Sunday, March 27, 2011
Telling the Wartburg Story
I just learned that the campus-wide theme for next year is the heading of this post. This creates ambivalence on my part. On the one hand, I'm a firm believer--as a veteran Q sorter--in the proposition that he who controls the narrative (or tells the story) wields the power. On the other hand, I'm not sure that upper-Midwesterners are comfortable, in the Garrison Keillor caricature, of "telling their own stories." It's a cultural no-no, bordering on bragging,and it's an overall attractive feature, in my view, of life in this part of the country. But, on yet another hand, if the theme is an invitation to do better than "Being Orange" as a marketing way of selling the value of a Wartburg education, then I'm all for the possibilities that this opens. So, in a bit of an offbeat thread on Obamadogs, here's the call for a better -- more honest, more effective -- alternative to "be Orange" as a way of attracting the interest of the better students soon to be in the process of deciding which colleges to attend. Please feel free to nominate your creative suggestions for a new marketing theme to replace "be orange." If we generate a sufficiently diverse and defensible set of alternatives, I'll compile them into a Q sample and we can undertake a study that we may want to present to the Powers that Be.
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Telling the Wartburg Story? It is the American dream, and if you are a true American, you will come to Wartburg. You betcha, we are good at taking out debt! You betcha, we have great competitors on the field! You betcha, it will be a heck of a ride!
ReplyDeleteIn all seriousness, I think Telling the Wartburg Story is much better than "Be Orange." We have a lot of great stories on campus covering a wide range of demographics, and I think it would be great if we showcased these stories. I do agree with you though that it is difficult to sometimes have people come forward and tell their story, and I am as guilty of this as anyone else. This could be a success, and I hope improves and leads to bigger and better things.
Finally something else than "Be Orange". Almost anything else is better than that, not even clever, motto... I'm all for telling "the Wartburg story"...as long as we remember we're not in the "cheese state", and as we keep that in mind we don't make the stories so cheesy. One story is the fact that Wartburg has a lot of diversity...students from all over the world. However, many Wartburg students don't seem to care about that.
ReplyDeleteI guess I have some questions regarding this new marketing strategy Are the stories supposed to be realistic? Honest? Truly representative of Wartburg? I do believe we have many good stories, but in all honesty, I can't wait to see what the final product will be!
This is indeed a better alternative to 'be orange' (which I might add is a very ugly color), and it is an incentive that might be more interesting to the prospective students. Despite the fact that it is a better slogan/marketing strategy, who is telling the story? whose story are they telling? are they telling the whole story,or just what is favorable to wartburg?
ReplyDeleteAnother thing that should be taken into consideration is the fact that this slogan is divisive; it is easier for a lot of people to 'be orange', but not as easy to tell your wartburg story.I am concerned that this will marginalize a large segment of the wartburg community. It is indeed right to celebrate achievement and those with exceptional and extraordinary stories, but what about those with ordinary stories?
Here's a start:
ReplyDeleteWartburg: Where futures are made
Wartburg: We're better than our name sounds
Wartburg: Rockin' your world in Waverly!
Wartburg: A boogie-woogie burgh totally free of warts
Wartburg: Where winners are weaned
Wartburg: Charlie Sheen could not get in!
Wartburg: Number One on the Fox News Rankings
Wartburg: From Pre-Meds to Pot-Heads
Wartburg: From A to W (and then out of cash)
Wartburg: Where stories are made (up)
Wartburg: Secretariat once trained here
Wartburg: Funny Name, Serious Place
etc.
Oh wow, this seems like a fine time to return to Obamadogs. I definitely agree with numbers 3, 6, 8, 9, and 10.
ReplyDeleteSome additional suggestions...
Wartburg: Where As Are Given Away (major dependent)
Wartburg: Where your future is only 4 years (and $30,000 in debt minimally) away
Wartburg: A challenging liberal arts education (professor discretion applied)
Wartburg: No May term, no graduation! (without variance of course)
Those were all very negative, so on a positive
Wartburg: Where your future is what you make it!
Hey All - I haven't laughed that hard in awhile DT...
ReplyDeleteJust to clarify Dan, Isaiah, etc., every year there is a "theme" as this year was the "Year of Community." This "Tell the Wartburg Story" is simply the theme for the year, not the replacement of Be Orange, which I happen to like, such a bold color!
In all seriousness, I feel that with Wartburg's recent decisions regarding faculty hiring, department consolidation, and pay-freezes that we do not want people to know the current "Wartburg Story". Therefor, it seems that we will invent the "Wartburg Story" based on what we want people to think of the college, but not based on the focus of what Wartburg should be. This focus should be on the liberal arts education that has been inherent in the college. Letting faculty go and not hiring tenure-track faculty to fill positions is not the way to do that in my opinion.
You may recall from _The Things They Carried_, one of those "you don't have to do it" assignments from OrangeExcel, that O'Brien distinguishes between "Truth" and "Narrative Truth." The former is concerned with actual, empirical reality; the latter deals with stories in the sense that Trevor is implying in the last comment. (That is, the Wartburg Story the College will seek to tell is one that will pass as "narrative truth," no matter how discomfiting the fit with reality. Stephen Colbert gets at the same thing with his notion of "truthiness" in the skit he does on Wikipedia.)
ReplyDeleteLest we get too self-congratulatory as seekers of true truth, we best not forget that politics is saturated with "narrative truth." Indeed, my most earnest complaint about Obama's presidency is its failure to foster a narrative on how the world works that can take on the "Reagan rap." For thirty years now, Americans have been dancing to the "government is evil (and/or incompetent)" tune that The Gipper spun and sung repeatedly in virtually every speech. That this was lunacy in an ostensible democracy -- where we are the government -- has not caught on among Democratic presidents Clinton and Obama, whose first order of business (as per presidential historian Stephen Skowronek) would be to take a battering ram to the prevailing ethos that government sucks. As long as that story prevails with greater "truthiness" than the alternative, the wars over the budget, taxes, the wars, who governs, etc. will be fought on Republicans' (or Tea Partiers') turf. And we will continue to get the government that our sorry narrative accounts deserve: a self-destructive, upwardly redistributing entity whose self-appointive task is to preside over the Darwinian survival of the richest. So, let the fun begin: imagining and constructing "the Wartburg story."