 2018: 6). Indeed, the term platform is sometimes used to describe the rise of multisided markets (Langley and Leyshon 2017). Platformization is thus important to acknowledge here not only because of the significance of datafication for the emergence of MyUniversity, but because platforms have made possible “lower cost, more dynamic, and more competitive alternatives to governmental or quasi-governmental monopoly infrastructures, in exchange for a transfer of wealth and responsibility to private enterprises” (Plantin et al. 2018: 306).²⁴ In other words, platformization has enabled the intervention of new actors in higher education, including a variety of entities concerned with online learning,²⁵ permitting old and new actors to acquire new and varying capacities, transforming the ways in which the heterogeneous values of education are created, distributed, accumulated, and extracted in the conjoining of “one of a kind” with “a kind of a one.”²⁶

Whose University is MyUniversity?

In the account above, I have described the emergence of MyUniversity as the outcome of a process of personalization, supported by processes of personification and platformization. But the underlying context for the emergence of personalization in higher education is important for the argument that MyUniversity is a personalized generic: that is, the saturation of an increasingly marketized sector with “sameness.” The most visible indicator of this in the UK was the abolition of the binary distinction between polytechnics and universities in 1992,²⁷ a growth in size of the sector further enabled by the increasing globalization of education.²⁸ Nigel Thrift observes:

Whereas there were about 250,000 students in 1965 [in the UK], now there are near to two and a half million. This expansion has been mainly in domestically based students, but a significant additional element has been international students flocking from many parts of the world. Since these students pay more, they have become a crucial element in the makeup of the economy of most universities.

(2016: 401)

The major role played by what are now called the post-1992 universities in the expansion of student numbers – including widening participation²⁹ at least to some degree – and then the decision by the sector as a whole to charge the same maximum fee allowed by the government in 2012,³⁰ have only complicated the ways in which sameness has become the basis of the search for distinction.³¹ The increasingly intense regulatory environment (including most recently the establishment in the UK of a national Office for Students as the “single market regulator”) is explicitly designed to enhance choice for students and increase competition between providers.³² The pressures on all academics to conduct “world class research” and the intensity of audit culture in UK higher education are both an additional cause and consequence. As Thrift observes of such expansion and the growing realization of the significance of higher education to the economy, “Universities come to be understood as intellectual property” (2016: 402). Whose property and how the distribution of the value of that property is mapped onto those who create it is what is at stake in the emergence of MyUniversity as a personalized generic.³³

To address these questions, I draw upon Cori Hayden’s assertion that “the generic” is “a rapidly expanding and differentiating category” (2013: 605). In her discussion of “parity situations,” that is, situations of substantive likeness, and “commercial landscapes saturated by sameness” (2013: 604), Hayden says of the generic that “this space of presumed indistinction is actually coming to hold within it and generate surprising potential for heterogeneity and stratification” (2013: 605). Indeed, in her discussion of the pharmaceutical industry she identifies a variety of generic kinds – newly invented “kinds of similar,” including super-generics, bio-similars, and me-too products. In all such cases, she says, similarity is constitutive rather than (merely) derivative;³⁴ importantly, how it is constitutive varies from one (kind of) generic to another. To specify MyUniversity in terms of its own form of constitutive similarity, and consider whether the emergence of MyUniversity is an instance of genericide – the fate that meets a brand or trademark when it becomes so dominant that it becomes synonymous with its entire kind – I draw on both Hayden’s and Jeremy Greene’s account of the history of generic medicines.

Greene suggests that “there were no firms known specifically as generic drug manufacturers or anything clearly called a generic drug until the late twentieth century” (2014: 10). However, he also points out that generic names for medicines can be traced back to at least the late nineteenth century: for example, Upjohn’s morphine, Squibb’s morphine, or Smith, Kline and French’s morphine (2014: 10). The history of generic names for universities is much longer, but the parallel is obvious: Harvard University, Durham University, and the University of the West of England, among others. Greene also describes the struggles involved in the attempt to establish the use of a single, universal generic name for drugs by the World Health Organization and the American Medical Association in the 1940s and 1950s, as well as the ways in which the anonymity of generic drugs was presented both as a risk (“Drugs Anonymous”) and “a value (of consumer empowerment) to be optimized” (2014: 64). But here the parallel with universities breaks down: MyUniversity may be ubiquitous but it is not Universities Anonymous. Neither, however, is the prefix to MyUniversity a proper name: it is, instead, “my.” And, so it will be argued here, it is the exercise of the personal possessive pronoun in the practices described above, rather than a name, that enables similarity to be constitutive of the value(s) of MyUniversity as a personalized generic.³⁵

Used on its own, “my” is what in linguistics is called a shifter: its meaning is dependent on who uses it. As shifters, personal pronouns are deictic signs that have the capacity to “multitask,” to “work busily to point us in different directions,” appearing to free us from “the catastrophe of repeated nouns.”³⁶ This liberation from a singular identity acquires a new potency in the redistribution of education through a transformed epistemic infrastructure. As I have argued elsewhere (Lury 2021), the role of linguistic shifters, including personal pronouns, has been significantly expanded with the changes in the activity of indexing associated with contemporary informational infrastructures.³⁷ And in the datafied university, the abductive agency of the personal pronoun acquires new significance, enabling the conjoining of “one of a kind” with “a kind of one” in a constantly changing, multidirectional moving ratio. And in this respect, the use of a variety of pronouns in the names and phrases associated with a whole range of products and services outside as well as inside education is suggestive, indicating some of the various ways in which personalized generics can be configured, and their diverse implications for the distribution of agency, accountability, and (intellectual and other) property. Alongside MyUniversity there are MySpace, MyGov, MyApp, MyInsurance, “I am train,” and “We are MyProtein. We are ForeverFit.” The vitamin products “WellMan” and “WellWoman” now have a competitor in “BetterYou,” while Cohen suggests that in the context of a discussion of search engines, “anything” should be considered “the symbolic pronoun of twenty-first-century commodity culture’s democratic claim” (2017: 112).³⁸ But how the abductive agency of pronouns is put to work – and who might benefit from that work – in the platforms of personalized generics is a complex matter: as Jonathan Flatley suggests, the questions, “Can one simply decide to [be] like something? How might one exert agency in one’s likes?” (2010: 72) seem to be the ones that matter.

Hayden proposes that one of the merits of the “exuberant proliferation” of kinds of generics is that they make it possible for ownership claims to be established through non-legal as well as legal means. She stresses the importance of idioms of sameness and what she calls vernacular reconfigurations, but also suggests that “generic kinds might now, counterintuitively, be considered an instance of what Mario Biagioli has called ‘intellectual property without intellectual property’” (2013: 606). Certainly, the use of personal pronouns appears to allow for the possibility of “IP without IP,” but non-legal claims to ownership of the intellectual property of the university are multiple, often layered together with legal claims, and are by no means easy to adjudicate (Dreyfuss 2010). In current uses, for example, personal pronouns are not only often “passive voice constructions” (Cohen 2019: 167), typified by indirect forms of address, but are frequently linked with proper, sometimes proprietary, names in a kind of mise-en-abyme. In such uses, the pronoun is subordinated to a name that can be repeated, branded, and may be owned as a trademark. This is the case with many of the examples of MyUniversity given at the beginning (although none, as far as I am aware, is registered as a trademark).³⁹

Sometimes the pronoun is not personal but impersonal, as in the case of itslearning, a virtual learning environment for education which describes itself as “The learning platform designed for teaching,” a phrase that neatly sums up the role of the platform in conjoining “People (teachers) like you” with “Things like this (content, curricula, resources).”⁴⁰ Sometimes the platform pronoun/suffix comes second to the proper name (Harvard.X, MITx, BerkeleyX, ANUx, ImperialX, HKUSTx), even as it implies ownership of the generic activity of “education,” as in ed.X®:

the trusted platform for education and learning. Founded by Harvard and MIT, edX is home to more than 20 million learners, the majority of top-ranked universities in the world and industry-leading companies. As a global nonprofit, edX is transforming traditional education, removing the barriers of cost, location and access. Fulfilling the demand for people to learn on their own terms, edX is reimagining the possibilities of education, providing the highest-quality, stackable learning experiences including the groundbreaking MicroMasters® programs.⁴¹

Sometimes, the proper or “personal” name of individuals is explicitly identified as a problem; so, for example, the ORCID platform (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) is described as a response to name ambiguity in scholarly research.⁴² The solution this platform provides is a sixteen-digit alphanumeric identity, similar to that created for content-related entities on digital networks by digital object identifiers (DOIs). It is the platform – not the state or the law – that assures the propriety of this “name” and enables it to be recognized as an owner of intellectual property; it is also what encourages an understanding of the value of content (that is, knowledge) in terms of its ability to incite platform relations.

And while the proliferation of generic kinds may invite multiple configurations of abductive agency, many kinds are subject to regulation of a variety of sorts, including being tested in measures of sameness and similarity. Both Hayden and Greene note that pharmaceutical generics have been subject to a range of equivalence tests, including tests of chemical equivalence and bioequivalence. So too the distinctiveness of the personalized generic MyUniversity depends, at least to a certain degree, on tests of equivalence – or sameness and similarity – to other (My)universities.⁴³ Traditionally, a significant guarantee of teaching quality in the UK was provided by the reports of external examiners of degree programs, but even though that role has been made (a little) more transparent,⁴⁴ it is still a process internal to the sector and the comparative referent of quality is typically only loosely specified.⁴⁵ In a parity situation, it has come to be supplemented by external evaluations according to criteria linked to national policy, including most recently in England the Teaching Excellence and Student Outcome Framework (TEF), which assigns bronze, silver, and gold awards to universities and colleges. The Research Excellence Framework (REF) is a peer-review process of research evaluation, in which “Units of Assessment” are assessed in relation to the rigour, originality, and significance of their members’ “output,” the impact of their research, and the quality of the research environment. Both these processes of evaluation provide absolute results, that is, results in relation to fixed criteria defined by the national regulatory framework, so the score achieved by one institution or unit should not affect that of another. However, these measures of similarity or sameness – along with many others – have increasingly come to be tied to rankings, enabling them to act as a mark of relative distinction within a sector characterized by sameness.

In the now considerable literature on rankings in academia and elsewhere (Espeland and Sauder 2007; Guyer 2010; Musselin 2010; Gerlitz and Lury 2014; Esposito and Stark 2019), it has been pointed out that it’s unusual for a single ranking to be accepted as the ultimate arbiter in any given arena; so, for example, there are numerous education rankings that order universities in relation to a wide range of academic and non-academic concerns, as well as competing rankings calculated in relation to ostensibly the same object. Importantly, however, such rankings are variously described as reactive (Espeland and Sauder 2007), performative (Esposito and Stark 2019), or participative (Gerlitz and Lury 2014).⁴⁶ In these analyses, contemporary ratings do not perform as observations of an independent world but acquire effectivity in a world in which observers include the observed, who have little choice but to take into account – and act on – the observations of others.

And to the extent that universities do act on rankings, the distinction of the personalized generic emerges in relations of similitude as described by Foucault, that is, in “small differences among small differences,” differences in (recursive) series that “obey no single hierarchy” and “are able to move in one direction as easily as another” (1982: 44). In this regard, a MyUniversity that is guided by rankings alone might be said to be undergoing a form of genericide, a slow death of forced self-classification, “up-dating to remain the same” (Chun 2017) for fear of falling down the gap between “the merely similar and the properly equivalent” (Hayden 2013: 619).⁴⁷ Even if a university has room for maneuver (with elite institutions having more room than others), having refused the market lure of “the same, but cheaper” – the claim of the Mexican pharmaceutical chain Farmacias Similares studied by Hayden – a MyUniversity has little choice, in the UK at least, but to embrace the never-ending one-upmanship of “the same, but better (or worse).”⁴⁸ Indeed, as competitors to universities emerge as part of a process of platformization and privatization, they may well become “like a(nother) university, but not quite.”

3 The Public Higher Education Brand

Deven R. Desai

Higher education institutions (HEIs) misunderstand branding in at least two ways. First, branding is supposed to enable market differentiation, yet higher education in the US seems to converge on one standard model: a school with high-test-scoring and high-grade-point-average students. Second, critics of branding in higher education argue that the nature of branding turns higher education into a commodity. The irony is that branding is supposed to avoid the problems of being a commodity by allowing an institution to move beyond price and economic levers and offer people something a competitor cannot copy.¹ This chapter argues that branding should be understood as a tool or “mechanism” that can (re)configure production,² and when properly understood, this tool can help higher education institutions focus their efforts on their respective missions, and allow them to co-create value with society.³ This chapter seeks to apply the logic of branding to the realities of higher education today,⁴ thereby opening a way, especially for public institutions and educational systems, to define their purpose and break free of the problems posed by rankings and similar quantification endeavors.

Despite a range of higher education institutions, higher education reduces to one model.⁵ A large problem is that even if one wants to copy the current, aspirational model, how this rich environment is created and works is unclear. Is it the students, the professors, the location, or some combination that creates the desired offering? Are some institutions simply selecting students of such high caliber that “success” is measured by building power networks?⁶ Are other institutions offering rigorous training that molds raw human capital into something more? Does each potential student need the same education? Where do schools that focus on training practitioners or vocational schools fit? What should such schools offer? The difficulty in knowing what education does for a student has fostered the idea that society needs higher education accountability. The College Scorecard is an example of an accountability system that tries to quantify “education” in the hope that it can be analyzed in economic terms.⁷ Like other rankings, accountability systems drive higher education institutions to chase numbers and compete with other institutions on the same metrics, even when those metrics may not fit an institution’s mission or capabilities. In short, higher education is becoming – if it is not already – the same offering across all institutions. But sameness is exactly what branding is supposed to defeat.⁸

A different misunderstanding of branding is that branding of its nature leads to a quantified, market-based orientation to education and the claim that branding should not be used by higher education at all.⁹ To be clear, reputational competition among higher education institutions, and faculty, has been part of higher education’s history.¹⁰ Nonetheless, education is a relational good – a good “produced in sympathetic, empathetic, trusting, and high regard relationships … [that are part of] social capital.”¹¹ Like relational goods in general, a key part of education’s “value depends on [its] connection to people and relationships between people and the social environment in which they are exchanged.”¹² But, for a range of reasons, market-driven ideology has become an additional and powerful way in which higher education institutions compete.¹³ Market-driven ideology – bolstered by various attempts to quantify education – challenges the way education is offered and feeds turning education into a commodity.¹⁴ As a review of the meaning of the word commodification puts it, the shift is to “exchanges through which something ‘human’ or ‘inalienable’ becomes valued for its commodity exchange value in a market.”¹⁵ Thus critics say that lessons from higher education branding “may have a potential for challenging the institutional integrity of universities.”¹⁶ Critics also assert that a cross-national move to branding in education creates an “unbearable lightness of university branding,” and begs the question, “Are universities like all other institutions?”¹⁷ These views assume that branding leads to commodification and the reduction of education to a market-exchanged “economic good, a raw material, an article of commerce, a mass produced and undifferentiated product, or a good that is widely available and has a low profit margin.”¹⁸ Although every higher education institution behaving the same and striving to meet metrics set by dubious ranking systems is a path to commodification that cedes power to outsiders,¹⁹ branding does not force such an outcome. Indeed, branding is supposed to aid in defeating such a result.

In this chapter, Part I identifies the apparent convergence of metrics and brands in the context of higher education institutions, and argues that this convergence is based on a faulty view of both brands and higher education. Popular rankings such as U.S. News & World Report focus on metrics that measure one set of criteria/values that favor selection-effect schools over treatment-effect schools.²⁰ Schools, often public ones, that focus on serving first-generation students seek to have a treatment effect. That is, after attending the school, a student unlikely to attain success such as attending graduate or professional school or getting a prestigious job upon graduation is able to pursue such options. Treatment effects are not, however, measured by entering class selectivity. Put differently, schools vary greatly in their type, goals, and missions. There are differences between private and public schools. There are also differences among private schools and among public schools. Yet playing the ranking game makes a school compete on sameness rather than on what makes it unique. In that sense schools fail to use branding as a tool to show what is different and special about the school.

Part II uses California’s A Master Plan for Higher Education in California, 1960–1975²¹ (AMP) as a lens to examine the varied goals of education and adds a distinction – a differentiation and branding one – between private and public institutions. The laudable goal of the then president of the University of California and chief architect of AMP, Clark Kerr, for public higher education institutions – to balance the “competing demands of fostering excellence and guaranteeing educational access for all”²² – may not fit the private institutions with which many public institutions compete.²³ The twin goals may shatter when the desire, and unfortunate need, for advancement in the higher education ranking game takes hold.²⁴

Part III turns to how a better understanding of a given type of higher education institution may allow a given public higher education system to recapture control over its destiny.²⁵ It begins by explaining how pursuing co-creation of value as a branding practice enables a school to establish its brand in partnership with its stakeholders, and by extension to look beyond the metrics that miss a particular school’s vision. Part III then uses the University of California (UC) system and its approach to first-generation students as an example of how co-creation of value works at specific schools and across the state’s higher education system.

The chapter concludes by offering that the purpose of US higher education has changed throughout its history, and yet the question is stable: Who is served? Students, faculty, or society at large?²⁶ I argue that public higher education must answer this question with a resounding “yes” to all three stakeholders. To do so will require institutions to reassess their place in society continually and co-create value by listening to their stakeholders, experimenting with programs, communicating results, and building the future at each level of public higher education on the system’s terms rather than a news magazine’s. This approach should allow education systems to show why they need funding and help higher education institutions avoid becoming commodities. It will allow institutions to build and evolve their brand just as any corporation does.

I. Markets, Numbers, and Missteps

Higher education institutions ought to resist the factors that feed the turn to the current commodity market mindset. Funding problems and a desire to show value intersect. They create a feedback loop where an obsession with numbers and quantifiable outcomes leads to commodification and a cycle that is difficult to break.²⁷ As funding goes down, and the cost paid directly by students goes up, the question of what one gets from education becomes acute. Yet rankings don’t measure important differentiating things such as how well a school educates someone or whether the school serves underrepresented minorities or first-generation-to-college students well. This section presents the difference between schools that operate based on selecting students already set up for success versus schools that seek to train students so that after graduation the students have skills and knowledge that set them up for success. It then turns to how ranking systems create a trap for schools so that they chase external metrics rather than building programs that differentiate their institution from others.

A. The Selection or Treatment Effect Problem

An important question is whether a school is simply showing a selection effect or whether there is a treatment effect. Selection effects are driven by choosing someone who already has a trait or traits. A modeling agency selects beautiful people, it does not make people beautiful.²⁸ With a treatment-effect institution, such as the US Marine Corps, the training is what counts and those who make it through have a reputation for being “a formidable soldier.”²⁹

Educational institutions differ on whether their outcomes are driven by selection or treatment effects. “Top-tier universities depend heavily on selection effects; [they] produce top graduates by accepting the best applicants.”³⁰ Top-tier universities operate “more like a modeling agency than like the Marine Corps.”³¹ Institutions such as Harvard, Stanford, Yale, and so on select students who are smart, hard working, etc., and often come from families where parents have an average of sixteen years of education.³² By choosing such students, these schools select people who would have done well by many measures, including income, even if they had attended a “moderately selective school” such as a state university.³³ These results do not, however, apply for racial and ethnic minorities and students whose parents “have relatively little education.”³⁴ As Alan Krueger said in 2005 – well before the recent college admissions bribery scandal – parents “fight to get their kids into the better school. But they are just assigning to the school a lot of what the student is bringing with him to the school.”³⁵ Even so, the difference appears not to be the education received at the school, but the access “to networks for minority students and for students from disadvantaged family backgrounds that are otherwise not available to them.”³⁶

In contrast, some schools pursue treatment effects as they strive to serve low-income students or students who are the first in their family to attend college. One example is UC Santa Barbara (UCSB). Its pioneering program, Promise Scholars, provides support to low-income students and first-generation students.³⁷ The program is expensive but helps students maintain little to no debt and provides counseling for academic and career success.³⁸ Members of the first 122 to graduate have entered PhD and MA programs at Harvard, Duke, USC, University of Pennsylvania, and Michigan State as well as been hired straight out of college into industry jobs.³⁹

Prospective students and society should know about and value treatment effects. Rankings, however, track selection-effect metrics much better than treatment effects, if rankings even track the latter at all. This problem pushes institutions into the rankings trap.

B. The Rankings Trap

That some schools are selection-effect schools and others treatment-effect schools may seem benign, but when rankings enter the picture several problems arise. First, rankings favor selection-effect schools. Second, when one focuses on quantified metrics such as grade point average (GPA) and test scores, the pressure to accept a homogeneous, already set-up-for-success student body is high. Third, because rankings are not good at reflecting treatment effects, schools that strive to offer training and develop students who might otherwise not succeed look like inferior institutions, when in fact they may be a superior educational choice. Fourth, once a school embraces ranking, it is trapped. It is less able to show what it does differently from other schools. Instead, it will strive to compete in areas that other schools can copy and so cede its power to brand – its power to offer and communicate what is unique.

Selection-driven admissions seem to breed school rankings, or league tables as the British call them,⁴⁰ – a phrase that evokes sports and the way in which sports fans obsess over stars, trades of stars, and win-loss statistics and captures the problem with ranking. Looking at entering class SAT or ACT test performance and GPAs starts an arms race. Schools can no longer look at the breadth of a student’s experience or calibrate for intrinsic biases in testing when admitting students.⁴¹ Instead, an entering class must have a high twenty-fifth, median, and seventy-fifth percentile standing (e.g., a class may have entering students with the top 25 percent having above a 1,580 SAT score out of 1,600 and 75 percent are above a 1,460 score) so that a school can maintain or improve its rank.⁴² Worry about rankings and median scores can push even a well-regarded, established, and highly ranked private higher education institution to reject precisely those students who would most benefit from admission.⁴³ And yet, the focus on entering class grades and scores simply tells a potential student that a school has selected in a certain way, not that the school will add to the student’s knowledge and skills.

Other aspects of rankings aggravate the problem of selection versus treatment effects. Using dollars spent per student as part of a school’s rank score⁴⁴ puts public institutions at a disadvantage and makes otherwise top-tier institutions look less attentive to students so they slip down the list.⁴⁵ Focusing on immediate job placement privileges schools that have smaller student populations and powerful alumni – the very same elite schools that thrive based on selection, not treatment effects. Adding a student’s income upon graduation into rankings again favors schools that admit applicants already connected to privilege. In addition, the focus on job placement and income favors schools with large technology or business programs and disfavors schools that send students to graduate or professional schools. As such, a school cannot ignore maintaining, if not growing, technology and business programs at the cost of maintaining and developing programs that lead to deeper training in and engagement with, for example, medicine, public health, social services, law, and of course basic scientific research. Ironically, advances in basic scientific research are the lifeblood for exactly the technology and business jobs that are factored into rankings.⁴⁶

As opposed to selection metrics, treatment efforts and results are not well reflected in rankings. Recall the work at UCSB that strives to serve low-income and first-generation college students. Rankings fail to capture this subset population let alone the value of such services to students and society.⁴⁷ For example, rankings that rely on retention rates and job success will make an institution seeking to reach students who may have lower scores or GPAs rank lower and look like a poor performer, even though the very nature of its mission is to serve those students who are less likely to graduate, or graduate on an Ivy League timetable, and are more likely to have lower-paying jobs.⁴⁸

Although the metrics used in rankings can be seen as helping students know what a particular higher education institution offers, the focus ends up shifting to a consumer model.⁴⁹ The student is the consumer and wishes to know what will come of the price paid in dollars and hours spent in school. As an outsider, the student-consumer needs a way to assess quality. Rankings become the easy way to express quality. And yet, students, parents, and employers read league tables in ways that misunderstand the difference between higher education institutions that focus on educating a student – a treatment effect – and higher education institutions that rely on a student’s pre-admission training and luck to have been born into a family where the parents have attained at least a college degree – a selection effect. In that sense, rankings arguably force higher education institutions of all types to play the same game.⁵⁰

One dimension of ranking, academic reputation, exemplifies the way rankings can alter the focus and mission of an institution. Some rankings focus on publications and citations as metrics of global stature and the excellence of an institution’s faculty.⁵¹ That emphasis can lead to an explicit “shift” to improving publication and citation scores and away from educating students, as was the case in Russia.⁵² Citation obsession can lead to more absurd and unethical practices such as forming citation circles to improve the so-called impact factor of a journal and thus the claimed quality of a given author’s work.⁵³ Regardless of how citation counts are generated, having a highly cited professor has little to say about educating a student. Indeed, such professors’ focus is on their research and PhD students, not being in a classroom, so much so that reduced class loads, and thus less contact with non-doctoral students, is likely. All these tactics are ways to climb global ranking indices, not to educate students.⁵⁴

In short, rankings and specific metrics such as GPAs, endowment, job placement, and academic reputation ignore the different types of education and what they offer to different people. That is a mistake. There is a clear difference in the goals of a research university – a difference compounded by whether it is public or private – and the goals of a small college,⁵⁵ let alone the goals of a state college or junior/community college. Rankings, however, blur, or do not care about, these differences and try to create a commodity-style comparison table. Put differently, rankings force higher education institutions to be assessed on GPAs, standardized test scores, academic citations, etc. – metrics that are nothing more than education’s version of marketing’s famous four Ps (product, price, place, and promotion) – characteristics or qualities that other HEIs can and do copy, instead of allowing them to focus on offering something unique.⁵⁶ Again, that sameness is exactly what branding is supposed to defeat,⁵⁷ rather than succumb to.

II. The Diversity of Educational Institutions and Goals: How Public Education Is Different from Private Education

Educational institutions vary. There are research institutions and small colleges. There are private institutions and public ones. Elite private institutions – be they universities or small colleges – are self-contained and autonomous. They can have a singular goal as determined by their board. Public institutions, however, function as part of a given state’s overall higher education system. Their goals are set at the state level with the basic goal being to build an education system that serves the public. The beauty and difficulty of such systems is that they have many offerings within the system. For example, within public higher education there are research universities, state universities, and community colleges. And there are notable differences in each of those spheres. There are differences among public research institutions, among state universities, and among public community colleges. Thus, a public education system has different parts that provide different things to the public, but those parts taken together present a cohesive public education offering.

Branding raises questions for public education. One question is, “What is different about being part of a system?” In other words, is there a system-level brand? A related question is, “What differentiates institutions at a given level within a system?” Can a school at the research level distinguish itself from other schools at the same level? Does differentiation within a system level also differentiate a school from private schools? Before answering these questions, however, one has to have an understanding of the overall system and of the various offerings within that system. California’s approach to higher education provides an example of a system’s goals and the offerings within it.

The study, A Master Plan for Higher Education in California, 1960–1975 (AMP),⁵⁸ provides a way to understand the differences among higher education institutions and what an overarching identity or brand for a system-wide higher educational offering might look like. The study was prepared for the Liaison Committee of the State Board of Education and Regents of the University of California in 1960. AMP’s main focus was on public higher education institutions. It formalized the state’s existing,⁵⁹ “disorganized,”⁶⁰ three-tier system of public higher education institutions so that, “Each shall strive for excellence in its sphere.”⁶¹ Rather than “uncoordinated and competing colleges and universities,” each segment had its sphere of “excellence.”⁶² AMP can thus be understood as a coherent, comprehensive education system for California.⁶³ The spheres show differing goals that together provide the dream: fostering excellence and guaranteeing educational access for all.⁶⁴

Under AMP, state research and doctoral education are the province of University of California campuses and admission is for “seniors in the top 12.5 percent of their public high school graduation class.”⁶⁵ If someone is not in that top group, but is in the top 40 percent of high school graduates, the California State University (CSU, also called Cal State) system offers another type of four-year university offering.⁶⁶ Even if someone did not get into the UC or State level schools to start, a student could go to a junior college (today called a community college), and if they met a certain grade point average, transfer to finish a four-year degree. Junior colleges also took in non-traditional students.⁶⁷ In addition, AMP acknowledged and worked with “independent colleges and universities” as another part of the way California would be able to meet its education needs.⁶⁸ Although distinct, the segments are supposed to work together to provide educational, and so economic mobility.⁶⁹

Despite the dream, AMP has faced continual challenges. Critiques of AMP point out that AMP falls short of its goals, because of California governors of the Reagan mindset changing commitments to those goals and to the system’s overall structure; underfunding of the system primarily due to the passage of Proposition 13 in 1978 and its limitation on property taxation; the change from “comparatively quite low” fees to higher and higher ones to attend; the introduction of explicit tuition in 2009; and an unwillingness and/or inability to continue to fund the expansion of student seats needed at all tiers of the system.⁷⁰ A deeper criticism is that from its birth, AMP was in fact a product of the need to limit costs and build capacity for the future such that the admissions standards worked to reduce and limit admission to four-year programs.⁷¹ In other words, the balance of students seeking higher education was pushed to two-year programs at junior colleges.⁷² Yet AMP embraced two-year programs as part of the overall approach, and whether everyone should go to a four-year college is unclear.⁷³

Claiming that all should go to, or are ready for, a four-year college at eighteen recreates the ranking problem, because it assumes that one size of education fits all – a position this chapter challenges. Nonetheless, as of this writing, the ten UC campuses educate about 280,000 students while also being a “massive and top-ranked research enterprise, [with] five medical centers, three affiliated national laboratories and an overall budget of $37.2 billion, bigger than those of more than 30 states” and being the main creator of PhDs in the state on top of its undergraduate and master’s degrees.⁷⁴ The Cal State (CSU) system is “the largest and most diverse four-year university system in the nation, educating 482,000 students on 23 campuses who are drawn from the top 40% of California’s annual high school graduates.”⁷⁵ The system “is often referred to as the ‘job engine’ of California,” given that it trains about half of California’s teachers and more than half of its nurses in addition to providing education for other important career paths.⁷⁶ Thus despite the structural issues and questions around the balance of how many students go to four-year colleges, the system continues to try to serve the state by fostering excellence and striving to guarantee educational access for all.

In short, these critiques do not undermine the idea of an identity or brand for a public higher education system. Instead, they challenge whether a system lives up to its claims and force institutions to focus and refine what they do. These tasks fit well with branding.

III. Recapturing the Public Higher Education System Brand

It is time for public higher education systems to recapture what they do. It is time for public higher education systems to recapture their brand. Public higher education systems should re-embrace, and tell the public that they are, systems. Like a major corporation with a range or family of brands offered under one umbrella,⁷⁷ public higher education systems should offer, support, and celebrate a range of higher education institutions. California’s AMP sets out a system with three types. Ernest Boyer’s study of scholarship offers more types – research universities, doctorate-granting institutions, liberal arts colleges, community colleges, and the comprehensive college or university.⁷⁸ The point is that higher education systems can set out types of higher education institutions so that each level can have a purpose to guide its mission. In addition, within a level, a given institution can innovate and “take pride in its own distinctive mission and seek to complement rather than imitate the others.”⁷⁹ In this section, I explain what branding – and in particular the view of branding as co-creation of value – requires and what it can do for a public education system. I then explore how the UC system is an example of branding as co-creation of value.

A. Public Education and Co-Creating Value as a Brand

Brands and branding have evolved to embrace far more than the simple world where a brand was owned by an institution and used to communicate the brand owner’s offering to consumers.⁸⁰ As I have developed elsewhere, we can think of corporate or entity-level brand activity and non-corporate or outside-the-entity brand activity. Both activities matter. The corporate, or internal, aspect of branding involves “forg[ing] not only a product symbol, but also a connection with consumers so that consumers look beyond price when they make a purchasing decision. It also enables corporations to sell multiple branded products and ancillary merchandise and to turn the brand into a product in its own right.”⁸¹ In corporate branding, the entity builds and offers the brand. But today there is more to brand relationships than simply using advertising to tell people to buy a good or service. The non-corporate, or external, side of branding accounts for “consumers and communities as stakeholders in brands.”⁸² The way to connect these activities is through the idea of co-creating value. Co-creation of value embraces the idea that value is not created purely “from a product- and firm-centric view” but rather that it comes from “personalized consumer experiences.”⁸³ In this understanding, “Informed, networked, empowered, and active consumers are increasingly co-creating value with the firm. The interaction between the firm and the consumer is becoming the locus of value creation and value extraction.”⁸⁴ As such, a higher education institution must address both internal and external brand activity.

A higher education system must co-construct its future with its public. That requires understanding what its public needs. The system must also understand the nature of its students. Last, it must continually communicate with the public about needs, goals, methods, and outcomes. Put simply, the boldest step for any higher education system would be not to give in to the herd and imitate what current rankings try to assess. If a system wants to reject or move away from ranking metrics, it will have to show how and why that change is a good goal. And it will need to build its offering from within, which leads to another set of important stakeholders – the people working inside the institution.

Systems and specific institutions will need to co-create value within the institution. They must communicate with faculty about the possible shift from rote rankings chasing. Part of that shift might, and I argue should, include a broader understanding of scholarship. Embracing a range of scholarship – what Boyer calls a Mosaic of Talent – can begin to unlock the potential for higher education systems and specific schools.⁸⁵ That is, especially at a large higher education institution, not everyone needs to be doing the same thing. Of course, research is a key and major part of a research institution.⁸⁶ But if someone is past tenure and wants to focus on scholarship beyond publication including as a teacher, an institution should have room for and support that goal. It may be that an institution shifts teaching loads based on research plans. For example, one professor who is pursuing research may teach fewer courses, while another pursuing novel teaching techniques may teach fewer courses while developing new methods, and another person may explicitly focus on course delivery and feedback to students and so teach one or two more courses instead of research. As an institutional matter, all are able to focus on their desires as scholars, and all are well served as long as each aspect of their effort is respected.⁸⁷

Staying with the simpler California model as an example, the California higher education system would set out what each tier is and still give room for experimentation, innovation, and competition within each tier. The UC level would be clearer about what it means to be at a top research institution where professors engage in what Boyer calls discovery. But a given UC campus might focus on how its faculty are also scholars who integrate knowledge across disciplines, or apply knowledge by engaging with “consequential problems,” or develop teaching so that people can understand discovery.⁸⁸ The Cal States and community colleges (originally called junior colleges in AMP) would also focus on their realms, and yet again pursue differentiating and innovative offerings. Cal State and Cal Polytechnic campuses might celebrate teaching prowess in general. Still a given campus may have one or two programs that shine in agriculture, business, computer science, health professions, or other specific fields. Community colleges may focus on training and treatment effects in fields where a two-year program can accomplish much. Or they may focus on training and treatment to be ready to transfer to a UC or CSU. Success from either approach would perhaps let a campus, or the entire set of higher education institutions at a given level, be the US Marines of public education.

A look at how the UC system is facing its current challenge of educating a growing first-generation student population shows how these steps might work and how the same challenge can be met in different, innovative ways.

B. Co-Creation in Action: The UC System and First-Generation Students

The California system must address the changing nature of Californians entering college – many of whom are first-generation attendees. Despite different educational emphases and student populations, both the UC and Cal State systems have “far higher proportions of low-income and first-generation students than do similar universities in other states.”⁸⁹ Both face a similar challenge – “to close achievement gaps for low-income, first-generation and underrepresented minority students.”⁹⁰ As Lindsay Romasanta, director of Student Success Programs at UC San Diego, puts it, “the demographics of our students are changing, and it’s important we get ahead of the curve and give them the information that’s going to help them thrive.”⁹¹ Director Romasanta also captures a key point, not just for her campus but all the UC campuses: “Our perception has been, we’re a highly selective institution – our students will figure it out on their own.”⁹² That is, relying on selection effects alone, instead of trying to have treatments effects, is not viable or proper for the UC, given the reality of its attendees’ backgrounds. The different UC campuses address the issues in ways that fit a specific institution, but they do not act in isolation. There is coalition across the UC system that focuses on first-generation students. Yet the variety of approaches shows how a system can identify or set a goal and then allow campuses and faculties room to be creative and responsive to their student and campus needs.

For example, UC Merced is the newest of the University of California campuses and has distinguished itself by embracing first-generation students. In 2018, UC Merced’s student body was 73 percent first-generation, the highest within the UC system and “double the national average.”⁹³ In 2010, UC Merced started and maintained up to today a program, Fiat Lux, focused on first-generation students.⁹⁴ The program serves more than 100 first-year and more than 150 later-year students by providing money, space to live together as a cohort, structured learning environments, and dedicated counselors and student mentors.⁹⁵ Specific aspects of the program such as “numerous workshops aimed at what is called procedural knowledge, boning up on study skills and learning how to connect with professors and research opportunities … [and] Several … organized lunches with faculty members per semester” provide a foundation for success.⁹⁶ As evidence of the program’s treatment effect, “Scholars graduate at a higher rate than students with comparable grade-point averages.”⁹⁷

The focus on first-generation student success has spread across the UC system.⁹⁸ In addition to UC Santa Barbara’s Promise Scholars Program, UCSB professors of biology have developed a BioMentors program that seeks to combat the problem that “Fewer than 40% of U.S. students entering into science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) majors complete their intended degree upon graduation,”⁹⁹ and close to 50 percent of STEM majors leave such majors after their first year.¹⁰⁰ Some students leaving the major “came from high schools that didn’t prepare them for the rigor that [they] face in college,” which, when combined with “feeling out of place in a completely new environment and not knowing who to turn to for help,” leads to poor performance and a loss of “confidence in their abilities and to reconsider their major.”¹⁰¹ This outcome occurs despite the students being fully qualified and capable of doing the work.¹⁰²

The change in teaching style, a treatment, worked. Students in the BioMentors program “outperformed their peers in the traditional lecture course by about 12% on common exam questions, and … [had] higher final course grades overall.”¹⁰³ Beyond grades, the sense of “belonging” increased, students were connecting with professors more, and so far those in the program are “10% more likely than their peers” to take the next course in the series.¹⁰⁴ The authors of the study note that whether the approach can scale to classes larger than 300 and long-term retention needs to be studied.¹⁰⁵ But the point is that even at a campus with a large program focused on specific student cohorts, the room to study and improve how students are reached in other ways was present and supported.

Other campuses have addressed first-generation student success. UC San Diego has created a Student Success Coaching Program for first-generation students that grew from 800 to 1,200 participants in 2018.¹⁰⁶ The program focuses on increasing “cultural capital” so that first-generation students would better know about “where to find a study group, how to manage their time as midterms approached … upcoming registration deadlines, and … academic opportunities, like a new study abroad scholarship developed just for program participants.”¹⁰⁷ UCLA is pursuing new housing for first-generation students as a different way to build support and foster success.¹⁰⁸ UC Irvine is using a data-system so that professors can know whether a large number of students are first-generation, have taken other courses in the subject area, and “how well those students did academically.”¹⁰⁹ Options for ways to alter teaching methods to reach students are offered based on that information.¹¹⁰ UC Berkeley has opened a food pantry to address issues surrounding the high cost of living that faces students in general and especially low-income and first-generation students.¹¹¹

Returning to UC Santa Barbara’s Promise Scholars Program, it is thus an example of seeing that the institution has broader goals and a larger vision of what it means to be an educational institution and indeed, to educate. The more UC Santa Barbara tells the public about its support for first-generation students and the way they can be served even at a top research institution, the more UC Santa Barbara is valued for its own mission. In addition, by providing room for professors to pursue teaching innovations such as the BioMentors program and recognizing that work, UCSB fosters broader recognition that scholarship and being a professor have a broad and valued range of possibilities.

Nonetheless, other campuses are finding, and will continue to find, ways to show how they address common challenges in particular ways. As California demographics change, the UC campuses will likely further differentiate how they address those changes. Some of those paths will end in failure or less than desired outcomes. As long as the experiments are studied to see what went wrong and the results shared, that is expected and good for the system. Other paths will do so well that, of course, other campuses will copy them. That too is good for the system. Despite the need to differentiate, best practices should be shared across a healthy public higher education system. For even with that, each campus’s history, resources, and student population will differ enough that each campus will use tools differently as the different campuses continue to grapple with how they meet their specific mission.

In addition, by following the internal step of co-creating value with faculty by embracing a broader view of scholarship, students should benefit too. Students should end up with more options within the campus. Many may want the star teacher who inspires them to learn more.¹¹² Some students may want the professor who integrates and applies ideas.¹¹³ A few students may want to go deep into a field to perhaps even enter academia, and so access to research-focused faculty who nonetheless teach provides a different, important option. With a range of scholars, the campus now offers more to a diverse student body; and yet it still is a research campus. By extension, a student seeking training toward certain jobs should be able to see that they may be better served at a Cal State school or junior college.

Co-creation, however, needs more than these steps. All of these efforts require support from within an education system and from the public. A system will have to communicate to students, parents, taxpayers, and legislatures why getting away from the easy-to-digest world of rankings is a good thing. The examples above provide details that matter for such a shift, data. Educational institutions are well placed to use their core skills not only to experiment but to track outcomes. Numbers return, but they are under terms that matter to the new goals and behaviors of the institution. Institutions must be sure to reach all stakeholders with concrete information about how a new program works and whether its goals are achieved. Saying, “We embrace first-generation students, because it’s just and fair,” is lovely, but not compelling. Saying the same thing and showing – as UC Santa Barbara or UC Merced do – that the programs have force by tracking the funding and outcomes of specific programs, is powerful. The combination makes those who oppose such endeavors come up with arguments against such programs. And those arguments will reveal the biases, or at least differences, of objectives. These contrasts would show differences, dare I say differentiation, and should offer students and all concerned rich ways to compare offerings and make meaningful, better informed, choices.

Conclusion

Criticisms of branding as it relates to education miss the point of branding. A focus on, and being beholden to, rankings and phony or inappropriate rankings drive a singular mindset. At the same time, higher education institutions and higher education systems cannot pretend they are not part of society. Indeed, higher education in the US has not been static. It began with early focus on developing moral character, preparing young men for “civic and religious leadership.”¹¹⁴ As the economy changed and the needs of society changed with it, higher education systems added a service-to-society-oriented model as exemplified by the land grant colleges and polytechnic schools to produce “builders of all kinds.”¹¹⁵ Basic research has been part of higher education institutions since the early days of the American republic, but did not gain a strong place until the mid-1800s.¹¹⁶ And it was only after World War II that the model of government-funded research and a focus on research faculty became the norm.¹¹⁷ At the same time, yet another goal was added, “moving from an elite to a mass system of higher education.”¹¹⁸ Thus, higher education institutions and higher education systems have a long and responsive history of working with society to add those elements that it needs addressed.

Put differently, higher education institutions and systems have co-created, and must continue to co-create, value with society, including responding to student views on what education is and should be.¹¹⁹ As the former dean of Harvard College, Harry Lewis, points out, the core question is: “Will the university be run for the benefit of students, faculty, or society?”¹²⁰ The answer to the question should be “Yes,” especially for public higher education institutions and systems. They will have to show how they benefit all three stakeholder groups and perhaps improve or add layers to their offerings as society changes. Establishing a brand that, (a) shows the nature of the offering at each type of higher education institution, and that, (b) also preserves the ability for innovation – that is, academic freedom – within each type and by individual members of an institution, can begin the process of allowing higher education institutions and systems to reclaim their role in not only offering but explaining what education is and should be. To be clear, escaping the current ranking obsession will not be easy, will take time, and any institution trying to do so will have to show why its approach is better than the approaches that follow the ranking herd. It is likely that schools will have to follow a dual approach where attention to ranking metrics is combined with innovative programs that deliver worthwhile results in ways beyond ranking metrics.

The key will be to take new actions and to show how and why they work. As a recent study on markets and education asked, “Why shouldn’t universities routinely consider alternative and radical structures and roles for themselves? There might be other exciting models that emerge if we think and talk and act.”¹²¹ Rather than the passive “why shouldn’t we consider alternative paths” perspective, I say higher education institutions and higher education systems must consider and pursue new paths that explore and shape education’s future structures and roles. And branding, properly understood and used, is the way to do so.