Marketing and PR Are Corrupting Universities

In May, the Advancement Division at my university renamed its morning publication, which had been called the Virginia Tech News, as VTx. X, we are told, stands for EXPONENTIAL. Sorrow and hilarity compete in the hearts of the attentive.

“Exponentially More Videos,” “Exponentially More Features,” etc. — that’s what the banner on top of VTx’s web page advertises as you navigate the site. This is ridiculous on one level because it is simply nonsense: If the office produces 40 “news” stories this week, will it publish 1,600 next week and 2,560,000 the week after that?

The deeper problem, though, is not illogic but tawdriness and lack of character. “Exponential” is a Silicon Valley buzzword often associated with “the singularity,” the idea that technology is changing at an ever-accelerating rate. In the most popular version of this religion, the process will end in computers becoming more intelligent than their human makers. Some say we will upload our consciousnesses onto hard drives in the sky.

The problem is that technology in general isn’t improving exponentially. Just look at the low productivity growth that has marked our economy for decades. A university grasping onto “exponential” wants to smell like Silicon Valley without knowing that Silicon Valley stinks. (And never mind that using “X” in the way VTx does might have been trendy years ago but has long since become unfashionable. When I posted an image of VTx on Twitter, one person responded, “The 1990s called.”)

If “VTx” were an isolated incident, it wouldn’t be worth talking about. But it’s not. It is an example of a much bigger problem: How higher education has become suffused with innovation-speak and business bullshit, using words to chase cash rather than to strive for accuracy and truth. In a real sense, such talk is a betrayal of the mission of universities.

When I heard about VTx, I thought of George Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language.” Orwell warned readers about politicians’ rhetorical ticks — their “dying metaphors,” their empty, clichéd phrases, their “pretentious diction,” including jargon and what would later become known as buzzwords. “When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims,” he wrote, “one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.” We cloud our words to obscure our intentions, to pull a fast one.

Orwell wanted readers to see that writing clearly and truthfully is a moral act. This is why, for instance, it is so wrong to argue that the primary value of college writing instruction is give students “communication skills” for their future jobs. Teaching writing is teaching thinking, and thinking well is a moral virtue. “The great enemy of clear language is insincerity,” Orwell wrote; to be insincere is to be untrue.

Orwell’s politicians talked the way they did because they needed people to go along with them and to vote for them. Politics is the strategic struggle to win resources, including human attention, affection and money. Higher education, of course, is full of politics in this sense. This is especially true at public universities, which have faced declining state funding for decades and therefore suffer the existential need to find other sources of revenue. One way they have responded is to turn, increasingly, to marketing. They have acquired large and expensive PR and marketing departments, often under euphemistic titles like “advancement” and “development.” The message of these departments is that universities provide value to students and society at large. But they make their case in hyped-up marketing-speak, which has an unstable relationship to truthfulness.

In January 2021, Virginia Tech Magazine, another product of the Advancement Division, published an article called “The Future of Work: Unwavering in Unprecedented Times.” Its text begins, “Virginia Tech’s service mission and technical expertise have ever placed it on the future’s leading edge.” The article claims that the near-term future will be dramatically different in ways that university leaders can predict. They are prepared for this inevitable tomorrow!

For anyone who knows about the economics of technology, however, the article contains a number of startling claims. For instance:

The first sentence here is loaded with errors.

Here are a few: The mass production revolution of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries was not rooted in automatic technologies. It required loads of labor. The term “automation” didn’t emerge until the late 1940s. We’ve automated some industrial processes pretty deeply, but it has been long, hard, slow, expensive. The economist Susan Houseman and her co-authors have shown that people tend to overestimate the rate of automation that’s occurred in the past few decades. The author of the magazine article cites no evidence that automation has “accelerated in the 21^st century,” because there is none. As the economist Paul Krugman noted in a column about the former presidential candidate Andrew Yang, who pushes the idea that current automation will lead to unmanageable levels of unemployment and inequality, in fact rapid productivity gains are “not what we’re seeing.” Instead we’ve been experiencing “the historically low growth in productivity since 2005” (and one can add, the 1970s and 1980s before that).

In short: Claiming that “almost every business sector around the world” has been disrupted by automation in the 21^st century is outrageous.

The goal of this naughty sentence is to create a sense of rapid and frightening change. It’s notable that the author turns not to the work of scholars but to a report from the McKinsey consulting company. Among people who study these topics, McKinsey’s projections around new technologies and their impact on jobs are famously lousy. The technology scholar Jeffrey Funk has observed that McKinsey made some of its most drastic claims about the potential of artificial intelligence “by extrapolating from claims made by various startups” — in other words, McKinsey projected from hype.

It’s in McKinsey’s interests to make it seem like the looming technological future is dramatically different and scary as hell, because McKinsey wants to sell you its services. McKinsey uses unrealistic claims about the nature and rate of technological change to create an opening for what one of its reports calls “bold, well-targeted interventions,” and that’s what the author of the piece in Virginia Tech Magazine does too: “Virginia Tech’s motto, Ut Prosim (That I May Serve), demands that the university meet this moment, and indeed, it is growing to play a bolder role in the world, expanding programs that will support and direct the progression towards the future.”

Ah, so that’s why a university publication contains such inaccuracies. We’re getting a sales pitch.

Publications like these hype up unrealistic projections of near-term technological change because moneyed interests, including entrepreneurs, start-up executives, venture capitalists, and, yes, universities, want to keep us invested in their visions, however tenuous. But their starry-eyed image of the future obscures more mundane and troubling realities. Scholars like Robert J. Gordon, Jeffrey Funk, and Aaron Benanav have shown that deep, economically significant innovation has plateaued, even decreased, since the 1970s. Others have demonstrated that research productivity has been decreasing for decades — it takes more and more people to make incremental improvements.

Meanwhile, college students have taken on mountain ranges of debt at a time when wages for college graduates have stagnated. How does, say, a land-grant university like Virginia Tech meet this moment?

Now, I realize that “Students Load Up on Debt While Wages for College Grads Stagnate” is not a winning headline for a glossy PR publication. But universities have a moral duty to bring their rhetoric back down to earth. Shouldn’t their publications educate and inform? Is it OK for university organs to spout bullshit? Indeed, the duty to inform is especially true of land-grant universities, which have an explicit mission to educate the public at large, as our agricultural-extension programs have done for over a century.

It may seem like I’m picking on my workplace. But Virginia Tech is far from alone when it comes to this stuff. It is the norm. As an alumnus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, I get its shiny magazine too. The cover story of the spring 2020 issue of LAS News was on virtual reality in the classroom. Naturally, the article doesn’t account for the long history of failures in education technology or explain how often “EdTech” falls flat when it comes to student outcomes. Instead we get a simple story of an unalloyed good — of an inevitably better technologically enhanced future: “Whatever’s next, one thing is certain — with programmers envisioning bold new worlds and innovative faculty exploring them, the sky’s no longer the limit.” (Why don’t we hold hands and talk about MOOCs while we watch the 1992 futuristic virtual-reality thriller The Lawnmower Man?)

Unfortunately, it’s not just university PR units but also higher-education administrators who engage in loose talk. In November 2018, Virginia Tech announced that, as part of the package to attract Amazon’s new headquarters to the state, it would be building an “innovation campus” in Northern Virginia for more than $1 billion. The university’s proposal for the campus made a number of at-best controversial claims while providing zero evidence for their veracity.

Foremost among these dubious claims was that the campus would produce innovation and economic growth. In fact, as Matt Wisnioski and I explained in The Chronicle, the best research suggests that innovation campuses and other initiatives of their ilk do not lead to measurable innovation or growth.

Did the administrators at my university have access to some secret, platinum-grade research showing beyond doubt that innovation campuses do actually produce these things? I don’t think so. I think they were gassing.

When the innovation campus was announced, Virginia Tech’s president wrote an op-ed in the The Roanoke Times, “Amazon Is an Inflection Point for Virginia,” which contained a number of questionable assertions (not to mention the ambiguity about whether he was doing PR for the university or for one of the richest corporations on the planet). Perhaps most troubling was the first sentence:

How, precisely, is erecting a more than $1 billion, glass-covered building in the Washington, D.C., metro region supposed to help the rural poor? You wouldn’t be able to figure that out from the president’s words.

Why do people talk like this? Surely many factors — from social conformity to ignorance to stupidity — contribute to university leaders and staff members hollowly disgorging popular untruths. But my hunch is that one of the most important forces of all has to do with time, specifically the lack of it.

For several years, I taught a great books class for college freshmen. We always covered Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum, in which Bacon laid out his vision for empirical investigation, often seen as an early version of the so-called scientific method. Bacon argues that clear thinking is led astray by impediments, four of which he dubs Idols. He defines the Idol of Marketplace as false beliefs that we learn from others. The market is a place of interaction where we pick up ways of thinking and talking, which we sometimes repeat without looking into whether they are true. “And thus a poor and unskillful code of words incredibly obstructs the understanding,” writes Bacon. In this way, worshiping the Idol of the Marketplace involves regurgitating clichés.

But thinking is a war against cliché. As philosophers like Simone Weil, Iris Murdoch, and Cora Diamond have argued, thinking requires the moral effort to focus, to pay attention, to pierce the veil of mere hearsay, to inquire. For Weil, attention was a path to God: “That is why every time we really concentrate our attention, we destroy the evil in ourselves.” Most of all, because thinking is an activity, it requires dedicated time.

Some of my friends and dearest loved ones are involved in university administration and communications. They have no time. They are often too busy running between meetings to breathe, let alone to think. Obviously they are moral actors ultimately responsible for their decisions, but you could go so far as to say they are compelled to fire out sentences at too fast a rate for care. In such circumstances, it isn’t surprising that they find themselves bending a knee before the Idols of the Marketplace.

An administrator friend sent me a quotation about a faculty member’s work he’d provided to his university’s PR person. It was full of platitudes and nonsense about innovation, discovery, and a much-improved future that the work would create “impactfully.” My friend said he came up with the words in under 10 seconds while in a Zoom meeting on another topic with soccer playing on a television in the background and several social-media and messaging apps open on his phone and laptop.

It is worth striving to bring university communications within the realm of truth-seeking, but doing so would require universities that are quite different than the ones we have today. You have to imagine universities where the felt need to produce words does not outpace the time to think. The root of our word “school” is the Greek word skholē, meaning leisure or free time. To create a school is to create space for thought.