What I’m reading now.

Commodify Your Dissent: The Business of Culture in the New Gilded Age by Thomas Frank and Matt Weiland

I picked up this book not long after I saw students from the Isenberg School of Management at UMass working on a “marketing exercise” last fall on the lawn in front of the Student Union. They had split up into teams and were competing to see who could most successfully promote the new Honda Element (a squared-off minivan with a configurable, industrially tricked-out interior — sort of an SUV for slobs who have expensive pastimes involving significant amounts of equipment) to their fellow students on campus. Several of these cars (trucks?) were parked on the lawn, surrounded by small, frenetic groups of SOM students who were shoving promotional material at passersby, giving out pens and T-shirts, and recruiting people to sign up for “games” and raffles — in exchange for their personal demographic information, of course.

When I asked one of the students what this was about, I was told that the activity was part of a marketing class project; the winning team would get a prize. Honda, of course, would get the potential customer list and exposure on campus with the eager help of a herd of willing shills-for-a-day.

The whole phenomenon confirmed a suspicion I’d long held — that cash-strapped schools are turning themselves into laboratories for marketers and adsmen who get funding in return for access to that key demographic — the 18-to-25 year olds (especially males) — in an attempt to nurture brand loyalty before this group graduates and has a salary to spend. Honda was enlisting students to market to each other, and to collect information on their peers for future marketing campaigns, in the guise of a “classroom partnership”. This is a development several degrees more distressing than the free goodie boxes of product samples given to returning students, or the credit card and cellphone companies who have students cede access to their credit records in return for free giveaways at tables in the Campus Center Concourse where part-time craftspeople, student organizations and political groups formerly held sway.

It is distressing because Honda is not merely selling to students hanging out on campus — they are using the classrooms themselves as marketing tools, with the willing assistance of business deans and professors in exchange for corporate funding and pre-written “study guides,” to a captive audience of business students who are not free to bow out of this “real-life” exercise should they be at all uneasy at being so used.

If professors are so willing to let their curricula be co-opted by corporate dollars, what is to prevent universities and schools of businesses from becoming mere extensions of the multinationals, churning out workers and consumers instead of independently-minded professionals who can head off the next Enron or WorldCom? And how will students be free to examine the culture, behavior and ethics of companies as part of their studies if they are at the same time accepting funding from those same companies? Is this the kind of “education” we want for future CEOs?