BY HARVEY J. GRAFF 

In my recent Washington Monthly essay, “The Banality of University Slogans,” I observed that “whether it’s ad campaigns for football season, gauzy reports from the provost, or bombast from the school’s president, higher education abounds with empty rhetoric.” In “Per Aspera ad Astra” Academe Blog contributing editor Hank Reichman shared and commented on some excerpts from that essay, which called attention to the simultaneous contradictions and reinforcement of cheerleading, sometimes laughable and inappropriate slogans, and the much greater and rarely noted practice of “leadership by sloganeering.” I had previously addressed this issue in a 2015 Wall Street Journal op-ed, “An Education in Sloganeering,” which began, “Universities have always engaged in relentless self-promotion. But the relationship between rhetoric and reality has become ever more tenuous, and the line separating honest aspiration from fabrication fainter.”

Reichman joins other respondents to “The Banality of University Slogans” in commenting on the uninformed mistranslations of traditional Latin mottoes (with the example of his home institution California State University, East Bay) to mid- to late twentieth-century self-promoting slogans. Some of them come from paid advertising agencies, some from in-house “communications and development” offices, neither of them known for their foreign or even English language skills. He writes, “As Graff’s piece shows, this sort of silliness is not without significance, often disguising incompetence and failure, or worse, bad intentions.”

The fundamental issue is how we embrace at once the silliness of slogans—as evidenced so well by the marketing firm SloganSlingers with their top sixty slogans that range from animal mascots wild and tame to mangled classical phrases—and the all-too-common administrative practice of repeatedly, inadequately, and dishonestly substituting slogans for policies and programs. They are a sign of the failure of senior administrators to manage universities.

I first encountered the limits of sloganeering in my first two tenure-track and tenured professorships at two new branch campuses of the University of Texas System from 1975 to 2004. Both institutions were founded on claims that they were unique in their interdisciplinary focus both to Texas and to American higher education. Without the aid of agencies like SloganSlingers, their rhetoric paled in comparison to those we see now. And Latin could not be accommodated into the Texas vernacular. The assertions of both branch campuses were marketing ploys for the state higher educational authorities, state legislature, and local politicians and business leaders. They succeeded in the founding of new universities but failed almost completely in achieving their much-touted agendas. Their slogans proved useful for hiring talented young faculty at the lowest points in the tight job market, but they proved meaningless to local undergraduates. Deans, vice presidents, provosts, and presidents were seldom qualified or suited to their brand-new “interdisciplinary” responsibilities.

In terms of institutional operations and program development, the impacts were damaging. “Interdisciplinarity” translated directly into budget cutting through the absence of individual disciplinary departments with administrators, staff, and space. It also led to disappointed, disaffected faculty who clashed with each other for limited resources at the college, school, and division level. It confused both graduate and undergraduate students. Finally, it resulted in unbalanced and unsuitable hiring and even worse reappointment, promotion, and tenure decisions. I discussed these problems in my 2008 book The Dallas Myth: The Making and Unmaking of an American City.

At Ohio State, my third university, sloganeering worsened. For its then president Gordon Gee, the subject of my Wall Street Journal essay, and his successors, sloganeering substitutes for, and likely obstructs, learning about the campuses they command. It substitutes inadequately for programs, policies, budgets, or timetables. Gee’s legacy included the unattempted transition to “one university/one Ohio State,” and from “do something big” to “do something great.” The Columbus Dispatch reported on marketing agency plans in 2001, “Though the goal is to change OSU’s image from that of just a football school, the new slogan will be introduced to the public during a football game.” Reporter Alice Thomas noted that “‘Do something big’ did not go over. ’Great’ could not overcome ‘big’” (“Ohio State Changing Marketing Slogan,” Columbus Dispatch, September 28, 2001).

Gee’s successors followed with less prowess. Michael Drake’s slogans during his presidency from 2014 to 2020 promised less. The “One University Enrollment Plan” damaged the balance of enrollments, budgets, and course offerings across the huge campus. Slogans about advancing minority student enrollment did not increase the declining percentages of Black students. His “Vision 2020: Access, affordability and excellence” never resolved its internal contradictions of combining these three disparate aspirations.

Kristina Johnson took office in September 2020. She had never presided over an individual campus and quickly followed her predecessors in leading by slogans and lack of university knowledge. Grandly endorsing “innovation” and “interdisciplinary”—but only in science and medicine—Johnson trumpets OSU grandeur. A Dispatch reporter writes, “Johnson said every challenge has showed her that Ohio State can achieve one very big goal: ‘becoming the best land-grant university in the nation.’” Nothing is defined; there are no programs, timetables, or metrics. Only slogans without substance.

Leading by slogans is the contradiction of true leadership.

Harvey J. Graff is professor emeritus of English and history and Ohio Eminent Scholar at the Ohio State University. He is the author of many books on social history, including Searching for Literacy: The Social and Intellectual Origins of Literacy Studies (in press) and the forthcoming The Continuing Education of a Historian. He specializes in the history and present condition of literacy and education with a focus on higher education, children and families, cities, interdisciplinarity, and contemporary politics, culture, and society.