Obviously they aren’t

I get into State College very rarely anymore, but when I do I like to pair what ever it is I’m doing in town with something interesting on Penn State’s University Park campus. During my last visit I walked to Pattee, caught Chris Ware and a display in Special Collections, and noted a large number of temporary small signs and very oversized banners that bear the slogan “Penn State Lives Here.” It carried no significance for me. It was a bit empty and generic, but I thought at the time that, even though I feel that way, maybe students just starting will see it for four years, and it will represent their experience at Penn State to them, not me. Okay, I guess. It certainly puts some distance between me and Penn State, though.

Then, posting to twitter, Onward State shared a pointer to a CDT opinion piece by Jay Paterno where Jay railed a bit about the new slogan. I read the piece and had to agree- and I don’t always agree with Jay. Maybe my gut reaction wasn’t so far off of other people’s impressions?

Well over a year ago I sat in a meeting in one of the large rooms at the Nittany Lion Inn. The Penn State Marketing folks were doing a presentation on new directions. These were folks who had worked for Penn State for years—not a group of high priced marketing folks from outside. The message, though, wasn’t ours. The message was what the outsiders had come up with. “Penn State Lives Here” wasn’t any where near a part of what we heard, but maybe it was in the background. What we were told was that we all needed to be delivering the same message. They felt that the slogan, “We Are Penn State” sounded arrogant. It was the first time I’d ever gone to one of these meetings, and it was my last. At the time I wrote a very brief blog post about the event:

“We are Penn State” is arrogant? No. Sorry. Not when we say it. You just sound too much like you want to be Penn State without our input

It had no comments, as most of my more political posts went untouched. I received a response from a high level administrator:

Felt the same way. “we are all brand ambassadors” was a quote that made my skin crawl. Good thing that happened at the end.

It was good to hear support from such quarters. I had verbal support from others, too. I think Penn State paid a lot of money to have someone who knows what to do come in and fix things. I also think that no one wants to tell those outsiders they’re wrong because it means the money was poorly spent, a decision poorly made. But folks? It’s so apparent that it’s not from Penn State: Penn State is so much better than that.