Daily Lobo

View from the bottom
Education second to new image
By: Richard M. Berthold / Daily Lobo columnist

Having already spent almost $1 million in the past year, President Schmidly intends to spend another $4 million this year on improving the University's image. How perfectly American: Image triumphs over substance again. Rather than focusing resources on making UNM a better institution, the plan is to make it appear to be a better institution.

According to administrators, better marketing is the answer to UNM's "lackluster image" and declining enrollments. Thus the bane of advertising infects the University as it does every other aspect of our society. For all their cleverness, the one thing the Founding Fathers could not possibly foresee in assembling the Constitution was the incredible and corrupting power of marketing, which has turned our elections into little more than exercises in money and image.

"Telling our story will attract the best and brightest students, faculty and staff," proclaims Schmidly. Say what? Despite the low reputation and poor pay, the "best and brightest" will suddenly see UNM as the place to study or work? And I thought it was precisely the dull and the ignorant who believed advertising over facts.

"Past research" has shown that of the University, only the sports teams and Health Sciences Center are recognized by the public. It took research to come to that conclusion? In any case, are we to assume this is due to marketing, rather than simply because college athletics always has a high profile and the public uses the hospital? Athletics ad man Kurt Esser suggests that if people "are excited about the Lobo athletics, then maybe they'll also check out our business school or the law department.…" Sure. And the Allied coalition will fall apart, and the Reich will be saved.

Of course there's the inevitable counter-argument: Other schools do it and spend even more money than we do. This is the reason we have to pay our administrators and coaches so much. But other schools, including all those in our peer group, pay their faculty and staff much better than UNM does. I am no administrator, but would it not be easier to attract the best and brightest faculty and staff by offering them better compensation?

"But this ad money is only a fraction of UNM's budget," say our leaders. True, but it is still a lot of money, especially for those who do not make a six-figure salary or have the authority to dispense funds like these. A million here, a million there - it adds up to serious money. Congressional earmarks are only a fraction of the national budget, too. Is that a justification?

Further, assuming such marketing is desirable, it is easy to understand money being spent on TV time and magazine space, but adding staff to a marketing bureaucracy that already has as many full-time positions as one of the smaller academic departments? What exactly do all these people do, especially in light of the many goofs that have come out of the University's public relations establishment? Actually, to be honest, I suppose this is trivial compared to the question of exactly what all those much more highly paid vice presidents do.

Note that part of the plan is to coordinate all marketing, since allowing departments and colleges to continue on their own "dilutes the University's brand." Of course this Gleichschaltung would also mean the central administration controls all the money and makes all the decisions and can hire those expensive Washington consultants who are much smarter and more creative than anyone in New Mexico. Older faculty will remember how the University once banned individual lobbying efforts in Santa Fe in favor of highly paid professional University lobbyists. These guys were so good that the University later encouraged individual faculty to show up in the Roundhouse.

Advertising out of state what an excellent financial deal UNM is makes sense, but inasmuch as there is little else to crow about, how effectively can the image be spun? And this basic message - decent undergraduate education at an affordable price - would hardly require hiring armies of consultants and local staff.

In the last several years, the department of history has lost three excellent professors, one of them a subsequent MacArthur Award winner, to other schools. As far as I know, they left not because the other institutions had great advertising but because they paid much more and set up fewer bureaucratic obstacles.


Richard M. Berthold is a retired professor of classical history at UNM. He is the author of Rhodes in the Hellenistic Age.