In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, David Pan talks with J. E. Elliott about his article “Brand English and Its Discontents: Situating Truth and Value in the University Today,” from Telos 200 (Fall 2022). An excerpt of the article appears here. In their conversation they discuss how the pressure to commercialize university work has led to the creation of academic brands; how dissent has converged with commercialization at the university; why there is a conflict between meritocracy and inclusion, and how academic branding resolves it; how the peer review process has been undermined by academic branding; what a return to meritocratic values would look like; and why it is more appropriate to speak of truth-posits rather than truth as a goal of university work. If your university has an online subscription to Telos, you can read the full article at the Telos Online website. For non-subscribers, learn how your university can begin a subscription to Telos at our library recommendation page. Print copies of Telos 200 are available for purchase in our online store.
Brand English and Its Discontents: Situating Truth and Value in the University Today
J. E. Elliott
The so-called enterprise or commercial-bureaucratic university has been with us for some time. To its advocates, it has set higher education on a rational footing and demystified the folkways of cosseted intellectuals. To its detractors, it galls the kibe. For observers and stakeholders alike, the age of the office has introduced a new way of thinking and speaking in campus boardrooms and action sessions. The idiom of markets and corporations—How competitive are we? What are the anticipated returns on investment? Where can payroll efficiencies be found?—frames an instrumental, quantifiable understanding of the vita academica. Corporate clients need to decide how profitable a multiyear laboratory research project, for which the university may claim patent protection, is likely to be. Student-consumers want to know the projected payoff of a degree from a particular university in a particular degree subject. Accreditation imprimaturs, research assessment scores, and league table placements affect a given institution’s ability to attract top faculty and students.[1]
Crucially, the managed university’s covering doctrine and practices extend beyond explicitly administrative functions to their teaching and research core. Much has been written about the top-down influence that commercial objectives have had on sponsored research, labor practices, and enrollment growth in fields waggishly characterized as catering to the “three monies.”[2] Less attention has been paid to the marketing dimensions of cost-benefit calculi. Still less has been accorded the ways in which disciplinary work has embodied platforms and scripts very different from the meritocratic ideals it once championed. Almost nothing, finally, has been written about the accommodative nature of protest culture in the humanities, a peculiar but dynamic feature of its institutionally affirmative role and one almost universally misrecognized by its advocates.[3]
The lens through which I propose to view disciplinary reconfiguration in the age of the office is the academic brand. This conceptual frame might puzzle. To the extent, however, that the enterprise university treats intellectual work as a commodity pitched to clients and consumers at graduated price points, the attribution is apt.[4] As with brands in material sectors, the key to effective labeling is a well-modulated mix of optics and product differentiation. The targeted commodity, in other words, must be readily identifiable, consistent in message, and distinguishable from rival offerings. It should also relay a “brand narrative” that resonates with the bien-passant.[5] As with the fashion handbag or state-of-the-art wine fridge, disciplinary brands balance connoisseurship with the social and institutional capital embedded in approved attitudes, positions, and vocabularies—what Mark Bauerlein has aptly termed “tokens of belonging.” The most effective branding inscribes what it describes: man ist was man kauft.[6] Important everywhere is staying on message while appearing tastefully independent of the cruder forms of imitation.[7] This is true even when, as with protest culture, insider groups label themselves as outsiders contesting the repressive politics of the status quo ante.[8]
At least three disciplinary brands have emerged under a commercial-bureaucratic covering doctrine on campus: Brand Business, Brand English, and Brand STEM.[9] Each of the three responds to perceived stakeholder demand across organizational benchmarks of credentialing, networking, revenue generation, reputation management, and values capture. Satisfaction of this demand, the elements of which comprise a brand narrative, enhances the status of the academic product and the reliability of its label. MBA programs, for example, promise a passe-partout for corporate management and career enhancement; STEM research generates institutional prestige and third-party revenue streams; Brand English attracts students committed to social change and the advocacy of the disempowered.[10]
The identification of dissent culture as a brand might initially seem counterintuitive. To be sure, a long-standing target of engagé teaching and research has been the faceless mien of consumerism, “the autonomous movement of the non-living,” in Guy Debord’s pregnant phrase. Yet it is not only the case that the macronomic inspiration behind such critique—whether Debord’s sense of the spectacle, Jacques Ellul’s elucidation of technics, or the Frankfurt School anatomies of the culture industry and one-dimensional man—went out of fashion with the turn to identity politics in the 1990s. The protest label has also served as a marketing lure for students uninterested in STEM and business majors, a coalition-building platform for faculty and graduate students, and a “post-ableist” signal suitable to egalitarian “studies” disciplines. The leap from literary narratives to brand narratives, finally, is a short one where the artwork is treatable as a commodity. In these and other respects, Brand English has sought to maximize organizational capital by putting its ideological nonconformity to strategic use.
Beyond message priming and field-level marketing, however, Brand English also exercises a key doctrinal function for the higher education sector. If every institutional configuration faces legitimacy challenges, the commercial-bureaucratic university is weakest where it is asked to address the question of values. It is not so much that the logic of price points and office routines is value-free, as Bill Readings urged many years ago in his discussion of the University of Excellence; or even, following Max Weber, that we have neglected the pragmatic advantage of rules-based bureaucracies. The point, rather, is that the ascendency of higher education as an inventory of scripts, labels, and platforms (a value choice in its own right) fails to do justice to our inherited understanding of the norms and values that university teaching and learning promote: intellectual fulfillment, democracy building, civic engagement, aesthetic sensibility, and self-actualization. To the extent that these desiderata still influence what is taught and thought on campus, they have not been fully co-opted in the name of any technical efficiency or marketing imprimatur.
Each of these values, it will be understood, is accompanied by a truth claim: the creation of knowledge, practical judgment, fidelity to experience, or the Ereignis in art and expression.[11] Collectively, these values and truth claims validate the university as more than a technical enterprise directed to revenue maximization and institutional growth. The humanities, if today more a receptacle for administered commodities than a grumbling hive or republic of letters, maintain the responsibility of articulating the contours of the true and the valuable. The probing question is how effectively—and in what form—Brand English can do so. By nature, labels—and the commodities they advertise—eschew nuance, frustrate complexity. As such, values under a commercial-bureaucratic dominion might more accurately be described as value-effects; truth as truth-posits.[12]
The degree to which this reframing convinces us, however, pivots on a more detailed account of our disciplinary map, both organizationally and in historical compass. This task is taken up in sections II and III, followed by some concluding thoughts about the place of truth (or truth-posits) in the academy today.
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1. The research corpus on the enterprise university is so voluminous as to defeat manageable citation. Even the task of listing a dozen or so key works fails when alternative dozens can readily be produced. I therefore leave it to the reader to select by individual interest and the Google™ genie.
2. James Engell and Anthony Dangerfield, Saving Education in the Age of Money (Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia Press, 2005).
3. Cf. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003), sect. 132 (my translation): “[t]hat which [intellectuals] subjectively take to be radical obeys objectively such a thoroughly regimented, self-affirming pattern as to reduce radicalism to abstract prestige, a form of legitimation for those who know well what an intellectual today should value and what oppose.” I am aware of only one published attempt—David Rieff’s 1993 Harper’s article from which my second epigraph is drawn—to align profit-driven consumerism and the cultural left (see note 23 below). Paucity of treatment might be viewed as proof of disassociation; I think it evident, rather, of latent patterning. By “protest culture,” I mean a campus-based, intersectional coalition of the committed: feminists, ecocritics, critical race theorists, POMOnistas, and others explicitly hostile toward a big tent of classical liberalism, patriarchy, the nation-state, capitalism, institutional racism, and the like. Importantly, anger is filtered through a vigorous, at times utopian, faith in transformational change through performative acts of resistance. An echo to Lionel Trilling’s “adversary culture” is incidental but not inappropriate.
4. In the words of a UK government circular from the 1990s, universities are to “deliver on the brand” and “bring the brand to life in everything we do.” Quoted in Mike Molesworth, Elizabeth Nixon, and Richard Scullion, “Having, Being, and Higher Education: The Marketisation of the University and the Transformation of the Student into Consumer,” Teaching in Higher Education 14, no. 3 (2009): 277.
5. Narrative spinning is the specific function of the “identity brand.” See Douglas B. Holt, “What Becomes an Icon Most?,” Harvard Business Review 81, no. 3 (2003): 43–49.
6. There is a compelling link, through the brand, between the corporate university and the spectral dynamic of postmodernism in art and the media. I return to this briefly in section IV below. Cf. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 1991). Jameson does not address disciplinary branding, nor does he tackle the academic commodification of transgressive identity posits.
7. The essence, in other words, of what Adorno referred to as “pseudo-individuation.” Theodor Adorno and George Simpson, “On Popular Music,” Studies in Philosophy and Social Science 9 (1941): 17–48.
8. So-called “no name” or “no logo” brands in commodities markets parallel anti-brand brands in academia. As discussed more fully below, they constitute a second-order co-optation of what they otherwise reject.
9. These clusters are not exclusive. Professional programs arguably qualify as a fourth academic brand. What I am calling Brand English, moreover, is intended as a synecdoche for protest culture, radical but illiberal, engagé but not politically consequential. It is not meant to serve as a registered trademark of English departments. See J. E. Elliott, “Insourcing Dissent: Brand English in the Enterprise University,” Telos 187 (Summer 2019): 129–55.
10. Care should be taken to distinguish the brand from the field, the logo from the practice. What the brand provides is not total absorption but a channel of least resistance, the spectacle that seduces by means of its contrived simplicity. For reasons explored in section III, not everyone will be seduced, nor is every disciplinary concentration equally seductive.
11. My reference to the “event” is from Hans-Georg Gadamer, echoing Heidegger, in part I of Truth and Method, 2nd ed., trans. Joel Winesheimer and Donald G. Marshall (London: Continuum, 2004). In a very different diopter, speech-act events also inform the literary-theoretical discussion of performatives. See, among many, J. Hillis Miller, Parables, Tropes, Performatives (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 1990); and Derek Attridge, The Singularity of Literature (London: Routledge, 2017). “Beauty is the Event; the Event, Beauty.”
12. One might be reminded here of Michel Foucault’s coinage “regimes of truth,” though as will become clear below, there is reason to consider “techno-scientific structures” or a biopolitics of power across historical periods, epistemes, and institutions top-heavy. My approach is also less committed to the unmasking of truth regimes as monolithic cant. See, in particular, Michel Foucault, “The Political Function of the Intellectual,” Radical Philosophy 17 (1977): 12–14.
