In an article about the university branding campaign (“Students align against new BU logo,” Jan. 29, p. 1), The Daily Free Press reported that College of Fine Arts spokeswoman Ellen Carr said the new logo guidelines are not mandatory. This is contradicted by a Jan. 24 press release on the Office of Marketing and Communications website, which reads “While these logo rules are mandatory, we’re asking community members to apply them prospectively.” However, the new logo is the least worrying aspect of this branding initiative.

In the instructions for “Editorial Voice and Tone,” one learns that here at BU, the sound we hear is “the raucous buzz of the spinning world.” On the same page, we are told that BU “is where fashion meets higher education and it all looks modern and cool and decidedly with-it.” With this, the perceived value of your degree erodes. Would you rather the BU seal on your diploma testify the academic rigor of your education, or as endorsement of your fad-conscious fashion savvy?

Also on the Branding Group website, we learn that one must be “unapologetic” in order to be “progressive.” Buzzwords typically signal the lack of actual meaning. Nowhere in these guidelines is there any discussion of the intellectual humility needed to receive an education. Nowhere is the value of hard work and academic rigor mentioned. Not one member of the Branding Group is on the university faculty or a member of the student body.

None of the students I work with strike me as being susceptible to this superficial pap. I have no doubt that they are most “bold and unapologetic” when spending time among the books on a seldom-visited shelf in Mugar; when getting a favorite professor to explain the depth of meaning in a line of verse; and when burning the midnight oil mastering a tough problem set. Of the many students who have expressed to me their dissatisfaction about these guidelines, one made her objection with succinct force:

Is BU a place where I can develop into a conscientious, autonomous adult or where I will be trained to become a mindless drone running in the consumerist rat race? If anything, BU ought to teach us that we should be wary of what’s “fashionable” and “decidedly with-it.” I don’t want to be hip. I want to learn.

I am concerned therefore not about current students on campus, but about the impression prospective students will gather from this campaign. How much work should we do — and how much money should we spend — in order to attract students who mistakenly believe that the coefficient of hip is the appropriate measure of a university?

Zachary Bos

Administrative Coordinator

CAS Core Curriculum