File photo/The Daily Cougar
There is a growing illness sweeping across campus. It started with the lightest of symptoms: an occasional logo plastered across a flier or sign and a spread of Red Bull cars parked outside the campus buildings, handing out free samples to passing students. Now it seems to be growing to larger proportions.
Two weeks ago, there was a large truck set up between the M.D. Anderson Memorial Library and Philip Guthrie Hoffman Hall accompanied with a professional disc jockey and several go-go dancers on pedestals, trying desperately to sell students Coke Zero.
This circus act of advertising was more gaudy and hilarious than alluring — the dancers stepping awkwardly in their four-by-four squares, kicking their legs in a slow and unenthusiastic manner and trying to pass these movements off as dance. It appeared as if not even the dancers and DJ wanted to be there.
This erroneous display of campus advertising was a demonstrative symptom of a worrying disease: the privatization of education.
On some level, it’s understandable. These new dining halls, parking lots, residence halls and football stadiums are not entirely paid for by donations and government funding.
Although there are many donations coming to the University from affluent families and charitable foundations, evidence shows corporations are still paying to send people to the University for the explicit reason of peddling their goods to students. It’s the perfect marketing place — a concentrated population of their target audience: 18- to 24-year-olds with some degree of purchasing power, the ideal demographic for consuming energy drinks and sodas.
Imagine the advertisers who would show up if they could pay to get time in elementary and middle schools. There could exist a world where Pepsi and Toys R’ Us could hold demonstrations in kindergarten classes.
That is not this world, however, because we still live in a society that holds education to a degree of sanctity — a degree that is apparently lessening with every passing day. At more universities than just UH, our campus grounds are becoming hot beds for marketing and advertising.
Our education is becoming less about bettering ourselves in hopes of a better future and more about making the youth of America better consumers. You would imagine we wouldn’t need any help, but every day, receiving a higher education is just making you a larger target for big corporations to sell you something.
A university’s main purpose should be educating its students and not shamelessly peddling of soft drinks. It’s distracting and quite frankly annoying to walk around campus only to run into a mob of students swarming someone with free sample bags.
It’s almost understandable that UH would so openly take whatever corporate sponsorship is thrown at them. It becomes a type of financial pragmatism of delivering the best classrooms and the best materials it can get. Yet that does not reduce the shamefulness of selling the campus and students.
Patrick Larose is a creative writing senior and may be reached at [email protected].
Corp sponsors flood campus http://t.co/N9NeO8Ad
Who else has noticed all of the corporate advertisements on campus? http://t.co/idTh6Zel
What’s wrong with companies looking to advertise to their target consumer? The reason they’re targeting us — college students- is because we WANT to consume their goods. There’s nothing wrong with that; we want something and they want to supply us with it. The fact that it’s on a college campus shouldn’t worry anyone; if students didn’t want these things in the first place these corporations wouldn’t bother competing for out attention. This isn’t the mark of schools becoming privatized — which isn’t a bad thing, afterall, there are plenty of good, private universities out there- or the crux of why universities are becoming more concerned with profit than quality. If you’re worried about that — profit over quality- then perhaps you should take the fight to those institutions that are more greatly turning universities into intellectual voids where young Americans come to earn debt instead of degrees, namely: government. Government insured loans, and mandates requiring the ease of which young people find their way into college, are what is ruining high education in this country. Schools are letting kids walk right in, rack up tremendous amounts of debt, and maybe…MAYBE…walk out with a degree that secures them a spot waiting tables at the local Applebees. The culprit is non-other than government, which insures these loans so universities can charge whatever they want; doesn’t matter to them- they’re getting paid one way or the other. These are kids who, thanks to mandated lowering of standards, have no business being in college and who would fair much better in the long-term by entering the workforce early without $100,000 worth of debt.
Continued: Let’s stop blaming “big, bad, evil” corporations for everything going wrong in this country. Yes, there are plenty of corporations in the market today too big for their (or our) own good; but, most of them would not be where they are if government wasn’t already in the position to hand them special favors and privileges. The road being traveled by most public universities today of lesser quality was paved by government; these corporations on campus looking to “target” potential customers are only there to do what these universities and government has failed to: give us something we want for a price we can afford.
Lots of grammatical errors in both posts. Sorry. On my phone. ^_^
I don’t usually care. The only thing I do care is that if they advertize, they show some responsibility for any waste they produce. Tons of bottles/cans from various beverage companies litter campus both outside and inside buildings, and good luck getting people to recycle.
I think partially the reason why UH doesn’t even have purified water filling stations (to encourage reusable bottles like Rice does) is because Coca-Cola sells Dasani water. Coca-Cola loses potential money if UH would do that. So instead, we just let them encourage students to toss their Dasani bottles everywhere but a recycling bin.
Just as bad are student organizations or “tutors” or whatever distributing out marketing materials in the form of cards/flyers/etc. and student tossing them away, where I’ve seen auditoriums littered with that junk. Just plain wasteful.
Thank you for writing this. It could have been a little less forgiving but action has to start somewhere. What is most shameful (as I am reading the comments) is the fact that the students themselves have been sucked into the system so easily and that a University (where you should be learning to think for yourself) they are instead taking on the corporate mantra. This school has big issues with corporations, as most seem to, and it starts with that partnership with the HigherOne. I conclude by posting a quote from one of our great American filmmakers:
Our universities have long been the subject of scathing novels on the petty politics of internal department politics, bloated egos, etc., and recently, as in the case of Penn State, of pure unmitigated corruption. Universities are now very big business, with spin-off research institutions, close ties to corporate interests, sports incomes, and of course their original mission of “education” has been duly corrupted in process. They largely function as farm systems for corporate interests. Along the way they charge exorbitantly for their “services” and leave their students, clearly as part of a larger social project, with a massive debt in loans, which puts those clients on a treadmill of corporate servitude. Student loans are particularly odious as most are structured precisely to put the borrower in an untenable position, under the lash. It is clearly a purposeful system as the universities are transparently part of the larger social con in which it is insisted that without a vaunted degree one will get nowhere in life. It has all degenerated into a cruel farce in which corruption is the moral, ethical, economic, social and political norm. These universities play a significant role on constructing this fraud. – Jon Jost