Extra Ordinary: How College Marketing Shapes Students’ Collective Identity [PERSPECTIVE]

“Discover Connecticut College, one of the nation’s leading residential liberal arts colleges, located midway between New York and Boston.”

This is the opening sentence to our college’s Admission homepage, crafted by the offices of College Relations and Admission. These departments are primarily responsible for controlling the image of Connecticut College. Their roles seem straightforward – to portray the College accurately and positively, embracing and exposing its opportunities. Their audience: an anonymously large group of high school juniors and seniors, their parents and alumni.

The paragraph continues (links bolded): “You’ll find a challenging academic program, distinguished faculty and a friendly campus community that’s globally focused, actively involved with athletics and more than 60 student-run clubs and organizations.”

Its comprehensive message is secondary to the underlined blue words this page spotlights, the rest reading “financial aid program”, “aerial tour”, “visit our beautiful campus”, “this year’s freshmen”, “their stats” and “ten things students love”.

Visitors are linked to pages like Academics (“A Connecticut College education will help you develop skills for success in any arena”), Residential Education (“Ninety-eight percent of students live on campus”) and internationalization (“More than half of our students study abroad”). They will find a YouTube Aerial Tour, a compilation of helicopter views of our vast, sprawling pristine campus with phrases that include, “We’ll expand your mind and your horizons”.

They are also brought to a list of active and inactive clubs, as well as a virtual slideshow of Admissions’ view cards, 32 glossy 4×6 cards labeled with the slogan “Extraordinary” that promote what they deem to be Conn’s best qualities: bios of computer science teaching assistant and resident DJ James Jackson, art history majoring CISLA Scholar Sasha Goldman, and Environmental Studies REC extraordinaire Tyler Dunham sit among striking pictures of our arboretum, our hockey team and our students working on bikes and sculptures and relationships with the New London youth. It also tell us Ten Things to Love about Connecticut College – including the view, language tables, camel cookies, the Plex at night, MOBROC and Camelympics.

This information scatters important attributes of our college with a lack of emphasis; doing so dilutes defining factors of our campus community, factors that, if underscored, could help promote a common goal.

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In the library on a Sunday afternoon, a haphazard sampling of 10 students listed the things they liked about Connecticut College as an “honor code we care about,” non-segregated housing, Floralia, the view and, most commonly, the school’s “sense of community.” This last term, “sense of community,” was consistently defined with the adjectives “friendly,” “welcoming,” “helpful,” “supportive” and “well rounded.”

But when pushed a step further, the emphasis changed. Contrast the previous with the following responses to the question, “What is a specific moments from the past few weeks in which you’ve felt truly connected to this school?”

Freshman Shelby Greely raved about International Politics professor Alex Hybel. “He’s created an atmosphere where I feel like I can speak up and he’ll actually listen to what I have to say,” she said. “I’ve found that a lot of professors wait until their upper level classes to start taking their students’ viewpoints seriously, but Hybel makes a big class seem like a really small, encouraging environment. And that’s important. I get to argue with kids a lot.”

Greely, who was a cheerleader in high school, went on to describe her most positive athletic experience at Conn. After months of ill-attended soccer games, she was reassured come hockey season.

“I walked in, and everyone’s in their white out, and everyone’s screaming for our team. It was then that I thought, okay. This is going to work.

“It tells you relieving things about the student body to know that we have the capacity to come together and advocate for our school,” she said. “I wish I saw much more of it.”

Senior Ivan Tatis offered that Conn’s lack of athletic pride has led to a lack of general school spirit.

“As a season continues, attendance dwindles, and I see students wearing Tufts and Williams shirts around campus. Come on, we’re Camels,” he said. “Half of our class is accepted through early decision, but I consistently hear students saying, ‘Conn wasn’t my first choice.’ It’s problematic.”

Jennifer Tejada, Housefellow of Wright, talked about events that brought people together in large numbers, like the Matthew Shepard Vigil and Relay for Life. As she listed groups, her voice sped up: sports teams, clubs, individual students, faculty and staff all gathered together for issues that hit close to home.

“At those events, everyone united all day for a good cause,” she said. “But generally, as a housefellow, it’s difficult to get that out of students. You put so much effort into planning events, and people don’t show up. I always think, this is a wonderful opportunity. Why aren’t students here?”

Senior Emma Nathanson and sophomore Sara Yeransian also expressed mixed feelings about active attendance.

“I went to Professor Tien’s lecture yesterday and it was packed,” said Nathanson. “It wasn’t because people had to be there, it was because people sometimes really show interest in going to that kind of thing.”

Added Yeransian, “But then sometimes you walk into an FNL, and they’re just so poorly attended. I always feel so bad for the bands.”

Sara also brought up the limitations of having so few committees dedicated to social coordinating. “The excitement is lost after the 12th dance in a row at Cro,” she said, “but that’s the most common complaint we have here. It would be nice if there were more variety. I think that would create more excitement.”

These responses threw aside well roundedness, self-scheduled exams and housing. Instead, every student brought up moments of enthusiasm and active investment – academically, athletically and socially – and all expressed a wish to see it actualized on a more frequent basis.

The fact that these students initially identified such well-marketed terms as Conn’s most positive facets speaks volumes about the impact our college’s promotional choices have on us. In fact, its influence on current students is far more powerful than on the prospective students and alumni it targets. Prospective students experience these slogans from their living room couch, surrounded by a stack of comparable college propaganda. Conn students experience them multiple times a day – when passing through the website to reach Moodle or Self Service, when Conn College YouTube videos infiltrate Facebook feeds, and when tours answer questions loudly outside of Shain. It’s powerful. Many can’t help but regurgitate it.

But when messages are too vague, students are internalizing and taking pride in phrases like “sense of community” without being completely clear about how “community” is actualized on campus. This creates an expectation that is undefined. When the school doesn’t reach these expectations – when SAC doesn’t throw enough parties, when academic courses are too overwhelming, when no one goes to sporting events – the disappointment, equally indefinable, materializes as blame. So who do students blame? Each other, and that hazy entity they call The Adminstration.

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College Relations works with its visual staff, occasionally hiring outside consultants, to create all of Conn’s promotional materials, from its Twitter feed to its catalogues, its campus maps, its logo and its acceptance envelopes. The material related to prospective students is then sent to Admissions, and the two departments have weekly dialogues between their cross-campus offices about what works and what doesn’t. Although Admissions has direct contact with the prospective students, College Relations is the one that ultimately creates its image on the page and screen.

Conn marketers work hard to strike a balance between portraying what they think Connecticut College is and the qualities it aspires to be. In individual interviews, director of College Relations Patricia Carey and Assistant Director of Admission Shalini Uppu offered each side.

Carey, Vice President of College Relations and one of the members of the Administration, focuses her Becker House team – Public Relations, Media Relations, Alumni Relations and CCMagazine – on representing the best of Conn right now to their audience: those outside the College gates.

“In the end, it’s our job to represent Connecticut College the way it is,” said Carey. “We don’t want to give students the wrong perception of this school.”

The Office of College Relations recently made changes to our view box after conducting focus groups with prospective students, in-house interviews with Conn freshmen, and an open forum with SGA. They focused on which cards worked and which didn’t, and the response was generally positive; the participants appreciated the cards’ interactivity, colorfulness, and unique format. Therefore the adjustments were small and the greater idea unchanged.

“It’s a constant push and pull,” said Carey, flipping through the cards to find the four that fit together to create a seasonal photo collage of South Campus. “We’re always learning based on trial and error.”

In the end, College Relations subtracted five cards out of the initial 37 and changed the content of a few sides based on accumulated suggestions. Some of the feedback suggested promoting individuality, thus a new card was born: an ethnically indeterminate male student with spiked hair, a goatee and a chainlink necklace stares at the viewer from behind the words “LIFE [Of The Mind]”.

The student doubtless has a style that challenges Conn’s “preppy” stereotype, but the card said nothing about what makes students individuals. LIFE [Of The Mind] gives no coherent message about who we are.

As head of the Tour Guide program in the Admissions Office, Shalini Uppu has a different perspective. Her job, in essence, is to find representatives of the College, students with the ability to improvise, speak eloquently and project the school’s values. Her job asks for a different method than Carey. Uppu chooses tour guides that represent the college by embodying its potentiality. Her choices don’t represent any ideal Conn student, but Conn students who stand in for characteristics the College wants more of – in her words, “athletics, sciences, students of color, geographic diversity – things that contribute to our national reputation feature more prominently in the selection process.

“My job isn’t to hire tour guides who necessarily represent the college the way it is now, but to hire tour guides that reflect the college the way we want it to be in the future,” she said. “That’s the goal that I see. It has everything to do with where we are right now, what we’re looking for and what role we see them filling.”

In effect, both parties are working to increase ranks from a narrow lens, selling an image that is divorced from reality; it focuses on how they think our college is and should be instead of how their students want to see themselves. The questions they ask are too pointed to spur effective feedback.

Moreover, almost every board and committee on campus has space for student representatives, except those pertaining to promotions and advertising.

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A few of our peer institutions have noticeably effective advertising techniques, because they define their schools based on their students. The Colby Admission homepage boasts, “The Colby experience is challenging and uplifting, enlightening and provocative, dynamic and focused. It is relationships between professors and students that transform both. It fosters intellectual and personal growth, with graduates emerging as conscientious, committed leaders ready to make a profound impact on their world. A Colby education is distinctly inspired.”

Unlike Conn’s website, the links are organized in tabs along the side as a supplement to this takeaway message, a message that is active and focused, with writing that commands an intellectual audience.

Wesleyan offers a slideshow entitled “Are you Wesleyan?” which markets itself as a school of thinkers, advocating depth with questions like “Do neuroscience, dance and history seem like a logical combination? Do you find patterns in complexity? Do you expect to spend your whole life learning?”

The subsequent bio promotes that “It’s the Wesleyan style to operate on many fronts at the same time… virtually all extracurricular organizations and service projects are student-run: students are the source of the energy, spirit and momentum, as well as the impetus for evolution and change.”

These schools, instead of offering a grab bag of information, are giving direct, concrete, flattering descriptions of an inspired student body while implying that if you want to be a part of their community, you need to want these things, too. Intellectual spirit. Initiative. Creativity. Enthusiasm. These schools have taken control over how they want to be seen and pushed past the shallow developmental stage of the looking glass self; by promoting a strong sense of identity, they leave no room for outsiders to characterize them with unwanted words. Conn is constantly trying to outrun words like “homogeneous” and “passive” – instead, they should actively shut those doors completely by deciding upon an identity its students agree with.

“Apathy,” a buzzword our students and faculty use just as frequently as “sense of community”, is a term that focuses on blame instead of responsibility. The college’s mode of advertising puts the locus in control in the College’s hands, offering CELS, CISLA, CCBES, free music lessons and a beautiful sunset, and in doing so, takes it out of ours. Until students feel like the locus of control is within themselves, they will not feel responsible for creating the community they’ve shown they want.

The College’s most important clients should be the students who experience this campus every day. If the material can promote the qualities that they do individually value – academic, creative, social, athletic enthusiasm and investment – it will unconsciously encourage them as a Student Body to live up to that potential, and to internalize, embrace and regurgitate something new and more impressive. In the long run, this will forward our college’s reputation in a much more permanent, substantial way: it will create more lasting attachments between the students and their school, improving alumni donations and involvement; it will attract prospective students that find these traits important, improving the quality and quantity of our applications. College Relations and Admissions, through the power of representation, can help students take ownership over their shared goals by focusing clearly on the qualities of Connecticut College worth celebrating.