Brochure Booboo

An art school in France is blaming its U.S. communications company for darkening the skin of some of the people in a photo featuring its student body, and replacing some of the actual students who are white with darker-skinned folks who don't attend the school.

College brochures, of course, work hard to make sure that they feature a nice variety of melanin and both X and Y chromosomes in the promo pictures. Preferably sitting around outside on a manicured green lawn, absorbing knowledge from the cool, laid-back prof who isn't afraid to teach outdoors when the weather is nice. I used to work at a college, and I can count the number of non-art profs who would teach out of doors on one hand -- subject retention went through the basement when the lecture was presented in the great outdoors with its myriad attractive distractions, not to mention its distracting attractions.

Another thing that the brochures at the college where I used to work would leave out: International students. I worked there for five years and I can count on the other hand the number of international students I saw in any promotional literature not aimed specifically at that pool of recruits. The dearth was one of the marketing office's blind spots. Another was the careful attention paid to properly camouflaging the school's connection to a church denomination. It has a top-level set of programs in the performing arts and the admissions office for some reason believed that being too overt in mentioning the church that founded the school would make it harder to recruit the top students for those programs.

One of the several focus groups and such that tried to create mission or branding statements for the college met with different groups of employees and students to test out some of the ones they had developed through surveys. We were shown five or six and asked to respond to them in different ways, as well as pick which one we thought best described the mission of the school. "Well, none of them describe the mission of the school for my community," I said. "The people in my denomination's churches would figure on some mention of faith, or a life of faith and none of these do that."

"Well, if you had to pick one," said the market research company employee who was probably not happy he drew the group with the associate chaplain, "which one would be closest?"

I shrugged. "But I don't have to pick one," I said. "And none of them include what I think ought to be essential to the mission of a church-related university." After some silence he moved on; I saw his co-worker make some mark on her tally sheet but I have no idea what it was. In any event the new mission slogan came out a month or so later and I think lasted for almost a year before we had a new strategizing routine tossed at us to develop a new slogan. I can't recall what either of them were, of course.