Spartans will ... what?

Updated to correct an error

In America, "Back to school" is not so much a call to education as a ramped-up retail rush, like Christmas or Halloween. Brand names jostle for student dollars in the September scramble for clothes, bikes, computers, and so on.

Dont expect a tree-shaded respite on campus. In the 21st century, the biggest brand of all is the university itself.

MSU sociology Professor Lawrence Busch wonders about the expansive white banners put up on campus buildings over the past two years.

"As you wander along the campus here, you will see these huge signs that say, SPARTANS WILL," Busch told listeners at a March conference at MSU. "Im not sure what Spartans will do."

Busch will take part in a series of talks centering on the "corporatization" of higher education at an MSU Faculty Forum at 10:30 a.m. Sept. 11 in Room 62 of the Kellogg Center.

Public universities, including MSU, have changed a lot over the past 20 to 40 years, owing largely to a chain of market-driven shocks. As state support for secondary education plunged, tuition skyrocketed and many graduates are handed an anvil of debt on graduation day.

The high cost of a diploma ramps up the pressure on universities to deliver return on investment, in the form of high-paying jobs, to its graduates. Each year, U.S. News and World Report ranks colleges and majors on the basis of return on investment.

Some academics fear that the shift to a branded, market-driven model of higher education is eclipsing the old ideal of college as a time in life to learn things for their own sake, become a public-minded citizen rather as a market-defined "leader," and, yes, to find ones self.

Frank Fear, associate dean at MSUs College of Agriculture and Natural Resources, will frankly share these fears, and others, at another Faculty Forum at 10:30 a.m. Oct. 9, also in Room 62 of the Kellogg Center.

Fear never heard the word "brand" in connection with higher education when he went into academia in the 1970s. "Now its ubiquitous," he said.

That "Spartans Will" tagline doesnt sit well with him.

"Just think about it for a second," Fear said. "It gives the impression that Spartans will in ways that others wont."

Like most ad copy, Fear said, the tagline is unprovable and meaningless. It also begs the question of what, exactly, Spartans will do.

A brand, as touted on an MSU Web page about the "Spartans Will" campaign, is an "intentional process of shaping perception."

Several bullet points at the bottom of the page list what a strong brand can do. The first is to "communicate clearly what the organization stands for." And what clearer stand can there be than "Spartans will do some unspecified thing?"

The last bullet point is breathtakingly brazen: a strong brand, it reads, "makes it possible to charge a higher price for the same product."

East Lansing author Alice Dreger got a sinking feeling in the 1990s, when she was a professor at MSU and the school rolled out a new, lean-lettered, corporate-looking logo, etched in brick and limestone at every campus entrance.

"It was literally the same font as the mortgage brokering company I had worked for before graduate school," Dreger said. "It gave me the creeps. I remember saying to people, This is gross. I left corporate life to become an academic. I thought I had left that life of greed."

The brokerage-firm font might seem a small thing, but looking back, Dreger sees it as a harbinger of things to come.

"A lot of us thought, oh well, thats just the MBAs being MBAs and we really werent paying attention," she said. "Now were paying attention."

Dreger left MSU in 2005 to concentrate on her work as an author and advocate. Her book on the dangerous shoals of truth-telling in academia, "Galileos Middle Finger," made it to several Best of lists. Dreger skirts those shoals daily as a researcher and writer on sexuality and bioethics. She is perhaps best known in this area for live tweeting, with acid commentary, her sons abstinence-based sex education class at East Lansing High School.

Last month, Dreger resigned her most recent position, at Northwestern University, when her dean censored her work. She thinks the censorship arose from the administrations fear that some of her writings on sexuality would tarnish the brand of the medical schools parent hospital.

"I will not miss being asked to teach medical ethics in a room named after the drug company that paid for it," Dreger tweeted after she resigned.

Dreger used to love MSU hockey games. "Munn [Ice Arena] used to feel like a pretty chill hometown hockey arena," she said. "Today, you are bombarded from video screens with constant flashing of the MSU logo and pushing of the brand. The last time we went, it was so glitzy and corporate, we talked about just not going again. It didn’t feel like a college game at all."

If branding is smoke, theres a vivid snapshot of the bonfire underneath in Harpers Magazines September cover story by William Deresiewicz, "The Neoliberal Arts: How College Sold its Soul to the Market."

Neoliberalism is the current buzzword for a pervasive web of post-Reagan shifts in American economics, politics and culture.

MSUs Busch calls neoliberalism a "thought collective" that has led to "the transformation of all institutions into markets."

"Now higher education has become a neoliberal, not a social, institution," Busch said.

Deresiewicz put it this way: "The purpose of education in a neoliberal age is to produce producers."

Its well known that the rise of the brand has come with a decline in support for arts, social sciences and humanities, but Dereseiwicz adds that even the percentage of students majoring in the physical sciences has declined by 60 percent since the 1960s, with "vocational fields" such as business and communications taking their place.

"Weve seen education being redefined as mainly salary maximization," Busch said.

The money chase begins well before graduation. Students, Busch said, lead "frenetic lives," holding down one or two jobs, to keep down debt.

Another bellwether of hyper-market-driven education, Busch said, is the erosion of foreign language requirements.

"At the very moment when were moving toward more interchange with the rest of the world than at any time in previous history, we have dropped foreign language requirements," Busch said. "Our students are much more likely to misunderstand those who come from another culture, and less likely to understand how languages create the world in which we live."

Its a bad time for universities to hunker into market-driven stalls and pump out producers and consumers, according to Dereseiewicz.

"The biggest challenges we face — climate change, resource depletion, the disappearance of work in the face of automation — will require nothing less than fundamental change, a new organization of society," he writes. "If there was ever a time that we needed young people to imagine a different world, that time is now."

At the same time, many academics, including Busch, see a growing pressure for national standardized testing for university students. Busch predicted that "doing so would dramatically reduce the creativity of the university curriculum, as it has done for elementary and secondary education."

Meanwhile, many professors are spending most of their time hustling for shrinking grant money, chasing after golden-goose patents and partnering with private-sector supporters whose interests may not square with the publics.

"Take the issue of reducing poverty versus building a more comfortable airline seat for Boeing," Fear said. "You know theres going to be money for the latter because of corporate self-interest." It takes public support, Fear said, to grapple with public issues like poverty reduction, income inequality or the environmental trauma of the Great Lakes.

On campus, Fear wants to see more attention paid to other matters that dont promise a quick return on investment: addressing campus sexual assaults, enhancing faculty and student body diversity, promoting research that furthers the public good, lifting barriers to lower-income students.

"Those things that are fundamental to universities as social institutions, not just as businesses," he said.

Whispering over the roar of the market machine, Fear offered some advice for new or returning students.

"Use this experience to determine what you believe your place in the world to be, and leave this place a much better person, a much better citizen than when you came in," he said.

Fear seemed taken aback by the simplicity of his own formula.

"The irony is that a lot of what I spend my time on in administration has nothing to do with that," he said.

"What people spend most of their time on in administration is tending to the advancement of the institution. The clarion call today is, protect and advance the brand."

This story was corrected to say that Alice Dreger was on the faculty art MSU in the 1990s, not 1980s, as earlier reported. It was also corrected to say that Lawrence Busch will speak on Sept. 11, not Sept. 18.