Branding the School of Cinematic Arts™

I realize that I risk sounding like a broken record this week as a number of themes that will appear in this post echo both my post from last week and today’s presentation that Mike and I will be giving. That being said, this small piece of critical landscape is my chosen soapbox, at least for the time being, and I think that many of these things need to be said, again and again.

At the beginning of her chapter on the promotional university, Alison Hearn points out that all universities in function are built around a sort of paradox or, as she borrows Derrida’s terminology, a lever, which pits the ongoing process of knowledge production against the commercial forces that are often ideologically contrary to the critical project of universities, and yet they are also necessary for the financial support that they provide to these institutions. “The quest for academic freedom,” she writes, “and the need for an outside source to authorize that quest push against each other,” but that this conflict has historically been “a generative and productive lever propelling the university through history.” (199) Yet, she also points out during her brief historical overview of universities that the delicate balance in this conflict began to tip in the 19th century with the growing focus on “useful knowledge” as a commodity that universities provided to their consumers, the students. Moreover, she argues that this trend has since grown more severe in recent years thanks to the influence of a neoliberal and ‘post-fordist’ economy that privileges exactly such a dynamic. (205) She then uses this background to explain the current branding environment surrounding university self-promotion. 

In reading all of Hearn’s thoughts, particularly as she broke down what exactly the dynamic of a university brand was in relation to its students and professors, I began to contemplate the School of Cinematic Arts’ own brand. Admittedly, the thoughts that follow from such an application, ones which I am now posting here, gesture towards an iconoclasm that runs almost entirely counter to the SCA brand, and as such I also find it worrying; it isn’t good form to bite the hand that feeds me (literally), and yet it is perhaps for that very reason that I find it even more critical to consider the applications of Hearn’s chapter to our own home environment.

In defining the growing impact of the neoliberal and ‘post-fordist’ economy on universities, Hearn points out two characteristics that particularly spoke to me as a resident of the SCA. First, she notes that these market conditions have resulted in “a push for ‘market-ready’ industry-driven education in the form of specialized colleges” like trade and vocational schools. (208) Admittedly, she mentioned this in relation to the rise of for-profit schools, like ITT or Devry University, which promise a more affordable, skill-oriented education. And yet, I think the same description could be applied to the SCA -- well, except for the more “affordable” part. While “market-ready” and “industry-driven” might not be terminology we would first adopt for our own Critical Studies division (in part because, let’s be honest, we are more often then not the red-headed step-child of the school), on the whole the SCA positions itself as a highly prestigious and competitive trade-oriented school that will furnish its students with the skills and networking connections necessary to achieve success in the entertainment industry; this incentive is at the core of the school’s brand.

Second, Hearn notes that ‘consumers’, which we probably better know as ‘students’, “do not simply buy for utility” but rather for the “access to cultural means and status.” (206) This suggests that the value of of a ‘usable’ degree may still be greater than the sum of its constituent skills and experiences because of the image and ethos that a school’s brand can also provide. What else does the SCA branding campaign broker in except exactly that? 

(I tried to embed a copy of the SCA admissions video here, but sadly the school has made it un-embeddable. For better reference, please refer to the video at this link.)

“Reality ends here” and “story-telling is the thing” exclaims the school’s promotional admissions video as it also dangles famous alumnae in front of prospective students. The rhetoric of the entire video is built around both the usability of an SCA education, implying that all graduates can be as employable as those who appear in the video, and the aura of magic or borrowed celebrity status that comes from attending a school whose very walls are named after George Lucas. (A none-too-small-point, given the number of times the named walls of our school feature in the admissions video.)

In tracing the current unbalancing of the ‘lever’ at contemporary universities, Hearn points to the invasion of corporate entities and the branding of physical spaces as the first step towards branding the larger university and the students themselves. (204) I could not help but be reminded of our own SCA campus and the celebrity sponsorship we have for our buildings, from the George Lucas and Steven Spielberg buildings to our own Bryan Singer Division of Critical Studies. In lending their names to our walls, these industry giants are allowing the SCA to borrow their own capital, and in doing so tap into their mythology as celebrities, in order to increase the capital and value of the SCA brand.

This strategy is hardly unique, as many universities tout the accomplishments of their famous alumnae as a reflection back on themselves, but in a school that is already very focused on its prestigious yet entirely ‘useable’ trade-oriented education, the SCA ends up conflating the industrial successes of Lucas, Spielberg, Bryan, and many others with the brand and image of the school itself. This is particularly problematic in light of Spielberg who isn’t even a USC alumn, and therefore logically the SCA holds no real claim to having contributed towards the man’s career, yet the school does benefit from this misunderstood association.

This type of corporate invasion of the SCA is also difficult, as many of us are now realizing, since our school’s brand hitched its wagon, and us by extension, to an industry celebrity who has since become embroiled in scandal. Thanks to SCA’s corporatization and branding, our own division is now associated with an alleged sexual abuser.

 

But the degree to which this corporate sponsorship has permeated our environment is even more insidious, more so than naming a building after George Lucs, or having a SpikeTV hallway, or by exclusively offering commercial real estate to Coffee Bean within the compound walls.

In the editing department of the school, all students are taught to use AVID editing software, as the SCA has an exclusive contract with AVID; the school may frame this as a boon to the students (“isn’t it great we have access to this software?”), but in reality, this is exactly as Hearn described, universities and corporations together co-opting their ‘built-in’ markets to sell their products. (211) In doing so, the SCA and AVID are grooming a future market of AVID users while at the same time limiting the amount of exposure students get to other udeful softwares. The irony in this, of course, is that while the SCA is a usabilty-oriented school (for the most part) that promises hirable skills to it students, by limiting its students’ training with programs like Adobe Premiere or Final Cut Pro in deference to AVID, in a small way the school is also negatively impacting the quality of the skills it teaches.

The downside of this corporatization and branding campaign is something that I think we are already quite aware of on a daily basis, although we may not have always looked at it critically. Hearn notes that branding practices at universities “work to abstract a heterogeneous and complex institution into an image,” yet these it also “heteronormizes, governing the day-to-day operations of the university from the outside by creating simplified abstractions of those operations” and “the faculty, staff, and students are often incorporated into the brand’s promotional logic, often unwillingly.” (210-211) What better way to consider Critical Studies own fraught relationship with the larger school than with these observations? The SCA brand is a prestigious trade brand: “you could be the next George Lucas or the next great editor or producer” the Dean of the SCA is often fond of reminding students at the beginning and end of each year. But where is the SCA’s prestigious critical brand? “You could be the next scholar to deconstruct the unbalanced business practices of Hollywood while reframing gender roles and identity in the marketplace,” said no one.

Critical Studies doesn’t fit the homogenized brand of the SCA; we are the black sheep and the red-headed step-child that often gets glossed over or ill-represented at larger school events because, as much as we might like to ascribe to the school’s party-line of cross-divisional unity, there isn’t an easily fitting place for our critical work within the trade-oriented brand of the school. The homogenizing and heteronormizing pressures that Hearn mentions are equally responsible for separating our division from the rest, because it does not fit the brand, and for continually pushing our division to be more like other divisions, or at the very least, more ‘relatable’ to other divisions.

I would argue that this is a good thing, for all that this often makes Critical Studies students feel like second class citizens at larger school events. The fact that Critical Studies has not yet been entirely co-opted by the SCA brand, regardless of Bryan Singer’s name on our walls, testifies to the efforts of our faculty and students to resist the corporatizing powers at play in our home environment. Often this semester we have debated the relevance and utility of ‘the Cultural Studies project’, yet there is clearly still some relevance in Cultural Studies for us on the homefront as we consider the institutional power structures that we are both a part of and -- ideally -- resisting, much like Hearn’s original construction of the paradoxical university.