In its Sept. 13 Education Issue, The New York Times Magazine published a piece urging us to “fear” the corporate entities our colleges and universities have become. In a personal anecdote from his time as a student at Purdue University, author of the piece Fredrick deBoer reminisces about his favorite spot on campus: an overgrown garden that is now being demolished to make room for a new, shiny building.
Here at BU, students in the College of Communication are experiencing a similar struggle, as the COM Lawn is halved and demolished for the installation of the new Center for Integrated Life Sciences and Engineering.
However, while the corporate structure of our cherished university may tear down our grassy picnic spots, its primary responsibility is to provide students with a renowned institution that gives us an outstanding education and an employable post-graduate reputation — and at that, BU succeeds.
When we begin to take our college tours as juniors and seniors in high school, we are overwhelmed with brochures, emails and college gear. We spend our free weekends visiting campus after campus, dragging our younger siblings along on cross-country tours. And somehow, somewhere, we are drawn in. Here at BU, we are instantaneously showered with free T-shirts and scarlet pamphlets, while being invited to sit in mock-classes and sent on tours with hand-picked student representatives who are active in the some of the most popular student groups on campus. We saw students wearing sweatshirts and t-shirts with big white and red letters across the front. Boston University is a brand, and we bought into it.
But many critics fail to realize the fact that branding is an entirely necessary practice, not only for a private university like BU, but for any college, business or corporation in the market. Branding is what makes an organization seem well put together and successful. We can’t blame the administration at a university for branding their college experience to attract prospective applicants in the same way that we can’t blame Target for branding its new Fenway store to attract college students on move-in day.
That being said, it is important to remember that a private university is a business. We have to consider that BU President Robert Brown is essentially the acting CEO of BU. Spokesman Colin Riley and his PR team treat this institution like a corporation because that’s exactly what it is. And obviously, there are some aspects of this corporation that are questionable and unethical: President Brown’s $1.1 million salary, including free housing in Brookline, is unnecessary. Our adjunct professors are paid less than public school teachers while our administrators live on white pillowcases and bask in the sunshine.
And some, such as deBoer, would argue, “Indeed, this is the very lifeblood of corporatism: creating systems and procedures that sacrifice the needs of humans to the needs of institutions.” In some ways, this statement is true of BU, which has had issues with transparency in the past, such as, once again, the administration’s resistance in taking responsibility for sexual assault cases.
But while those issues are undoubtedly extremely important, we also have to take a step back and examine the amount of good this university’s administration does for us as a student body. While we have a large amount of administrators compared to the amount of professors at BU, administration does a seamless job of choosing these professors.
All of the branding and corporate thinking has not infringed upon our experiences nor our relationships with our professors. And our professors don’t simply let the administration get in the way of their teaching — they very much march to the beat of their own drums. In actuality, what our school does as a corporation trickles down and gives us opportunities, but doesn’t negatively affect the learning experience.
While some may argue that BU is grossly overpriced, we have to remember that the real reason for the expense doesn’t necessarily lie within the fact that we have an overabundance of administrators or that this overabundance is paid too much — it lies in the fact that students are quite literally paying for their future reputation as a graduate with a BU degree.
And all of this is fine and good, as long as we as students at BU are given a creative space in which to speak out against corporatism. Freedom of speech becomes imperative — we must be given a voice in our community, and BU’s administration has continually provided us with that. While this fact may be hard to swallow, we aren’t paying our tuition bills so that our administration can give us only pretty gardens to sit in. Our tuition pays for our academic opportunities, and those have far outweighed any institutionalized, corporate threats to students here at BU.
