Below, you can read or skim this excellent and important article from Planning for Higher Education. Please do share this URL with any faculty colleagues you know who might understand the value of this for their campus.

The authors are faculty at the University of North Texas who reviewed peer institutions for faculty senate missions, analyzed them, and engaged their faculty in a process resulting in a faculty senate mission statement.

Here, you can also access an interactive beta SCUP semantic analysis of the document, where you can explore its facts, summaries, and key terms in a customizable fashion.

That analysis tells us that the following are the top ten "facts" in this article:

Here's your SCUP Link to "The 'Black Art' of Campus Branding"

What's a good brand? Why? How about an example or two? This interview by Jeff Wendt, of Today's Campus, with Rob Moore, managing partner of Lipman & Hearne, is brief, but it does answer some of those questions. We think that Northern Arizona University's slogan is excellent: 

Q: Is there a noteworthy example at Northern Arizona University?

A. Alumni there felt strongly that they received a great education. But their employers and peers did not share their high regard. An alternate narrative was necessary. The brand campaign led with the message "Mountain Air Makes You Smarter." Each alum now had a new and effective response to the question 'Why did you go to Northern Arizona?' Enrollment has soared.

In Florida, they definitely seem to be mostly going for that mile. And it's not primarily competition with 4-year colleges that worry many, it's a concern that community college 4-year programs might dilute the original community college mission. 

“There are a lot of different types of students who knock at the door of community colleges,” said Hagedorn, who before moving to Iowa State was a longtime educational policy researcher at the University of Florida. “I just worry that they’re not going to be able to serve all those different types if they’re bringing in more four-year program students. There will be less room for remediation and truly vocational programs. Some are not going to be as well-served as others. We have to remember the reason community colleges were established in the first place.”

Still, Hagedorn conceded that scholars do not know enough about these community college baccalaureate programs to say whether they have adversely affected existing two-year programs. As to why the furor in Florida over these degrees had died down, she said the answer was simple.

"The cry that ‘oh my god, the community colleges are going to be taking away our students’ didn’t happen,” Hagedorn said. “There’s no shortage of students going to the University of Florida or the University of Central Florida or to any of Florida’s other universities right now.”