When I received Chancellor Cheek’s e-mail this morning my heart stopped, and not just because I don’t like the color orange. “Our brand”? Is there no shelter from consumerism in this city? I can’t have a cup of coffee in the morning, get the news, drive to school without brands attacking me in swarms, everyone trying to promote themselves, sell themselves, slap a sticker on my bike, paste a label on my water, and if there is one respite, I would expect to find it on the university campus.
    
Can’t a university just be what it is? If we try to condense the spirit of higher learning into a brand then we end up with a can of tomato soup, not real ideas, and somewhere along the way, the Max Webers, Mikhail Bakhtins and Jean-Paul Sartres get squeezed out while they’re hidden away in some corner of the library studying. Do we all have to be cheerleaders, sell coupon books? Or can some of us be left alone from all this brand competition so that we can get some real research done?
   
 I know Chancellor Cheek and the rest of UT’s administration would say that we’ll never get into the top 25 if our professors don’t wear sandwich boards and hand out orange balloons to applicants, but honestly the easiest way to get to the top 25 is just to physically destroy our competition.
    
No, but really, making it to the top 25 means that we’ll have bumped someone out, and that kind of competition is precisely the opposite of the spirit of higher education. I would agree that a little competition is good for morale, but the UT administration is trying to run a brand across a finish line while the rest of the animal drags itself down the track. Do they care that our humanities faculty is one of the most underpaid in the country, that a number of campus workers are living below the poverty level? Sure we might increase our budget in general, but money isn’t the issue here, it’s what we do with the resources we have. And that’s a question of values.
   
 I’m convinced that UT’s administration is out of touch with the spirit of higher education, a spirit which would persist if the University of Tennessee were to come crashing down tomorrow. It would reassert itself on a budget of bread, without a brand, without a website, without a national ranking, without an administration, but with only a group of honest professors and honest students. I am not at all hoping to see that day, but the simple relationship between teacher and student is the real foundation of our UT. What I do hope to see, then, is an end to this superficial UT branding and a reemergence of the will to learn, above all.


— Amien Essif is a senior in English. He can be reached at aessif@utk.edu.