To the editor,

   
 I don’t know Lindsay Lee, but I thought that her editorial commentary in The Daily Beacon on Thursday was among the best, if not the best, I’ve read since I joined the faculty in 1975. As another member of the UTK faculty put it, “Boy, she’s sure got all that right.” I agree. The slogan BIG ORANGE, BIG IDEAS is incomplete. It implies that, as members of the faculty, we should spend our non-teaching, non-service time in our offices staring at the ceiling and thinking BIG IDEAS. I once attended a talk by a member of the UTK administrative staff who stated that what distinguished UTK and other research universities from colleges and universities without a major research emphasis was that, whereas the latter mainly communicate knowledge, the former both create and communicate knowledge. Through our research, we at UTK should be expected to create knowledge that is useful in a positive sense to the world at large. BIG IDEAS do not necessarily lead to much, if anything, positive. The Spruce Goose, New Coke, the Edsel, cold fusion, the hiring of Wade Gilley, John Shoemaker, John Peterson and Lane Kiffin, and the Spanish Inquisition, were all BIG IDEAS to someone. BIG IDEAS alone are not enough. Given all of the time, effort and money spent developing a new slogan, it’s too bad that it ended up just two lines long. I’d have suggested something like BIG ORANGE, BIG IDEAS, BIG RESULTS.
    
Maybe this whole exercise is the academic/corporate equivalent of a behavior, well known to behavioral ecologists, that is exhibited by wild lions. When the male leader of a pride becomes old or infirm, he is displaced by a younger male who immediately sets about killing all of the cubs sired by his predecessor, thereby removing any genetic vestige of the previous ruler. A few years ago, a former UT president also branded UT with a slogan or, rather, paid a consulting firm to come up with one: “Changing the future today.” Was that slogan flawed, or was it “killed off” by our current administration in an effort to proclaim dominance?


Arthur C. Echternacht
Professor in the Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology
echterna@utk.edu