Flunking out the schools
Web watchdogs target university brands
BY David Tough
Illustration by Jerry Silverberg
Try doing a web query through your search engine of choice using the name of a university—any university. You will invariably be overwhelmed with thousands of hits, announcing new faculty being hired, new programs being launched, new state-of-the-art buildings, or successes in fund-raising drives. They will inevitably be bursting with pride.
If you sift very carefully through the clutter, you may see some things that are a little different. One of them might be uwatch.ca, a national higher education web watchdog. Or you might find a union webpage, or a local version of uwatch like ourtrent.com at Trent. If you’re really lucky, you might even come across the page of some anonymous disgruntled employee, full of tales of how incompetent person X got assigned to administrative position Y and really screwed it up.
Websites about universities reflect the growing polarization on campuses between those who control the public image of the university and those who don’t. In the new image-culture of higher education, the web is their ultimate battleground.
Promotional material universities manufacture about themselves is a key part of how they work today. As corporations concerned primarily with solidifying revenues, universities increasingly harness their teaching, research, and even student culture to a corporate brand or public image. Producing and policing that public image has become the prime institutional imperative. And, like most things connected to universities, it’s something of a struggle.
There’s a real historical irony in this, because universities, until very recently, kept a very low profile. They were elite institutions, and played a central part in policing what counts as knowledge in a given society, but they performed their functions largely in the shadows. For their contribution, universities were granted significant independence from political powers, and jealously guarded the right to be apart.
In the last half-century, two revolutionary shifts occurred. After the Second World War, the assumption that universities should be for everyone, not just the elite, pushed older universities to expand and gave birth to new universities. Government funding for education soared, and with it demands for the universities to account for what they were doing and to be accessible and relevant to people who had historically been excluded—women, people of colour, working-class students. Cue the sit-ins and, ultimately, the culture wars of the 1990s.
Then, in the 1970s, the funding pool dried up and universities were left struggling to do all the things they had done when they were flush, but with less money. Cue faculty unionization, tuition hikes and more sit-ins. What money there was was given to students rather than to universities directly, or was allocated competitively for specific research projects. By the 1990s, governments were leaning hard on universities to turn to the private sector for money, and to make the curriculum relevant to the needs of industry. Cue research on the nutritional benefits of ketchup, perfume ads in washrooms and more sit-ins.
And, of course, cue institutional self-promotion. At the whim of individual students and private donors for a growing slice of the funding pie, the universities face immense pressure to present themselves as symbols of success and excellence. They become, in effect, the virtual image of the kind of university you might want to attend or give money to.
Of course, ruthlessly promoting a perfectly calibrated positive image necessitates an equally ruthless suppression of anything that might contradict it. Universities have a major stake in presenting news of their successes and failures—especially their failures—on their own terms, if not suppressing them entirely. If the web’s watchdogs beat them to it, the story is public property.
This is necessarily a messy process. The universities’ historic right to independence, reconfigured for the new century as the right to hide how they do business, has effectively shut out legitimate critics. So most of the web watchdogs are amateur, anonymous and ephemeral. The content is quite often libelous, and in some cases factually untrue.
But by challenging universities on what is increasingly their home turf, web watchdogs are performing an essential public service. By holding up the losing side in the delicate see-saw between independence and responsibility that universities themselves have abandoned, they are, however awkwardly, taking the public’s part in the new image politics of higher education.
