Even for ‘Mad Men’ Obsessives, Higher-Ed Marketing Inspires Unease

Joe Buglewicz for The Chronicle

The auditorium’s lights dim low, and an audience of professors trains its eyes on a half-naked woman wearing little more than a chinchilla coat. She’s being ordered around by Don Draper, the philandering boozehound advertising agent at the heart of Mad Men, a critically acclaimed television series that is the subject of an academic conference here.

“When I tell you,” Don whispers seductively, “you’re going to put your leg up on that chair, let the coat slide down and show me how smooth your skin is.”

The scene, which depicts a modeling audition for one of Don’s advertising creations, is the starting point of a keynote address from Miriam B. (Mimi) White, a professor in Northwestern University’s School of Communication. For the ensuing hour, Ms. White reads mostly verbatim from a paper titled “Mad Men and Women: Quandries of a Feminist Critic.” When Ms. White casually namedrops The Feminine Mystique, a pivotal manifesto of the movement, she gets nods of recognition from her audience. She references Mad Men’s “patriarchal gambit” and puzzles over the show’s “scopic manipulations.”

“I take things and make them complicated,” she says later. “I am interested in those layers of complication. I have fun looking at things from 87 perspectives.”

Indeed, Ms. White’s job is the opposite of advertising, which takes complex ideas and boils them down to catchy slogans.

The Mad Men conference, hosted by Middle Tennessee State University in collaboration with the University of Salford, in England, drew about 60 academics, mostly from the fields of communications and media studies, late last month. The conference is a scene of ready-made irony and contradiction. These scholars of a hit show about advertising are themselves conflicted about the role of marketing in their own profession, dubious of corporate influences seeping ever further into the academic realm, and begrudgingly accepting of growing pressures on individual professors and their institutions to not just prove their own worth but sell it.

As costs rise and competition for students grows, each of the nation’s roughly 5,000 degree-granting colleges is trying to make the case that it offers something truly special. They seek to establish what Don Draper once described as “a sentimental bond with the product.” There is no clearer pathway to that sentimental bond than through professors, who as shapers and distributors of knowledge are at the very center of the higher-education “product.” In that context, faculty members are encouraged to brand themselves, too. Many aren’t very good at it, and they often bristle at the ask.

Johnny Jones, an assistant professor at the University of Louisville and a presenter at the conference, has had the importance of self-promotion so driven into his head that he recently consulted Why Johnny Can’t Brand: Rediscovering the Lost Art of the Big Idea, by Bill Schley and Carl Nichols Jr.

“The tenure thing has become so corporatized,” says Mr. Jones, who works in Louisville’s theater-arts department. “My mentor said, ‘They want celebrities.’ If you’re not getting your work outside these walls, it’s not helping the university.”

Listening and Learning

The Mad Men conference is that rarest of academic gatherings, where cosplay is encouraged.

Mad Men The Party begins after a long day of more typical conference sessions, where working papers were audience-tested, engendering debate about the series’ depictions of race, sexuality, and the meaning of an elevator shaft that Don stares down in Season 5.

The Middle Tennessee Foundation House, accessed by a winding road beset by horse pastures, has been done up to resemble the world of Mad Men, which follows its characters from the 1960s into the 1970s. A bartender, who claims there was no beer in the Mad Men world, serves up old-fashioneds. Guests nosh on Jell-O molds and cocktail weenies, as “The Twist” and “Tequila” blare from a back room.

As the evening progresses, Sherry L. Wien, an associate professor of communication at Monmouth University, settles into a leather couch and fans herself with a paper doily. She wears a fire-engine-red dress with plunging décolletage and a lace brassiere, miming her best Bettie Page.

With each passing year at Monmouth, Ms. Wien hears more and more about the university’s efforts to distinguish itself as a place for “transformative learning.” Parents and students want a reason, she says, to shell out what amounts to a "$40,000 car for each of the four years.” They want to be assured that there is a job at the end of all this education, she says, “and I don’t disagree.”

Some professors chafe at any suggestion that college should resemble work-force training, but Ms. Wien is comfortable taking some cues from industry. Her interest in teaching a course on listening skills, for example, is a response to complaints she has heard from employers about college graduates’ deficits in that area.

Mad Men has proved fodder for Ms. Wien’s burgeoning research interests. Earlier in the day, she showed off a dazzling stack of spreadsheets, which chart how Joan Holloway and Peggy Olson, two women who start the series as an office manager and secretary, respectively, listen to one another. Across 33 scenes in seven seasons, Joan exhibits 865 listening behaviors, such as making eye contact, to Peggy’s 969. From all this data, Ms. Wien surmises, we can conclude that Peggy is a “relational listener” most of the time, meaning that she empathizes with her colleague. Joan, on the other hand, listens this way only about one-third of the time.

With a popular television show as her entry point, Ms. Wien thinks she can sell students on learning how to pay better attention at work, perhaps modeling Peggy’s empathic ear.

“I don’t teach Mad Men,” Ms. Wien says. “I teach how to listen.”

Considering Capitalism

It is nearly 10 p.m., and about a dozen women, who greatly outnumber men at the conference, twist and swim across a red Oriental rug.

Several professors have used some of their own money to travel to the Mad Men conference, partly because it gives them a chance to break out of their traditional roles. Indeed, the event has been branded around the promise that it is unlike the dreary mundanity of academe.

Joe Buglewicz for The Chronicle

Last night’s opening keynote, back at the Doubletree, was followed by a game of Mad Men trivia. The lucky winner left with a Good Grips cocktail shaker. David L. Lavery of Middle Tennessee State, an organizer of the conference, marvels at the event’s delightfully unstuffed ethos.

“I don’t think they have trivia night at the Milton conference,” he says, flashing a satisfied smile.

For the party, Mr. Lavery has dressed as Bertram (Bert) Cooper, a founding partner of Mad Men’s Sterling Cooper advertising agency. The English professor, embodying Cooper’s affectations and his libertarian streak, wears a red bow tie, socks without shoes, and carries a paperback copy of Atlas Shrugged.

But for the costume, Mr. Lavery could not be less like his alter ego. The professor has a soft spot for Marxism, likening his own views of advertising to that of John Berger, an English art critic.

“His theory about modern advertising is that the entire purpose of it is to destroy your self-esteem and then sell it back to you for the price of the product,” Mr. Lavery says. “You suck, but if you have this deodorant, this hair color, this feminine hygiene spray — one of my favorite examples — you’ll be whole, until we come to tell you how you’re inadequate again. He’s a Marxist, so at the heart of it he is saying — and I tend to agree with him — that there is something incredibly corrupting about capitalist society.”

Mr. Lavery has seen firsthand the power of marketing, concluding that his colleagues often do it far better than he does. The professor gripes regularly about the inequities he observes across programs at his university. The Business & Aerospace Building, where the conference sessions are being held, is described by Mr. Lavery as a Shangri-La constructed for the university’s favored cash cows.

“The dean’s office has a patio,” Mr. Lavery scoffs. “They know how to get what they want; we don’t. They know how to sell themselves.”

Networking in Costume

As the party winds down, Johanna Sjöberg, a senior lecturer of child studies at Linköping University, in Sweden, lingers near the kitchen. With her red beehive hairdo and elegant patterned green dress, Ms. Sjöberg is a pastiche of Mad Men’s Joan.

In the professor’s home country, people are so convinced of the maliciousness of advertising that they have passed laws to keep children from being targeted by commercials. Ms. Sjöberg is skeptical of her university’s own marketing tactics, which she says send the message that students are customers to be served. When students register for courses online, she explains, they place the course names in shopping carts before checking out.

“The students come and they think they are being given something, instead of having to gain knowledge,” Ms. Sjöberg says.

The marketing, she continues, sets a tone at the university, validating students who find fault with faculty members when they don’t like their grades.

Finishing her thought, the professor dips her hand into a small purse and pulls from it a white plastic box labeled “Kapten.”

“Swedish snus,” she says.

Smokeless tobacco is heavily marketed to women in Sweden, the professor explains. It comes in pink boxes and precious little metal tins.

How, in an academic climate of marketing, does Ms. Sjöberg market herself?

There are personal websites, of course. Some professors podcast. But, as much as technology has augmented branding in academe, nothing has replaced the simple and effective tradition of face-to-face networking. Everyone at this party, having met each other in such a memorable milieu, is more likely to cite the other in future publications, she says.

“It’s such a commercial business,” Ms. Sjöberg concedes, rolling her eyes.

Embracing Ambiguity

It is morning, and the conference’s attendees are making their way back to the Business & Aerospace building. Every stretch of Middle Tennessee State’s campus looks the same. Hanging from every lamppost on every street is the same blue flyer, reading “I am True Blue.”

This is Andrew Oppmann’s doing. Middle Tennessee’s vice president for marketing and communications insists on the ubiquity of the university’s “identity mark.”

“If I stand any place on campus, I want to see it at least five places,” Mr. Oppmann had said in an interview the previous afternoon.

To hear it from Mr. Oppmann, Middle Tennessee’s identity mark is deeper and more resonant than the various catchphrases the university has used over the years to market itself, the latest of which is “Take a Closer Look.”

“Advertising slogans come and go,” Mr. Oppmann says. “We didn’t want this to come and go.”

The phrase was born from a tragedy. In 2011, the Middle Tennessee community was stunned to learn that Tina Stewart, a 21-year-old basketball player, had been stabbed to death by her roommate. A sober assessment of the university’s core values, which included a stated commitment to nonviolence, followed, and the “I am True Blue” phrase emerged as a sort of pledge to those principles.

For Middle Tennessee State, Mr. Oppmann suggests, the identity mark is a differentiator, a succinct phrase that captures a strong communal bond unique to the institution. But it also does something else. It takes one of the worst things that ever happened here and extracts something positive from it. Indeed, it follows one of Don Draper’s core precepts: “If you don’t like what’s being said, change the conversation.”

Contemplative as its beginnings may be, “I Am True Blue” looks and feels like a work of pure marketing. The phrase is plastered on tote bags, water bottles, T-shirts, plastic cups, pins, and key chains.

“We’re all sick of it,” Mr. Lavery says.

Back at the Business & Aerospace building, conference goers are shuffling into an auditorium. For two days, Mr. Lavery has had a running joke about this morning.

“It will be just like Mad Men,” he quipped. “You’re going to work hungover.”

The speaker this morning is Matt Zoller Seitz, editor in chief of RogerEbert.com and a TV critic for New York Magazine and Vulture. Mr. Seitz is a brand unto himself. He churns out books, including Mad Men Carousel: The Complete Critical Companion, at a steady clip; co-hosts a weekly podcast; and counts nearly 45,000 Twitter followers.

If there is a middle ground for highbrow television criticism, which is smart enough to impress professors but accessible enough to engage mass audiences, Mr. Seitz occupies it. Over the course of an hour, the critic holds his own among a crowd of Ph.D.s. He mines the depths of John Cheever and John Dos Passos to place Mad Men in context. He posits that, in Season 3, a Mad Men party that ends in a bloody lawnmower accident is meant to foreshadow the Kennedy motorcade. And he connects the folksy wisdom of Don’s stepmother, who told him that life is like a horseshoe — “round on both ends, fat in the middle, and hard all the way through” — to a brief childhood flashback where Don slips on a toy that follows a horseshoe-shaped track.

As Mr. Seitz wraps up his talk, a professor near the front row laments the divide between his colleagues and popular magazine writers. Why can’t more faculty members’ ideas find broader audiences?

“I would want academia to be a welcoming place for smart critics,” the professor says. “I would also want journalism to be a welcoming place for smart academics, which it doesn’t seem to be.”

As he is leaving the auditorium, the professor, Walter C. Metz, engages with the issue further. Has he identified a marketing problem in higher education? Whose fault is it, anyway, that most professors talk only among a small a group of colleagues similarly obsessed with esoterica?

Mr. Metz, a professor of cinema and photography at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, says professors share some of the blame for not writing more clearly. But he is equally concerned about an “anti-intellectual” culture that he sees in the United States. Many Americans can’t have an intelligent conversation about the ambiguous ending of The Sopranos, Mr. Metz says, because they are rooted in sophomoric thinking that requires storytelling with easy answers.

A similarly unsettling ambiguity undergirds higher education’s sometimes fraught relationship with the world of advertising that Mad Men depicts in all of its complexity — hailing commercials and branding as both genuine creative endeavors and vehicles for mass manipulation. Academe is neither a purely corporate enterprise, to be sold like cola, nor is it a virginal enclave of intellectualism protected from the realities of market forces. And that contradiction is enough to drive any academic mad.

Jack Stripling covers college leadership, particularly presidents and governing boards. Follow him on Twitter @jackstripling, or email him at jack.stripling@chronicle.com.