The George Washington University faculty and staff ain’t got no culture. Or worse, we’ve got a culture of negativity. That was the verdict of the Disney Institute, which the president of our university commissioned last year to assess the culture on our campus. Fortunately, the institute, which is the “professional-development and external-training arm of the Walt Disney Company,” has a remediation plan. It has designed workshops to teach us the cultural “values” and “service priorities” we evidently require.
The culture that Disney has crafted for us is not, it should be said, the high culture of the arts that the poet Matthew Arnold described as “sweetness and light.” Nor is it the anthropological notion of culture — a system of meaning that shapes social behavior. Rather, it is corporate culture, a creature that has become all the rage in the business world — and now, it seems, is burrowing its way into universities. Its professed aim is to instill a sense of shared purpose among employees, but its real objective is far more coercive and insidious.
Our president is rumored to have forked over $3 million to $4 million to the Disney Institute to improve our culture (he refuses to reveal the cost). A select group of faculty and staff members, those identified as opinion leaders, are being offered all-expenses-paid trips to the Walt Disney World Resort, in Orlando, Fla., “to gain firsthand insight into Disney’s approach to culture.” For everyone else, the university is conducting culture-training workshops that run up to two hours. All staff members and managers are required to attend. Faculty members are strongly “encouraged” to participate, and some contract faculty members, who have little job security, evidently have been compelled to do so.
I attended one of those workshops. It was a surreal experience. About a hundred mostly sullen university employees — maintenance workers, administrative staff, faculty members, and more — filled a ballroom. Two workshop leaders strained to gin up the crowd’s enthusiasm with various exhortations and exercises, supplemented by several slickly produced videos. The result was a cross between a pep rally and an indoctrination camp.
We were introduced at the beginning of the workshop to the university’s brand-new slogan: “Only at GW, we change the world, one life at a time.” Hold on. We change the world only at GW? And we achieve this absurd ambition how? The answer, it turns out, is pretty vacuous — by being nice. “Care,” we were told, is one of our three Service Priorities. We were given Service Priorities table-tent cards, conveniently sized for our pocketbooks and billfolds so we can whip them out whenever we need to remind ourselves how we change the world.
The cards offer a series of declarative statements — pablum, some might say — about our “care” priorities. Here’s a sample: “I support a caring environment by greeting, welcoming, and thanking others.” To help us care for others, the university has established a “positive vibes submission” website, where we “can send a positive vibe to someone.” It was hard to detect many positive vibes in the workshop itself.
The other two Service Priorities give us a clearer idea of the culture initiative’s real agenda. One is “safety"; the other, “efficiency.” Both exhort employees to improve their work performance. The first “safety” recommendation is an injunction to “keep areas clean, well maintained, and inviting.” An important measure of “efficiency” is a willingness to “embrace change” and be “open to new ways of working.” One might wonder whether work efficiency would be enhanced by redirecting the millions of dollars that are going to the Disney Institute into staff salaries or bonuses instead. But that misses the point. The main purpose of this corporate-culture initiative is to create a more disciplined and compliant work force. Indeed, our workshop leaders confessed as much, acknowledging in a brief aside during their presentation that “compliance” was a central pillar of the project.
Lastly, we were introduced to Our GW Values — “ours” only in the sense that they were being imposed on us. One might think that our president would be interested in promoting and honoring the values that are specific to our mission as a university, such as innovative research, teaching excellence, critical inquiry, and new ideas. Think again. As crafted by the Disney Institute and its administrative acolytes, Our GW Values are “integrity,” “collaboration,” “courage,” “respect,” “excellence,” “diversity,” and “openness.” All worthy values, to be sure, but is it possible to offer a more generic and innocuous set of standards?
Are the workshops working? Is our campus embracing Our GW Values? How can we tell? Will we need to call on the Disney Institute to conduct another well-compensated assessment? If so, it’s pretty easy to predict how that will turn out. Either the institute’s wizards will claim they had worked their Disney magic and turned us into a compliant and efficient work force, or, more likely, they will recommend another round of indoctrination for those of us who still lack what they call culture.
The GW culture initiative can be summed up in two words: Mickey Mouse.
A version of this essay originally appeared on Academe Blog.
