My local NPR station (well, the one of the two that I generally listen to) is WAMU. Recently, they decided that they needed a slogan, for some reason. They came up with 'The Mind is Our Medium'.
I don't really have much issue with their choice of slogan; it's a bit pretentious, but that's a minor veniality.
The part that I can't figure out, and why I wrote this, is why they wanted to have a slogan to begin with. If this were a commercial enterprise (read: for profit), I would totally understand. But as a non-profit entity that gets a lot of its funding via contributions from listeners, I don't get it at all. Do they somehow think this slogan is going to increase listenership?
And if it does, what does that get them? They can't charge higher rates for advertising.
Are they going to stomp out the other local NPR station? That would be sad, on a number of levels, if so.
Or is this just part of the increasing effort to treat the university as a money-generating institution, which seems to be sweeping across many colleges and universities? The school did already lose one president a few years ago, because that was his MO, and he abused the fund-raising budget to stroke his own ego. (You know, thinking about it, part of the reason was that he used his chauffeur as an errand boy for personal errands, but I never thought to question why he had a chauffeur to begin with. I really can't see a reason for a university president to even need a chauffeur.)
I wish my snark-generator was working a bit better at the moment; this definitely deserves more mockery than I've written.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment