August
Political Values Impact Brand Strength
If you work at a college or university on the socially liberal end of the student spectrum, you may have heard the word “community” used frequently with a kind of idealistic fervency. We encourage community at Warren Wilson. We espouse a system of shared governance. We craft “Community Meetings” to help students stay abreast of issues facing the college as a whole and to gauge their opinions and reactions. We encourage students to challenge their assumptions about the workers who provide services in their lives because, at Wilson, those workers are fellow students. We’re all about community–it’s part of our brand, but it hurts us as much as helps. Fostering a sense of liberal community on campus encourages students to openly question both the leaders and values of the community; it stifles “school spirit” and provides easy openings for outside attacks and criticisms.
The latest set of liberal college freshman have spent the most formative period of their lives growing up with George W. Bush, the War on Terror, and the methods of activism and criticism used by media icons like Jon Stewart. They have seen patriotism shift from a high point to a low. They’ve listened to NPR, voted in elections, and talked amongst their peers. In short, they’ve spent their lives as young adults building a “community spirit” that uses cynical, self-depreciating humor, public criticism, and often truly impassioned vitriol in its self-criticism and defense of social liberal values. They’ve been taught not only to question authority, but also to see authority figures as corrupt and ignorant by default. Having been exposed to one of the twentieth centuries more blatant attempts to build nationalistic patriotism for political gain with the war in Iraq, these students are very leery of nationalism and patriotism.
In short, liberal “community spirit” for the current college set–while it encourages individual moral responsibility, environmental consciousness, a sense of global community, and a desire for equality across race and economic barriers–assumes that public leaders and politicians of all types are going to be self-interested and deceitful. You could almost go as far as to say that liberal community spirit does not want a leader that accurately represents its values and tears down its own political candidates because it only knows how to define itself within a common-against-authority struggle (witness Al Gore). Because the state (or other official representation of the community) is in the hands of these leaders, the images created to represent it are to be questioned or attacked. Community spirit, by virtue of its championship of the individual and of diversity, does not create images to represent itself. One cannot be patriotic to the community, one can only play a responsible role within the community–this is the only appropriate way to participate, as any attempt to hold one small community up in favor of another would be to denigrate the global community.
By contrast, conservative social values seek to find leaders that are iconic and that can represent the community interests. Self-critical only in the appropriate places, conservatives are more accepting of the idea that closed-room discussion is appropriate rather than insisting on transparency. While this may exclude the ‘have-nots’ from political intercourse, it also does not expose the self-critical process to competitors eager for a chink in the brand armor. These are the people who were more likely to feel a greater sense of patriotism and national identity during Bush’s two terms in office. Schools with socially conservative values overall are likely to have a very different, much more exclusive sense of community spirit. This is what we know of as “school spirit.” “School spirit” is defined (in one way) when one school is put over and against another through a sense of competitiveness. For example, organized sports in America–especially football–are very like war in the way that they work to create a proud, insular community with strong self-identity.
In short, conservative “school spirit”–while its adherents are more likely to subscribe easily to “us and them” attitudes that, in a worst-case scenario, fuel bigotry and rigid class-structures–will usually work to support strong leaders and a strong school brand image. A patriotic citizen accustomed to defending the actions of their country and assuming that their leaders are acting in their best interest is likely to carry-over that attitude into their private life as well. School spirit, thus engendered, seeks always to put the best face forward and actively participates in creating images and phrases to support the brand. The biggest danger here is off-brand support, such as taking pride in a fraternity’s partying prowess and associating it with the overall college image.
The Princeton Review and other, similar ranking processes are designed in such a way that school’s with a healthy and on-brand sense of school spirit will always dominate those blessed and cursed with strong community spirit. When students fill out the surveys on the websites and on paper for these ranking publications, their minds are in very different places. The socially conservative, patriotic student with a strong sense of school spirit is likely going to defend his school out of a sense for what is best for it, possibly even to the extent of submitting their comments with a rosy shade in the survey. By contrast, a student with a strong and critical sense of community spirit will, at best, be frankly honest and, at worst, will inflate problems in an attempt to effect change in their community by using the ranking guide to excerpt outside pressure. One set of students is concerned about “the power of pride,” prestige, and what others think of their school. The other set of students is concerned about “question authority,” their immediate living environment, about being a responsible community member, and often does not associate his/herself at all with the school brand image. One student would say “I am College X,” the other would say “they are College X” where ‘they’ usually refers to the administration or authority figures present on campus.
I have been plagued lately by the problem of trying to engage students in the Warren Wilson brand and challenge them to take ownership of it in some ways–to encourage them to say, “I am Warren Wilson College.” Our recent, unfortunate experience with the Princeton Review and the local media makes me wonder how we can keep our strong, niche identity as a liberal campus while still fostering a positive school spirit and strong brand image. No college community is ever going to be all things to all left-fringe liberal students, so how do we encourage them to take pride in what we have achieved, and to represent it to the public with pride, when pride itself is a cardinal liberal sin? By crafting this niche, have we set ourselves up for failure?
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