"Cellar door. Sell a door. Selladore. It almost “produces an enchanting proper name,”  C.S. Lewis wrote in 1963. These musings on the the aesthetics of words are often attributed to his friend, JRR Tolkein, but my understanding is that it was actually coined by a woman, Helen Keller. She suppoosedly mentioned this phrase as being especially beautiful in an article in The Washington Post in 1903. I haven't been able to find this article, so it may be apocryphal. But if it's not a true story, it's nonetheless interesting to think about. Who better than Hellen Keller to consult about the qualities of a name?

When I switched my major from Biology to Journalism at The W, I found myself taking American Literature. English Literature. Philosopy. Things we considered important at the time. I discovered my favorite poets & that poetry wasn't just that block of formated text that you skip over to get back to the prose. I learned about rhythm & rhyme & imagery. Assonance & consonance. Meter & tone. Onomatopoeia.

Onomatopoeia. Ono-mato-poeia. What a great word!

In the halls of The W, do they still discuss silly things like the beauty of words? It's understandable that we may consider these things frivolous now. We live in brutally efficient, economic times. "Economic" is also a funny word. It means "of & associated with money & the economy." However, it also means sparse. Spare. Cut the frills. Concentrate on what's most effective. "What direction is the economy headed?" or "Buy the economy package of toilet paper!" Thinly assembled & lots of it. Cheap.

Considering what has happened to the business of journalism, (the 5th estate) over the years, & the consequent state of our politics & our nation, I think we would be foolish to disregard the lesson about what is lost when market forces are the sole arbiter of what is of value. We must have values beyond simply what will make us money. That said, market forces must be acknowleged & responded to in order to thrive or even merely exist. They compell us to action.

In branding, a commonly used tool is the "brand archetype wheel." The brand archetype wheel is based upon Carl Jung's personality archetypes and is useful for determining the "personality" of the brand positioning. This is important for determining how the brand presents itself. And how the public percieves it.

Where would "Brightwell" live on the brand archetype wheel? Squarely & solely in the "Caregiver" or "service provider" segment. I think it's intended to also carry elements of the "Sage" segment, (which would be crucial for a University) but that part does not appear to reach people because of the ambiguity of the word "well."

Now, let's talk about it's asssociations. What are they? We live in this age where there is very little under the sun in possesion of a blank slate. Everything has associations. So let's google it. Early stage vetting.

Well, turns out It is "a FinTech company dedicated to empowering the financial freedom of global migrant workers." Oh & it's also a chain of mental health facilities. And it's an antibactieral veterinary product. Oh...and apparently to the kids, the name is slang for a sex addict. (According to Urban Dictionary.)

It's silly. Urban Dictionary is not an authority, but if your fly is down, it's helpful to have someone tell you that you are vulnerable to an avenue of ridicule; that you are starting out from the position of "the butt of jokes that write themselves." Freshmen are juvenile, that joke probably wouldn't go away. A former women's college whose name means "sex addict?" That's going to fester.

Ok, so let's flip it. What about "Wellbright"? Can we get "The W" back? What is Wellbright? It's an employee wellness company. See what I mean? Im not banging on it, I'm just pointing out that "Wellbright" is consisently in the "Caregiver" / "Service Provider" segement. & There's absolutely nothing wrong with that. It's just that these brand positionings explicitly reflect a more limited focus on a specific vocational positioning. That's all well & good, but its eggs in a single basket. You have to consider if the rebrand doesn't work. These brandings are more constrained. They will compell future administrations to a course, even if that course is to reverse or adjust this rebranding. IF that is even an option.

As these brandings are more constrained. They are a smaller version of what "The W" was, is, or could be. They are a smaller version of what the Alumni and public percieves the W to be. And that is the motivating force behind the greater mass of dissent.

Not all, but a sizable contingent of the vocal Alums are likely humanities majors. I would wager that you find fewer dissenters among the Nursing program. This brand positioning is good for the nursing department. Accounting & nursing etc. are well represented. Liberal arts feel aggressively shut out. Maybe that's the point. We've gone through this period, the conclusion of which has cast a stern verdict upon frivolous majors as a squandering of opportunity, money & lives. The student debt crisis looms. Gen Z can be impressively practical when it comes to these matters. A Liberal Arts Education may be a harder sell these days. But is a Liberal Arts Education truly frivolous? Should we throw it out or should it adjust with the times?

If you listen to a lot of the women that have attended The W, there is a recurring sentiment that they see, rightly or wrongly, The W as Mississippi's Ivy. Or could be. Has the potential to be. That is a big part of The W's current brand equity.

They either had this impression when recruited or through exposure to The W's history & traditions. Or maybe it's the writers symposium. Or maybe they were simply impressed with the quality of the education. Many felt that The W punched above it's weight. It's moderate size was an asset. You recived direct attention from your professors, some of whom were from places like Harvard & other Ivys. Students were afforded the opportunity to meet people like Kurt Vonnegut at the Welty writers symposium. (To a guy in his 20s in the 90s, this was epic.)

There is a tension between the incompatible goals of wanting to preserve the identity & brand of the University that issued their degrees, & the opposing desire of distancing itself from being a institution where half of their target market feels like an afterthought.

There seems to be an attitude that moving away from history & traditions is the trend that institutions are now following. The trend is also for colleges & Universities to have falling enrollment. If the trend is recession, then don't follow the trend. To sacrifice the identity of The W, is to feign there is nothing of value in The W's identity & history. & what would replace it? A vessel in the doldrums is not going to be saved by ditching its sails for oars. The W's history might be the only wind it has. Any positioning that discards the W's brand equity of respectibility, should have a plan for what replaces it, or failure of the re-brand will be impending - possibly pushing the institution accross a threshold of failure as well.

A proposal was made by a group of Alums that wanted "The W, A Mississippi University." That's a little awkward, but there's some merit in the idea. It underscores that "The W" is "The W."

The problem is the name conspicuously outlines a void. It immediately prompts the question, what does the W stand for? Well, the W stands for a position from which the school is trying reorient. That just takes us back to Mississippi University for Women.

The problem statement:

What is the value proposition of a liberal arts eduction in todays world?

Steve Jobs chose to invest heavily into font rendering & the visual design of Apple products because of a caligraphy class he took in college. Literally, the difference between Microsoft & Apple is exposure to a Liberal Arts Education.

Tech has driven so much of our economic growth over the past two decades. In the early days of the dot-com boom & what we called "Web 2.0" there was a high demand for liberal arts / humanities grads. Specifically liberal arts grads who could maybe code a little or do graphic design. As the market matured, the barriers to entry changed. Blue-sky invention was valued less. Specialization more. "Learn to code" was the mantra told to all the kids & the under-employed. This was good advice but on a downward trend as supply grew. Design is still valued, but designs have kind of standardized.

Now, we have entered a different era. Turn on the news. The tech companies frequently announce mass layoffs. There are hundreds of applicants to any given job ad. There'a alot of talk about "recalibration after Covid," but I know for a fact that many of the layoffs are due to the emergence of the technology called the "Generative Pretrained Transformer." Generative Artifical Intelligence. There is a lot of hype around AI right now. Some founded, some unfounded. But the thing to understand is that barring some "black swan event" or major restricive legal action, AI is currently at its lowest level of capability that it will ever have. It will only get better at tasks currently executed by white collar workers. & it's expected to do so on an exponential curve.

All this is really just to say, these times are times of constant and dramatic chage. Kids are lost and lack the tools to navigate the present, never mind the future. Many have come to see college as part of the problem rather than the solution.

Addressing the situation.

“Even in America, where poetry isn’t important to most people, everyone recognizes that at crucial times prose just doesn’t cut it. When we fall in love, when we get married, or have a baby, when somebody dies, prose doesn’t do it. We need poetry at these times. One of my ideas is that if people could work poetry into their daily lives, their daily lives would be better—more pleasurable, more thoughtful. As a country we’d have more imagination, and with more imagination there would be more empathy toward each other and toward the other countries in the world.”