The Re-Branding of SSU

A recent announcement by Shawnee State University informs us that “The Office of Communications has been renamed the Office of Marketing and Communications to reflect its broader role in outreach, marketing, and branding.” I wrote a post about an earlier"rebranding" at SSU in July 2009, which I am reposting a slightly edited version of below. I was hard in the post on Wayne Allen who is a gifted writer, but he would have been better if the PDT  Community Common had had somebody who could proofread.

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Will the cuddly Shawn E. Bear be euthanized?

      SSU’s Director of Communications Elizabeth Blevins was recently interviewed in the Community Common by reporter Wayne Allen on the subject of the “rebranding” of the university. Merriam-Webster defines the noun brand as “a well-known and usually highly regarded or marketable name.” So rebranding might mean “changing a brand to make it better known, more highly regarded and marketable.” Last fall, feeling it was time for rebranding, a brand marketing team was assembled from different departments at the university. Wayne Allen, a former SSU student, reported, “It became clear to the team, the university needed a partner to help lead them through the entire branding project.” Incidentally, that comma after team creates a run-on sentence. The sentence would be perfectly correct and clear if Mr. Allen used the relative pronoun “that” instead of the comma. If he wanted to be a little more formal, he could have used a semicolon instead of the comma, something I discouraged students from doing when I taught freshman composition at SSU. Only if they understood the correct usage of commas and periods should they risk fooling around with semicolons. Just as guns should be kept out of the hands of children, semicolons should be kept out of the hands of novice writers.

      Some of my colleagues at the university knowledgeable about composition theory believed that it didn’t help to point out punctuation mistakes to students, because research shows it doesn’t help, and besides there are more important things to teach students about writing than punctuation, a view I agree with. But I circled the punctuation errors anyway, thousands and thousands of them, out of habit I suppose, proving the truth of the saying you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. And if a reporter for the Community Common and the Portsmouth Daily Times, like Allen, who attended SSU, writes run-on sentences, doesn’t it only go to prove my colleagues knew more about composition than I did? Allen proves trying to teach punctuation is a waste of time.

      Anyway, the “ partner” the SSU brand marketing team chose to advise them was Stamats, a marketing firm that specializes in helping institutions of higher education with marketing problems. I had never heard of Stamats before, but I was immediately put off by the name. Isn’t that name a marketing problem? If I were advising Stamats, I would urge them to change their name. I mean what the kind of a name for a business is Statmats anyway? It’s not only meaningless; it sounds stupid and looks ugly. Only when I visited the Stamats website did I learn how Stamats got its name. Stamats is the name of the family that founded the firm back in 1923, and what’s more, their website points out, Stamats is a palindrome, a word that is spelled the same forwards and backwards. Well, will wonders never cease. But it doesn’t stop there. Stamats is a name that keeps on giving, because Stamats is also an anagram, an anagram of Assmat. If Stamats was in the assmat business instead of the business of advising universities about rebranding, the name Stamats would be Ok, the same forward as backward, with an anagram thrown in for good measure, with all kinds of ass-backwards connotations. If I were in the business of rebranding, I would advise Stamats, if it declined to change its name, to at least adapt the slogan of Ohio’s Smucker’s jams: “With an anagram like Assmat, it’s got to be good!”

Better Layed Than Never

       But let’s get back to Allen’s interview with Blevins. “What they did for us is layed the architecture for going through this kind of process,” Allen quotes Ms. Blevins. There is,no such word as “layed.” What Wayne Allen had in mind probably was “laid,” the past of the verb “lay.” I used to advise students to try to avoid the verbs lie and lay, whose various parts are so confusing and difficult to remember that it’s easy to mix them up and embarrass yourself and others.
      Ms. Blevins goes on in the interview to say that the SSU brand-marketing team didn’t want to just toss around suggestions for a new logo and choose one haphazardly. “We wanted it (the new logo) to be more meaningful than that.” She said the university wanted a new logo to be based on research.  So the folks at Stamats advised the brand marketing team on the research. “The research consisted of conducting a survey of current students, facility [sic], staff, and alumni.” Although there is a Facility Dept. at SSU, Allen’s "facility" is probably a typo for faculty. I make mistakes like that sometimes in my blog, but I have a friend who proofreads for me. But that’s what managing editors at newspapers are supposed to do for reporters: keep an eye out for typos and the wrong homonym, such as “there” for “their.” Allen quotes Blevins as saying, “They came in [the students and “facility”] and told us what they think of, [sic] when they think of Shawnee State. What they think makes us (SSU) unique in there [sic] eyes.” Allen writes, a sentence later: “They were also asked what keeps them at SSU, among various other questions about there [sic] experiences.” Blevins goes on, as quoted by Allen, “In a time were [sic] resources are limited [sentence fragment]. We do not want to be wasteful, this will be a soft implementation” [run-on sentence]. Isn’t there a managing editor at the Daily Times company, which now owns the Community Common, or is proofreading, like doing away with a Monday issue, one more thing that the Times company has eliminated to cut costs? Without an editor to assist him, Allen, who doesn't have much facility with language, is, grammatically speaking, virtually bare ass, or since we are talking about SSU, I should say bear ass. But that is nothing compared to what PDT reporters sometimes must do if they want to keep their jobs. Times reporters know that reporting some facts can cost them their jobs, as two of the best and most experienced of the PDT reporters, Jeff Barron and Mike Deaterla, discovered. [Barron was fired after reporting in a story in the PDT that someone who had been arrested for dealing drugs worked as a mechanic at Glockner's, a major advertiser in the PDT.]
      To sum up: the rebranding effort at SSU so far appears to consist mainly of slightly changing the curve of the Shawnee “S,” slightly changing the shade of the school’s blue and gray colors, and changing the cuddly looking  Shawnee Bear to a Grizzly.  Does this mean that the previously lovable Shawn E. Bear is going to be euthanized? If Shawnee State is going to continue to claim that its most marketable feature is that it is a student friendly place, shouldn’t the official SSU bear look a little friendlier, a little less lethally clawed, a little less grisly than the bear that SSU has just adopted?
      In one of Allen’s sentences near the end of his article, he makes an inspired error that shows a talent, if not a genius, for malapropism. It replaces my previous favorite Wayne Allen  malapropism, “imminent domain,” which when used in connection with developer Neal Hatcher, might more appropriately have been called “imminent doom.” Allen’s prize-deserving malapropism is, “There will be an official unavailing [sic] of the new look in the fall when all of the students are on campus.” “Unveiling” is the gerund Allen was not quite able to come up with, but  “unavailing” is even better, because it means “futile or useless,” or availing not. Is there a better word than “unavailing” to describe the current public relations effort on the part of SSU and its “partner” Stamats?

Annual Ranklings

      The other day I checked U.S. News’ annual rankings of American colleges and universities, which I know get no respect at SSU. Though SSU is no longer at the virtual bottom of the bottom fourth tier, the worst of the worst as they were ten years ago, they are still mired somewhere in that  fourth tier: SSU in the U.S. News rankings is not second-rate, not third-rate, but fourth-rate. There are a number of fine students and faculty at SSU, and let’s not forget the fine "facilities," but SSU's reputation is still in the toilet. Isn’t that the problem Stamats should be advising on, not the shades of the school colors, not the curve of the Shawnee S, and not the fangs and claws of the official Shawnee Bear. SSU is not likely to get out of that bottom tier anytime soon, not with former SSU students writing as carelessly as Allen does and not when SSU’s Director of Communication, presumably SSU’s resident expert on communication, spouts the public relations jargon the way she does. ("Soft implementation," indeed!) The notion that American business knows what's best for everybody, including those in higher education, carries a lot less weight than it did before the recent incredible display of incompetence and dishonesty by the business and financial class. Being more businesslike is hardly an unqualified virtue given the recent era of Bernard Madoff madness.

       I used to tell Shawnee students that Harvard was once viewed in England as the cow college in the colonies, but U.S. News now rates Harvard as the best university not only in the U.S. but in the world. Take that Oxford and Cambridge! I told students that maybe by the time their grandchildren are of college age SSU will have become a university they will want to attend and will be proud to say their grandparents attended. But on the basis of this current rebranding effort, I would say that day is much farther away than I thought. With rebranding efforts like the current one in which Stamats is involved, it may not be the grandchildren but the great-grandchildren who might one day may be able to take pride in their great-grandparents' degrees from Shawnee State.

      When I taught at SSU and struggled, along with others, to help raise it from a third-rate to a second-rate university, I adopted as my slogan a line by E. E. Cummings: “There is some shit I will not eat.” Before ending my reflections on rebranding, I will suggest a slogan for SSU, at least for English, if not Communications, majors. It is the title of a poem by the English Victorian author Arthur Hugh Clough (pronounced Cluff): “Say Not the Struggle Naught Availeth.” No marketing or communications experts, trained as they are in the art of deception, could possibly come up with a more inspiring use of the English language than Clough whose poem can be read by clicking here. 

SSU's new official bad-ass bear

J. Scott Douthat: The Specter of SSU's Anemic Academic Reputation

“What Professor Douthat and his students did at the Celebration of Scholarship, 
as the photo of him speaking at the Celebration suggests to me,  was to revive
 the Bela Lagosi-like  specter of SSU’s anemic academic reputation.” 

  

In 2012, a sociology professor at Shawnee State University, J. Scott Douthat, conducted a class whose ambitious aim was to address the many social and economic problems of Portsmouth. Such a daunting task would seem to require a multidisciplinary approach. Anyone addressing Portsmouth’s many problems—the poverty, unemployment, drug addiction, prostitution, political corruption, etc.—would need to understand not just sociology but also economics, political science, history, and other disciplines. Is Douthat multidisciplinary? What was the upshot of his class’s work? What conclusions did they reach? As the story on the front page of the SSU student newspaper The Chronicle put it in April 2012, the conclusion Professor J. Scott Douthat and his student researchers presented at the annual Celebration of Scholarship was that Portsmouth needs to be revitalized to become “the ‘All American [sic] City’ it once was 33 years ago . . .” As a former faculty member I’m embarrassed by such nonsense. The ignorance implied in the statement reflects poorly on us all. That Douthat conducts a real estate business in Portsmouth, rents to students, and has a private consulting practice, in addition to his full-time faculty position at SSU, may help explain why his students are not better prepared.

      One of the disciplines Professor Douthat and his students showed a poor grasp of at SSU’s 2012 Celebration of Scholarship is history, and in particular Portsmouth’s history. Contrary to what Douthat and his students mistakenly assumed, “33 years ago” was not the Golden Age of Portsmouth. On the contrary, In 1979-1980 Portsmouth was at perhaps its lowest point, at least politically, in the twentieth century, which was not surprising since the city had begun going downhill economically, socially, and politically after the Second World War. By 1979, when Barry Feldman (click here) was Portsmouth’s controversial city manager, the city was in desperate need of public relations. But Douthat and his students naively assumed, because Portsmouth had been designated an All-America City by the National Civic Association in 1979, that that period was Portsmouth’s finest hour. The promoter of All America City is the National Civic League (NCL), which was, and still is, primarily in the public relations business, which it is very good at. Cities looking to improve their image and reputation enter NCL’s annual All America City contest. One of the aims of public relations is to spin the news so that the public is too confused to know which side, or which city, is up. The essence of public relations is to use words and images to make anything, no matter how bad, look good or at least better. The historian Daniel Boorstin wrote wryly, “Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some hire public relations officers.” What some cities wanting to improve their reputations do is enter the National Civic League’s All-America City contest, as Portsmouth did in 1979. As an employee of NCL candidly admitted, the All-America City award is often used by the winners “for signs, for civic pride [and] to sell their city to corporations.” 

    Unfortunately, Portsmouth found no takers. Corporations continued their exit from our river city after 1979. What the city is left with now is little civic pride, no large corporations, and a big peeling icon of the All-America City on the river side of the flood wall. Peeling or not, it apparently still can fool some people, including Douthat and his students, into thinking Portsmouth’s past was so much better than its awful present. This is the stuff that myths, the ultimate in public relations, are made of.

      Mistakes or inaccuracies of any kind at SSU’s Celebration of Scholarship are unfortunate because the university from its founding in 1986 had gained a reputation as a  fourth-rate academic institution. U.S. News annually ranked SSU near the bottom of the lowest (fourth) tier of American colleges and universities. I wrote about those anemic rankings in April 2005:

Shawnee State is one of the 217 small liberal arts colleges that US News ranked for 2005. The 217 colleges are divided, by quality, into four tiers, the best in the top tier, the worst at the bottom. Shawnee State is one of 53 colleges in Tier 4, the bottom group. Not only that, it is near the bottom of the bottom group, and it has been ranked near the bottom of the bottom for at least a decade. By reputation (on a scale of 1 to 5) SSU is currently ranked at 1.6. There are only 4 colleges among the 217 that have a worse ranking.

What Professor Douthat and his students did at the Celebration of Scholarship, as the photo of him speaking on that occasion suggests to me, was to revive the Bela Lagosi-like  specter of SSU’s anemic academic reputation. Lagosi became famous playing  Dracula in the movies.

Bela Lagosi as the specter of SSU's anemic academic reputation

     Aside from looking the part, how did Douthat manage to raise the specter of academic anemia? Let me count the ways. Although he is a professor of sociology at SSU, Douthat’s B.A. and  Ph.D. degrees are both in psychology, not sociology, with the doctorate being specifically in forensic psychology. Yet he is, an associate professor of sociology at SSU and the coordinator of the department’s sociology major. The ideal venue for a forensic psychologist is the courtroom, not the classroom. Be that as it may, Union Institute and University, a primarily online institution where Douthat received his Ph.D. in 2005, is not, or at least was not, the best place to have a Ph.D. from in any field. In a useful consumer protection website, Ripoff Report, a frustrated Ph.D. candidate in religious studies wrote a long, detailed complaint in 2004 of his unhappy experiences with Union. “Now, as usual,” the candidate wrote, “further attempts to get the administration to update and correct my records and my program, have met with silence and inaction. This is only one string in this very long and complicated series of problems in which all attempts to get things cleaned up have met with, at most, a momentary flutter of activity that has resulted in no significant change except for often creating more problems.” One dissatisfied student, or perhaps he should be called customer, is one thing, but a complaint from an agency of the state of Ohio and another from the federal government is something else. In 2002, the Ohio Board of Regents (OBR) issued a report critical of Union’s Ph.D. program, finding that “expectations for student scholarship at the doctoral level were not as rigorous as is common for doctoral work . . .” As was reported in the Cincinnati Inquirer, the OBR called for a major overhaul of Union’s Ph.D. programs. Not long afterward the U.S. Department of Education (USDE) became concerned that the millions of federal dollars that were going to subsidize Union graduate students were not being distributed according to federal guidelines. The USDE  insisted on more accountability before it would release more funds. Shouldn’t somebody at SSU insist on more accountability from students and especially from professors participating in the Celebration of Scholarship?

Portsmouth's unelected mayor, David Malone, trying to balance city budget

      Who if  anybody benefited from Professor Douthat’s  class? A chief public relations beneficiary of the 2012 Celebration of Scholarship was Portsmouth’s unelected mayor David Malone, who embodies to an egregious degree the incompetency, dishonesty, and financial and moral  bankruptcy of  Portsmouth’s politicians.  “Several of the solutions proposed by students  to mayor Malone have been implemented,” The Chronicle reported. “Mayor Malone recently implemented the students’ suggestion that inmates could perform public services and clean up the city.” Oh?  My recollection is that inmates have been doing clean up for a long time. I checked with former mayor Murray, who, unlike the out-to-lunch, philandering Malone, was elected mayor and did not come in through a trap door. She informed me that utilizing inmates did not start with Malone. They were already being utilized when she became mayor, but she, along with the probation director and Health Dept. staff expanded it to include “litter control, mowing, cleaning the city buildings, etc.” Another proposal that one of  Douthat’s students came up with was increasing the city’s property taxes. This proposal is so misguided as to be insulting to the property owners of the city. No one who knew anything about the recent history of property taxes and other taxes in Portsmouth would seriously propose it.

    An earlier generation of students, twenty years ago,  on their own initiative, made a big impact on SSU and later on the city. Because The Chronicle lacked true editorial independence, these crusading students started their own newspaper The Shawnee Sentinel. SSU did everything it could to suppress these students and prevent their newspaper from being distributed on campus. This is part of the hidden history of SSU that Douthat’s students and perhaps Douthat himself are oblivious to. One of those former students, Austin Leedom, has an archive that includes copies of The Shawnee Sentinel and thousands of other documents that bring to light SSU’s hidden history. If only his collection could be made part of the archives at the Clark Library, SSU students would not have to rely on unqualified professors and back copies of  the politically correct  Chronicle for their research. It is time that a stake be driven though the heart of the anemic corpse that is SSU’s reputation as a fourth-class institution.

The peeling All-America icon on the Portsmouth flood wall