TCD rebrands itself, but at what cost?
Julien
Mercille
Trinity
College Dublin, Ireland’s oldest university, is rebranding itself. Under its
identity initiative, TCD’s name will be changed to ‘Trinity College, the
University of Dublin’ and its logo will be modified to give it a more modern
look. It’s debatable whether the proposed changes are necessary. The price tag
of €100,000, however, could have been allocated to teaching and research
instead.
TCD
is over 400 years old, but recently, it was suddenly felt that its current name
allegedly causes ‘fragmentation and confusion’. We are told that when academics
travel abroad, especially to the US and Asia, they feel that the word ‘college’
leads foreigners to believe that TCD might not be a university. Also, overseas
students might be confused when they search for a university in Ireland that they
could attend. But those claims are questionable, to say the least. There are
many other institutions whose name does not contain the word ‘university’, but that
are perfectly recognisable worldwide, such as MIT (Massachusetts Institute of
Technology), King’s College London, and Caltech, to name a few. The reason why
people know about them is not because they are leaders in branding themselves,
but because they excel in what they are supposed to be doing: research and
teaching.
Another
problem is that with the new initiative, TCD will seemingly have two names, keeping
the current one for academic publishing while the new one will be used for
everything else. But it’s unclear how this will improve name recognition
overseas. Foreign students and academics browsing the web to obtain information
on the university are likely to be confused and wonder if the TCD they saw in a
journal publication is the same institution as the TCUD (or is it TCTUD?) they
will see online.
Moreover,
the university will change its logo and colours, reportedly to avoid a clash
with the brands of Ryanair and Ikea. But since when are Ryanair and Ikea
competing for students with TCD? It’s difficult to figure out how a Chinese
student would confuse Ryanair with TCD and get to the airport instead of the
university for the year’s first class.
Further,
there will only be two colours—blue and white—on the university logo, instead
of the current five colours. This, according to the professionals in charge of
the redesign, is because fewer colours is more ‘contemporary and vibrant’ than
more colours. The consultants also observed that blue and gold are associated
with ‘value or convenience’ and that blue and yellow ‘lacks a sense of quality
and sophistication’, while a blue background is ‘modern and crisp’. One problem
here is that this makes no sense at all. Are those claims based on advanced
training in colour analytics? Or a PhD in Art History? Or just chats in a pub?
This
is not to say that branding a university is not important, or that marketing
campaigns to attract foreign students and talented staff from overseas should
be neglected, especially in a constrained budgetary environment as currently
faced by the Irish education sector. A more international student population
and staff make a learning institution more diverse and can foster innovation, new
ideas, and more.
But
the difficulty with the proposed changes is their cost. The bill to rebrand the
university has been reported to be about €100,000. The firm Behaviour and
Attitudes was paid €22,150 to conduct market research and Huguenot, a company
which provides identity and design services, will charge €80,000 for its
expertise, presumably in colour analysis and related matters.
The
rise of questionable spending seems to be a generalised problem. TCD’s
expenditures on consultants have more than doubled since Patrick Prendergast
became provost. The Sunday Times reported
that TCD spent €3.7 million on consultants in 2013, up 144% from 2012, when
€1.5 million was spent. In 2010 and 2011, TCD spent just under €800,000
annually. It is difficult to reconcile those numbers with TCD’s Strategic Plan,
which outlines ‘actions that involve rationalization and/or increased
efficiencies’ and that states that the university will ensure that its ‘funds
are spent on improving the quality of our academic activities’. Wasn’t this
supposed to apply to the branding exercise as well?
At
a global level, universities have suffered for quite a few years now from
bloated administrations. Benjamin Ginsberg has called the phenomenon ‘the rise
of the all-administrative university’ in his recent book entitled ‘The Fall of
the Faculty’, which documents how academic staff have gradually seen their
autonomy eroded by managers and administrators whose numbers and power have
risen dramatically. For example, in the US, between 1975 and 2005, the number
of academics increased by 51% but the number of administrative staff rose by
181%. Irish universities’ core staff is composed of 45% of academics and 55% of
non-academics.
The
result is large and inefficient academic bureaucracies that absorb scarce
resources that could be directed to teaching and research, the core mission of
universities. True, such bureaucracies may have been successful at some tasks,
such as raising funds from former students and philanthropists, and at
attracting more international students. However, the positive impact is reduced
by the increasingly large amounts of funds absorbed by bureaucracy itself.
Further,
even the most simple tasks become more complicated due to the large number of
phone calls and emails and waiting periods needed to accomplish them. There’s a
joke circulating in some universities that it takes two or three days’ notice
to order a few sandwiches for a departmental event. The problem is that the
joke often materialises.
How
can that situation be improved? One way would be to include, in global
university rankings, criteria that provide incentives to reduce administrative
fat. If an institution spends too much on overhead and not enough on teaching
and research, it would lose points, and vice-versa. It’s not clear how this
would affect the current rankings because many suffer from the same ailment.
But those that innovate and become more efficient would surely rise rapidly
towards the top, and thus attract more students, better academics, and more
donations. It sounds like a winning strategy.
