Remember when the Grammy Award-winning artist Lil Nas X was accepted to Liberty University? Liberty doesn’t.
The rapper and singer last week shared a doctored picture of an “acceptance letter” from the evangelical college on X, celebrating his admission to one of the most conservative higher-education institutions in the nation. Lil Nas X, he said, would be studying Christian leadership and biblical studies. Liberty quickly issued a statement clarifying that it had no record of the singer’s application and had not admitted him.
The whole bit was a joke — with a purpose. Lil Nas X (né Montero Hill), who is openly queer, would be unlikely to attend a university whose doctrinal statement condemns “romantic coupling among persons of the same sex” as a sin “prohibited by God.” Instead, the pseudo-acceptance letter was a marketing ploy, spoofing the university’s devout religious brand to draw attention to the coming release of Nas’s single “J Christ,” which portrays the artist as a biblical figure who dunks on Satan.
“He deliberately picked an institution that’s the opposite of his persona,” said Moya Luckett, a media historian and professor at New York University. “And he’s done so knowing that just the words ‘Liberty University’ are going to conjure up more than … a lot of other elaborate marketing. The clash between those two personas — the brand of the university and his brand — is so powerful.”
Celebrities often use colleges — their students and institutional reputations — to build their own brands. Campuses offer a treasure-trove of potential fans and customers. Take Ross Lynch, once a Disney Channel star, who now frequently performs at colleges for students who have deemed him the “internet’s boyfriend,” or Kendall Jenner, who stopped by four Big Ten universities last fall to promote her 818 tequila brand.
When you've got something as powerful as some of these university brands, it's great shorthand, and it can be used in so many ways.
“When you’ve got something as powerful as some of these university brands, it’s great shorthand, and it can be used in so many ways,” Luckett said.
Usually the relationship is mutually beneficial; celebrities can give a college big-time exposure, too. But sometimes — even when it’s not being mocked — the college isn’t thrilled by the attention.
Viewers of The Real Housewives of Potomac may have noticed a disclaimer at the end of a 2022 episode: “The Johns Hopkins University has no involvement with the Real Housewives of Potomac.” That’s because Wendy Osefo invoked her status as a Hopkins faculty member during a snippy argument with a fellow cast member.
A university spokesperson previously told The Chronicle that Hopkins doesn’t know about the show’s content before it airs and doesn’t dictate the use of the disclaimer. When Osefo, who often makes a point of her academic credentials, has mentioned her affiliation a handful of other times on the show, the disclaimer hasn’t appeared.
In other instances, colleges are in on the antics and happy to capitalize on celebrity recognition in exchange for news coverage. In 2013, Emerson College renamed its School of Communication for a day in honor of Ron Burgundy, Will Ferrell’s fictional Anchorman character. The stunt was the idea of Ferrell’s publicist, a graduate of the Boston college, and was orchestrated to promote the release of Anchorman 2. Top administrators at Emerson embraced the gimmick, holding a news conference and ceremony for Ferrell, who visited the college in character as the over-the-top newscaster.
Those examples involved real ties between a college and a celebrity. But Lil Nas X isn’t alone in using made-up claims about a college affiliation for comedic effect.
In 2021 and 2022 the TikToker Caroline Ricke’s millions of followers were both confused and enthralled as her online persona, “Rich Caroline,” pretended to be an ungrateful, spoiled biomedical-engineering student at Harvard University. “Never fill out the financial-aid form if you’re actually rich,” she gripes in one video. “I thought it was mandatory, and when my university found out how much money my dad made, they made me pay even more money in tuition.”
As with Lil Nas X’s stunt, it was all in good fun, but Ricke had a goal, Luckett said: entertaining the internet by playing on a university’s reputation. “Pretending to pass as being part of Harvard when you’re not is … something that sort of says, ‘This is a brand that’s up there and incredibly self-invested, and we’re going to puncture it by pretending to be part of it,’” the professor said. “It addresses the Harvard brand, but I think it also addresses that it is unreachable.”
Good for Business?
People with a large online following — and, today, anyone with a social-media account — can also use colleges’ images to poke at more serious issues, engaging their audience by spoofing or exaggerating popular stereotypes.
TikTok users parody “outfit of the day” videos made by white, blonde women partaking in the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa’s notorious sorority-recruitment process, mocking the importance the freshmen place on getting into the most “prestigious” Greek-letter organization (“Bama Rush” became such a popular phenomenon, it was chronicled in a 2023 HBO documentary). Influencers pretend to attend, or even teach, at Harvard, satirizing the Ivy League’s exclusivity and elitism.
For other celebrities, it’s no joke. More-official involvement with higher ed is good for business.
By pouring her tequila behind the bar at campus-adjacent hotspots, Kendall Jenner took advantage of the idea of college students “as a certain kind of normal,” Luckett said, “integrating herself and her brand into the everyday life of young people and rendering herself less overtly Kardashian.”
“This is part of a tried-and-true method of building your fan base,” said Louie Dean Valencia, a professor of digital history at Texas State University who teaches a course on the singer Harry Styles and celebrity culture. “Who is your prime audience going to be for relatively affordable tequila that you might want to get people hyped about? College students are a very good audience.”
Other celebrities have focused their influence on making certain universities more appealing and accessible.
Historically Black colleges and universities in particular have seen an increase in applications in recent years that parallels celebrity promotion: Texas Southern University’s applications jumped 44 percent, for example, after Megan Thee Stallion announced she had graduated from the HBCU and created a scholarship fund, in December 2021. Administrators attributed part of the increase to the “Megan effect.” Beyoncé’s 2018 Coachella performance and 2019 Homecoming documentary paid homage to HBCUs, though the singer never attended one herself.
Drawing attention to institutions in that way “is an extension of what universities want all alumni to do,” Valencia said. “Whether you’re talking about Megan Thee Stallion or talking about NYU giving an honorary doctorate to Taylor Swift, all of these are ways of showing that people connected to your institution are doing things that can represent your institution well.”
Days after Lil Nas X’s tweet, Liberty announced its spring schedule of convocation speakers, touting a lineup of celebrities whose reputations more closely align with its values, including the Duck Dynasty star Sadie Robertson Huff, who founded a ministry, and the retired NFL coach Tony Dungy, an evangelical Christian. The announcement failed to garner much attention. Unfortunately for colleges, they can’t always choose who makes headlines with their names.
