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Raising Cane Rob Perez |
UH logo controversy
intensifies debate
over prioritiesThis goes much deeper than a debate about a couple of logos. It goes well beyond questions about an $82,000 design contract.
Ultimately, it's a debate about priorities.
It's a debate about spending wisely during a severe and prolonged budget crunch. For some critics, it's all about substance over splash, teaching over marketing, mission over message.
Do you like
these logos?
Well, if not, here's your chance to design a better logo for the University of Hawaii. Send us your illustration. We'll run the best of the bunch next Sunday. Readers will be able to vote on which logo they like best --will it be one of the two official finalists (shown above) or one from a reader --and we will run the results on May 11. UH regents vote on their choice May 16.Everyone who sends in a logo will be entered in a drawing for a $50 certificate for dining out.
To send us your design:
Email: citydesk@starbulletin.com (Please make attachments in JPEG format, less than 500K file size.)
Mail: UH Logos, Honolulu Star-Bulletin, 7 Waterfront Plaza, 500 Ala Moana, Suite 210, Honolulu, HI 96813. Color illustrations are preferred, no bigger than on letter-sized paper.
The University of Hawaii last week unveiled the two finalists for its system-wide logo, a graphic representation that's supposed to reflect UH's identity. Reaction was swift.
Some people liked one or both of them. Others despised the designs.
Some questioned why the university hired a Maryland firm for $82,000 to design the logo when understanding Hawaii's "sense of place" -- not Maryland's -- was crucial to the process. Some questioned why UH didn't sponsor a contest and offer prize money to get faculty and students to design proposals.
The questions only hint at a much broader debate that has simmered along with the logo controversy: Should the university be spending more than $1 million this fiscal year and an as-yet undetermined amount next year on a marketing campaign (including logo development) while some UH instructional services continue to erode because of a lack of funding?
Should the flagship Manoa campus, for instance, have to contribute hundreds of thousands of dollars toward that marketing push while vacant teaching positions remain unfilled and some Manoa professors can't replace broken instructional equipment in their classrooms, get funding to update course materials or hire student assistants to help pursue new research grants?
Professors also are being told there's no funding for pay raises.
"It grates on the faculty," said Mike Forman, a linguistics professor and chairman of the Manoa Faculty Senate. "The question is, 'Is that (marketing) the best use of the money?' We'd like to believe this will make a difference. But we're a little bit not convinced and becoming more skeptical."
Of course, even $1 million wouldn't come close to restoring some of the huge hits the university has suffered through years of belt-tightening by the state government. And for a $1 billion educational institution, the marketing expense is but a tiny fraction of the budget.
"We're talking about chicken feed here," said Paul Costello, UH vice president for external affairs.
But as engineering associate professor Amarjit Singh noted, such chicken feed could pay for CD-ROMs for language courses and laptop computers for classrooms. It could restore funding for faculty development and mentoring programs that have fallen victim to the budget ax. It could cover the $300,000 in curriculum improvement requests on the Manoa campus that were rejected last year because of a lack of funding.
"The instructional needs are increasing, yet Manoa is falling further behind," Singh said. "The administration is failing us on that count."
Because UH had to assemble a marketing budget essentially from scratch, having never had a system-wide program before, it assessed the Manoa campus roughly $900,000 and the community colleges $400,000 to come up with funding for the current fiscal year. Not all that money, however, will be collected from the campuses because the budget has been pared to $1.1 million from $1.5 million.
UH said a marketing budget for the coming fiscal year has not been set.
In an age in which a polished image can pay big dividends, few experts would argue that marketing is unnecessary, even for public universities. For an institution like UH, such campaigns are important to raise public awareness and political support.
An effective marketing effort combined with solid academic programs can help a university better compete for students, faculty, federal grants and private donations, especially as other schools devote greater resources to tell their stories.
And with UH's dependence on tuition revenue growing as its share of state funding shrinks, the effort to attract more students becomes even more critical.
The question, however, is whether UH can afford to do such promoting now. Can UH afford to pay for advertising pitches, promotional brochures and branding efforts in the midst of a sluggish economy and tight fiscal times?
"While the university is facing multimillion-dollar budget cuts, I think it's irresponsible to spend more than $1 million on marketing at the same time we're cutting classes and laying off people," said Rep. K. Mark Takai, chairman of the House Higher Education Committee.
UH administration officials, not surprisingly, have a different take.
"The question to me is not whether we can afford to market the university," said Costello, the external affairs executive. "The question is whether we can afford not to market the university. If we don't do it, somebody else is going to eat our lunch."
To be sure, UH has fewer students today than in the mid-90s, when enrollment hit a peak of nearly 52,000 in 1994. For the past two years, however, enrollment has climbed more than 4 percent, topping 48,000 currently.
That increase has come largely without any marketing, other than Evan Dobelle assuming the UH presidency in 2001 and becoming a speech-making machine, telling the UH story to anyone who would listen.
To some faculty, the $1 million-plus effort that Dobelle's administration has launched for a formal marketing campaign is long overdue.
"In the long term, it's very important, and I totally agree with it," said James Goodman, an assistant art professor at Leeward Community College and chairman of that campus' faculty senate.
But the university faces a daunting task winning over the skeptics. And last week's logo flap won't help matters.
"In hard times, expenditures that seem like they might be frivolous are not good for morale," said Robert Bley-Vroman, a Manoa professor of second-language studies. "In this case, it's iffy."
If public perception is a big part of a marketing campaign, the logo effort thus far is a costly bust. For the rest of the campaign, we'll have to wait and see, although I'm skeptical.
The best marketing, of course, is for UH to excel at its core missions: Teaching and research. Even the slickest promotions can't mask an institution mired in mediocrity.
Star-Bulletin columnist Rob Perez writes on issues
and events affecting Hawaii. Fax 529-4750, or write to
Honolulu Star-Bulletin, 500 Ala Moana Blvd., No. 7-210,
Honolulu 96813. He can also be reached
by e-mail at: rperez@starbulletin.com.
