REINVENTING THE UNIVERSITY:  COMMENTS ON INSTITUTIONAL �BRANDING�, UNIVERSITY ALLIANCES, THE BUSINESS MODEL AND CULTURAL/POLITICAL CONSEQUENCES
Judith A. Schalick^[1], Fairfield, USA

Abstract

Universities, long immune to change by virtue of their role as a key societal heritage institution, are challenged by the rapidity of business modeling which carries a �brand� to global �consumers�.  The trend to alliances between the university and business is seen as crucial to the survival of both.   The trend to alliances between universities themselves creates global �brands� of education and is new to the post-modern university form.  Technology and alliances that integrate the efforts of business school leadership, particularly in the USA and increasingly in the UK, change the very nature of the university experience, its content and delivery.  The �Business� model with all its attendant linguistic and operational sequences is visible in its application to the dissemination of learning and of information as �product�.  Now, the university is not just repository in legacy terms, but innovator and change agent on the social and value scales of vastly differing global partners and �customers�. Cradle to grave learning is newly seen as product rather than process, and the monetizing of information has challenged the very nature of the university as the societal force that preserves legacy and incubates ideas for the future.  In this new role, there are social consequences that devolve from networks of those educated in this new pattern.  Alliances may be made between organizations that are collaborative or hierarchical and authoritarian. The university in the modern world may be both alienated from the changing organizational patterns of the global world in which it operates, but it may also be essential that it be aggressive in its presence to attract both scholars and students and to maintain its �brand� superiority.  Nation states and their cultural histories, forms of government, approaches to economic development may have universities that are gravely challenged by the identity factor in branding. The branding issue raises global cultural challenges of an unprecedented sort particularly where universities and the Internet cooperate or collide.  It is said that the university �systematically directs individual memory and channels perceptions� into forms compatible with those learned relations �authorize�. The monetization of knowledge, and the branding of its intellectual carriers, carries with it the risk that mass culture, whatever the material benefits, may impoverish or diminish the variety of experiences of thought and differences of tradition and conviction that are the mark of developed civilization. More importantly, at risk is the way in which the university defines itself as alienated from or cooperative with a new global perspective in which shared information benefits all.

Key Words

Branding, collaboration, alliances, societal values

Biography

Judith Alexander Schalick is an active communications and strategy consultant to conference planners, speakers and authors.  She specializes in strategies that put disparate partners together and has worked with writers and speakers from the US, Canada, the UK and the Orient.  She has worked with writers from the BBC, Financial Times, and the New York Times and has spoken in Toronto, Scotland, Hong Kong, Singapore, Sweden and Beirut among others, on issues relating to the Internet Society and education.  She has structured conferences for writers, for the front and rear projection industry, and for business processes.  Earlier in her career, she was Public Relations Director for Juran Institute, an international quality consulting organization where she also did editorial work on the Quality Control Handbook.  She has been an officer in the National Federation of Press Women and The Strategic Planning Forum.  Mrs. Schalick holds a BA from Wellesley College, an MA from Yale University, and has done postgraduate work in business communications and law at MIT and Yale.