When a Small-College Scholar Wins a Nobel, the Marketing Begins

Drew U.

Drew University loves William Campbell.

Mr. Campbell is a research fellow emeritus at Drew, a liberal-arts college in Madison, N.J., with just over 2,000 students, and on Monday he was named one of this year’s winners of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on a drug that treats two parasitic diseases, river blindness and lymphatic filariasis.

That makes him Drew’s first Nobel Prize winner, depending on how you count. One other Nobel laureate is associated with the university — a graduate of Drew’s Governor’s School, a summer program for high-school students — but Mr. Campbell is the first to serve on the faculty.

Universities with Nobel laureates tend to fit a type: large, prestigious, and heavy on research. When you tally up all of the prizewinners by institution, universities like Harvard and Columbia top the list.

For small colleges like Drew, having just one or two Nobel laureates on the staff matters. The prizewinners become key parts of the institutional identity, celebrated and sought after whenever they appear on the campus. They are also marketing assets.

“Most liberal-arts institutions do not have faculty members who receive Nobel awards,” said Kira Poplowski, Drew’s chief communications officer. “We in the communications department are doubling down on this.”

On Thursday a full-width photograph of the scientist occupied most of the home page on the university’s website. Clicking through photos on the page, which link to university news and information, Mr. Campbell is mentioned six times.

“It says something about Drew that Bill Campbell came to us,” said the university’s president, MaryAnn Baenninger. “There’s no question that we will use it over and over again in all of our marketing when we’re trying to attract students.”

‘War-Room Mentality’

The news of Mr. Campbell’s award broke on Monday morning, and Ms. Poplowski’s phone started ringing at around 6:30 a.m. She got dressed and boarded her train, already drafting a statement for the president.

“We just went into a let’s-get-to-the-war-room mentality,” she said. Once assembled, the communications team posted the news on Drew’s website, contacted students and alumni, and scheduled a half-page color ad to run in The New York Times.

But Drew also hopes the news will attract new applicants. So university officials sent an email announcement of Mr. Campbell’s honor to prospective students. (So far, the email’s open rate is twice as high as usual.) On social media, Drew’s communications team programmed a promoted post about the award to target high-school juniors and seniors specifically.

Ms. Baenninger hopes the award will show prospective students that, even though Drew is a small liberal-arts college, it also does important research. Mr. Campbell is a partially retired participant in Drew’s RISE Program, through which students at Drew work with retired industry scientists. Ms. Baenninger hopes that Mr. Campbell’s achievement will help prospective students learn about the program.

“These kinds of associations with great people really lift up the institution,” she said. “They don’t fundamentally change how good an institution is. But they highlight it, and they bring recognition for the enduring strengths.”

But who gets to claim Nobel laureates? The Nobel Prize’s website lists only the institutions with which the winners are affiliated at the time of the announcement. What if they worked at another university first and then switched jobs? What about the college the winner attended as an undergraduate?

After Mr. Campbell’s prize was announced, both Trinity College, in Dublin, and the University of Wisconsin at Madison — where he attended college and graduate school, respectively — publicized the news on their websites, too.

When tallying up their Nobel winners, some universities list only faculty members who won the prize, while others include alumni and former faculty members, too. At the University of Chicago, for instance, a list on the university website claims more prizewinners than are listed for Chicago at Nobelprize.org. At one point the university reportedly sold a shirt with the names of all its Nobel laureates.

While publicizing prizewinners via spirit wear is rare, many colleges with Nobel winners keep a public list, and they continue to use it in their marketing decades after the awards were announced.

Tulane University’s two Nobel laureates — Louis J. Ignarro and Andrew V. Schally — won the award in 1998 and 1977, respectively. Both are listed in a brochure put out by Tulane’s School of Medicine, said the university’s provost, Michael Bernstein, and on the university’s website.

“We list that there both to honor them and also to indicate to visitors to our site the quality of the university,” he said.

Tulane isn’t a small college like Drew, but it exists in a similar middle ground. Most colleges don’t have any Nobel winners, while some expect a prize every couple of years. But when a college of any size has just one or two Nobels, an award can become a turning point.

“It’s sort of like a small college winning the NCAA basketball championship,” Mr. Bernstein said. “Suddenly all this attention is focused on the institution, and people learn about it.”

Kathleen Matthews, a professor of biosciences at Rice University, remembers when two Rice faculty members won a Nobel Prize, in 1996. After the announcement, there was a campuswide celebration. “They were homegrown faculty who did something truly wonderful,” she said, “and so it was personal.”

The award also helped Rice recruit new faculty members and students, she said, and it solidified the university’s investment in nanoscale technology — the type of research for which the two faculty members won their prizes. “They weren’t brought in two years before it happened because we thought they would win a Nobel Prize,” Ms. Matthews said. “They did that work at Rice.”

In Mr. Campbell’s case, the prizewinning drug was not discovered at Drew. It was discovered during his time at Merck, a pharmaceutical company. But what matters, Ms. Baenninger said, is that Mr. Campbell chose Drew as the place to continue his work. The prize still affirms the quality of Drew’s science programs, she added, and it will certainly help when the university wants to apply for grant money or attract new students.

“It’s a shorthand way of saying real quality, excellent science happens at Drew,” she said. “So we will use it in every which way we can.”