This week I went to several lectures and dinners in which all sorts of professors were expostulating the need to insert a greater sense of marketing in to how they teach the humanities. This sounds great, if by marketing we mean something like persuasion. Professors should certainly strive to convince students that a subject matters, they should show its importance in the world, and not just pedantically assume that just because the topic has been considered important in the past that it will continue to be so. We should be light on our feet, witty, approachable, smiling.
The problem with marketing as a university principle arises when the very disciplines are structured according to a rewards system that is meant to mimic a market. Universities are not actually organized like an economy. They bend over backwards to reorganize themselves as if they were but the inherent hierarchy means that they do not operate through their own mechanisms. There is always the hand of an administrator acting as if he or she were the invisible one allocating resources. The free market model is more often a jargon to justify policies that administrators perceive as marketable, but not because the market has chosen them through its own operations.
Universities use business economics as a model, but they are not actually operating as an open system of competition. The very structures that are meant to measure the economic value of a discipline end up restricting their competitiveness. For example, any university that rewards departments for having high enrollment needs to enact rules on how to count students. Even in fields where interdisciplinarity is considered important, the mechanisms that measure the market flow of enrollments end up restricting it.
Students, for example, are routinely told they must take courses within their department because of enrollment counts. This of course undermines the free flow of the market. The reason students are treated like precious commodities within a mercantilist economy is that all department advisors know they are being measured by an administration that wants to see high numbers. Thus they prevent students from taking courses outside their department. The administrative mechanism that is intend to measure market place movements ends up hampering that very ebb and flow. Only by not counting enrollments and by lifting restrictions on where students take courses will a college simulate a market.
The real trouble is that universities are not interested in just selling classes. They also want to produce smart graduates, innovative research, famous professors. Marketing does not produce the most intelligent argument. The tendency is to develop a product so that it appeals broadly by deploying the most common denominator within the target audience. Very complex thought may go into designing the product, there is indeed often great art in simplicity, but most things up for sale are not so well thought through. They fit a familiar pattern; they confirm existing tastes and prejudices. History departments, if they were driven by market forces, would teach nothing but the American Civil War, World War Two, maybe some Roman history if it did not involve too much Latin.
Marketed products are not supposed to disturb the expectations of the audience. Television appeals to the assumptions that the audience already possesses; rarely does it seek to alter them, more often than not it confirms them by giving them a product that is consciously crafted to excite the feelings that have already been shown to exist. Innovation is important to marketing design only in order to distinguish a product from its competitors, but only to the extent that the new image promises a variation on an already familiar pattern.
If university courses were structured like sit-coms or reality shows then they would quickly stop developing new ideas. They would sell lots of seats perhaps, but they would not actually generate creative innovation. Instead they would reiterate the status quo, as opposed to changing it.
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