Before LSU football head coach Nick Saban could begin planning his strategies for the 2003 football season, before students could envision what would eventually be a national victory, University administrators were dreaming something of their own.
They envisioned the reputation of LSU as having star scholars as well as star athletes. It would overcome the stereotypes that southern students and professors are the slow-talking, slow-thinking characters seen on old situation comedies such as “The Andy Griffith Show” or “Dukes of Hazard.”
From that dream, the LSU National Flagship Agenda was born in fall 2002 as a concise plan for the University to overcome decades of regional bias and years of cultural conditioning associated with southern schools of higher education.
Despite the enthusiasm from those involved, the Flagship Agenda will not be an easy sell.
“I have Northeast friends who, when I said I was going to Louisiana, they said, ‘I’m not sure they have indoor plumbing,'” said Chancellor Mark Emmert. “That’s an exaggeration, but they really thought I’d lost my mind because they just couldn’t imagine that there’s a level of intellectual sophistication that rivals anything anyplace else.”
The agenda, often confused with the Master Plan, is a long range endeavor that will require money and a major public relations campaign to push the academic side of the University to climb national rankings and produce nationally competitive faculty, students and graduates.
Instead of looking at the Associated Press or Coaches’ polls to determine status, success will be measured by national surveys of higher education such as the U.S. News and World Report, and by perceptions of the South outside the region.
Measuring Excellence
Each year, U.S. News and World Report releases its annual college and university rankings leading some to shine in glory and forcing others to go back to the drawing board.
The magazine allocates scores in the following manner: 15 percent for student selectivity (how many a school accepts compared to the number it denies), 20 percent for faculty resources, 20 percent for graduation and retention rate, 10 percent for financial resources, 5 percent for alumni donations, 5 percent for graduation rate performance and – most heavily weighed — 25 percent for peer assessment.
Richard Folkers, US News and World Report media relations, said the purpose of the rankings is for informative reasons but others use them as official bragging rights.
He said the rankings are a journalistic endeavor, and U.S. News uses statistical data to rank schools in particular categories.
Although Folkers says the magazine’s purpose for ranking colleges is not to declare a certain winner per se, he does recognize that schools consider the results as a report card of their performance, and also how they need to improve.
“These rankings don’t make a year-to-year comparison,” Folkers said. “It’s not who’s up or who’s down. There are schools that eagerly await these things because they use them for marketing, but this is done for the students and their parents. We don’t do these for the schools.
“I know schools pay attention to the rankings and whether there’s a rise or fall, but I wish they wouldn’t do that. It’s silly to try and manipulate how you score. This isn’t a horse race.”
Although U.S. News conducts the surveys with good intentions, it seems inevitable that the rankings will hold much weight among schools.
Jason Droddy, the Chancellor’s office coordinator, said comparative data is important because it can show people the actions a university is taking to improve.
“It’s like a yard-stick to gauge our success,” Droddy said.
Showing success to prospective students and future employees in journalistic rankings provides significant advantages if a school can show a high position, according to University Provost Risa Palm.
Palm said University officials want higher rankings in order for the people of Louisiana to have more opportunities. A testament to the University’s desire of obtaining this status has been the incorporation of the LSU National Flagship Agenda into almost every aspect of the University’s operations.
“[The Flagship Agenda] is for the citizens of Louisiana to have a great public university, and for graduates to have a huge advantage when they graduate,” Palm said. “It adds to the economy to have successful graduates and professors. It’s about getting the very best faculty and students.”
Administrators have chosen 23 peer land-grant universities to use as models and benchmarks in striving for “the best.” Those schools are separated into two categories of regional and national peers.
Having strong leaders to work with and look up to can help the University’s project along, but some officials attribute LSU’s third-tier ranking to a generally low opinion of the school.
Overcoming the
Southern bias
The peer assessment of presidents and chancellors, provosts and admissions deans from universities and colleges nationwide can be a deciding factor in the outcome of a school’s rank, a reality that hits home for LSU administrators.
Palm said the University is one-tenth of a point from advancing to second tier status.
“There are only 650 people who vote [for the U.S. News and World Report survey],” she said. “We’re really being hurt on that part of the survey.”
Palm and Droddy think LSU’s score in this category is a direct result of an unfair national bias against southern schools as not being up to par with Northeast or West Coast schools.
Gaines Foster, a history professor who teaches History of the New South, said there has been a long tradition of others not taking Southern life seriously.
“It’s two reasons — for a very long time, the American South did neglect education, and the South’s image has been one of ‘leisure and hospitality’ or ‘backward and violent,'” he said. “Neither one reflects an educational background.”
Foster said stereotypes like these make it difficult for LSU to show its capabilities.
“Midwest universities have been more successful in changing their stereotypes, and the West Coast overcame it,” he said. “But changing all of that is a slow process.”
Palm, who has worked at or attended schools in every region of the country, admitted to having a similar bias.
“I’m not from the South, so I personally felt the bias until I moved to North Carolina,” she said. “People have this thought that all the great schools are in the Northeast or California. That perception has harmed people who graduate from southern schools or work at those schools.”
“There are cultural things about the South that are even portrayed in TV shows, such as ‘Dukes of Hazard’ and the ‘Andy Griffith Show’ that portrayed the South as slow-paced, slow-talking and slow-thinking,” Palm said.
Droddy said although he thinks the bias is present, other southern schools have fared well in this category.
Palm said the state of Louisiana is just as guilty of this bias.
“There’s a huge amount of modesty that Louisianians have,” she said. “The Flagship Agenda will give us confidence, and hopefully people will begin to not ask ‘Why Louisiana?,’ but ‘Why not?'”
Emmert agrees there is a cultural bias in Louisiana among its citizens.
“Louisianian’s have a renascence to brag,” he said. “We’re a little insecure over here so people don’t brag, and they don’t like to compete quite as much in national stuff, thinking, ‘I don’t know if I’m going to win that stuff.'”
Having regional support and confidence is just as important to selling the University in a positive way.
Emmert said once you have a great reputation, like with Harvard, you get a halo effect. People assume any program from a top institution is the best. But, the opposite is true for other, less familiar institutions.
“We get the reverse halo effect,” he said. “We have to tell our story really loudly to also get people to understand the transformation that LSU is in the middle of.”
Selling LSU
Telling the University’s story is going to take an aggressive approach by top officials and University Relations.
Gene Sands, University Relations director, said the department hopes to establish top-of-mind thinking with university presidents, provosts and deans.
“Positioning is key,” Sands said. “We want to do certain things to reposition the University. Large state universities have for a long time enjoyed recognition for sports programs, but we want to start attacking aggressively the academic side.
“We want to achieve national recognition for LSU as a ranked, important, researched university.”
And Emmert plans to use “shameless marketing” to repeat that message as often as possible.
Emmert and Palm constantly send personally written letters to other presidents and provosts around the country to keep them updated on LSU’s other attributes besides sports.
“We need literally 100 people in America to circle three instead of two on our scale and we’d change tiers,” Emmert said. “So I write letters four or five times a year, sometimes six, to the 225 chancellors and presidents that are my counterparts in America bragging about LSU, which is shameless. Provost Palm does that to all her counterparts, so we’ve got a direct mail marketing system going.”
“It’s going to change. It’s taking longer than I wanted, but it’s going to change as everybody learns more.”
Palm said the idea of sending periodic letters to other provosts is to let them know LSU is proud of its National Championship win, but it’s working on academics as well.
“It’s a way to call attention to ourselves and point to other things,” she said.
Dane Strother, a partner at Strother-Duffy-Strother, a national political strategist firm in Washington, said if the University wants to improve its image it should continue to do so internally and through advertisements in trade and higher-learning publications.
Strother said it is even more important to keep focus on national polls and rankings.
“[The University] must improve its rankings in polls,” he said. “As you grow in the polls, then there will be a platform to explain the rest of what the school is doing. Some people can say they don’t pay attention to that stuff, but that’s bull.
“Those rankings may be superfluous to some, but everybody reads them. Even if it’s not a scientific poll, that’s where it needs to start.”
Strother said finding a hook or focus, such as the Sugar Bowl, for a marketing strategy can set the stage for a strong campaign.
“[LSU] can say it’s not just our football, but we’re best in the nation about X-Y-Z as well,” he said.
University Relations and school administrators were thinking the same thing and quickly took advantage of the brief but influential attention.
Jumping on the football bandwagon
A “game plan” of letter-writing, as well as a slew of advertisements for the University, has been in effect for about four years now, but momentum has picked up tremendously since LSU’s national win.
“A great game plan on and off the field,” the University’s adopted slogan, was created after a quick round table brainstorming session at University Relations as soon as the Bowl Championship Series Commission announced LSU as a contender for the national title, said University Relations assistant director Holly Houk.
Houk said University Relations took out advertisements in the game day program, New Orleans Magazine, and radio and television spots circulating around the nationally publicized Sugar Bowl. In addition, advertisements have shown up in academic conference publications.
Sands said the University Relations has tried to take advantage of every avenue available. University Relations has taken donations and free publicity from area contributors, and even landed a space for an editorial column by Chancellor Emmert in the New York Times.
“We started working on [the New York Times opinion piece] last spring,” Sands said. “This was [Emmert’s] chance to answer the question of, ‘What are you doing besides playing football?’ There is a very strong bias against Southern schools from the Northeast.
“They think we still have mud between our toes and our neurons don’t connect. We didn’t know when we could get that piece to run, but we knew there was a very good chance we’d be BCS champions, so we had to be relentless in pursuing this and getting the story.”
Emmert acknowledges that sports bring more public support and enthusiasm to the school than academic successes. But he said sports still open more doors for marketing the University.
“We could have won three Nobel prizes and they wouldn’t have let me run that op-ed [in New York Times],” he said. “We play one football game and we land a picture of a physicist in the sports pages of the Sunday Times. That’s worth a lot.”
A concern for some is whether using the University’s football success as an outlet for advertising will reinforce the stereotype of LSU as a “football factory.”
But Houk said the Sugar Bowl publicity was just another way for people to learn about other programs at LSU.
“The way the Chancellor describes it is that athletics is the front porch of the University,” she said. “If that’s the way we can let everyone know about us, then we’re going to use it.”
Houk said there are no plans for a national campaign as far as advertising because of limited funding, but the University is trying to gain national exposure for its accomplishments through more newspaper articles as well as radio advertisements.
Officials hope that having a heightened national profile will in time make Louisiana State University a well-known university But this advantage does not come cheap.
Buying Attention
Keeping up with recruitment efforts is an expensive endeavor.
One full-page, four-color print ad in the Baton Rouge Business Report cost $2,870 in June 2003, and 30,000 out-of-state recruiting brochures cost more than $25,000.
University Relations spent more than $38,000 on Sugar Bowl promotion alone, not to mention other expenses during the year.
Thanks to generosity from community businesses, such as Lamar Advertising and Domino Sugar, University Relations was able to do more for less.
Houk said University Relations collaborated with Domino Sugar to make commemorative Sugar Bowl packets for New Orleans restaurants and venues.
Garth Roberts, Lamar Advertising vice president, said Lamar donated 10 billboards for “LSU Welcomes you to the Nokia Sugar Bowl” outdoor advertisements.
“LSU paid for the vinyl at a discounted price, and we donated the space and time,” Roberts said. “We [donated] because we live here and work here.
“This wasn’t a dollars and cents thing. LSU certainly could afford it, but there’s still paperwork involved and by the time it would have gone through the proper channels, the moment would have moved. Timing is everything.”
And University Relations understands timing means taking advantage of a window of opportunity or having it pass by.
Sands said University Relations has tried to use every possible avenue available to get their message out, and using the University’s success has given them the chance to create a key focus.
“If we hadn’t been No. 1, it would have been a different campaign,” Sands said. “The Chancellor has been very good with helping us out. We had some last-minute opportunities come up, and he said, ‘Yes, let’s do it.'”
Emmert said the University has a budget set aside for marketing expenses, and University Relations was able to pay for other things by using private money from fund raising.
“We tried really hard to be as frugal as we could,” he said. “There were a lot of things I would have loved to have done that were ridiculously expensive that we just couldn’t do, like print ads.
“I’m adamantly convinced it was a great investment. We took advantage of the media, and we worked a lot to make sure we were available to anyone in America that wanted to talk. I gave more interviews, and every time we ended up talking about the Flagship Agenda and the character of the kids instead of whether or not Marquis Hill was going to stay at LSU.”
Emmert thinks public relations is an essential tool for endorsing the Flagship Agenda and caliber of the University because it reaches audiences quickly.
Seeing Results
Whether by opinion columns, promotions at academic conferences, personally written letters or a national football title, people are starting to notice.
“We had the president’s office at the University of Maine two weeks ago call down here because they’re trying to identify the universities that are having the greatest transformation in American higher education,” Emmert said. “They want to learn about [those schools] because they want to fix some things at their place, and they picked LSU.
“Now, when people sitting in Orono, Maine, who couldn’t find Baton Rouge on a map, are calling us up and saying, ‘Hey, something cool’s happening down there,’ you have an impact. And so we have to keep saying it. You can’t just say it once.”
The University’s latest push forward caught the eye of Mississippi State University Provost Peter Rabideau and Virginia Polytechnic Institute Provost Mark McNamee, who both received letters from Palm.
McNamee said the first thing he thinks when he hears “L-S-U” is “a major university in Louisiana” rather than a “good football team.”
“[LSU] is beginning to get national attention,” he said. “I went to a [National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges] conference where a lot of administrators from different schools go, and I heard some discussion of LSU there.”
He said his letter from Palm said she was pleased the school won the BCS National Championship, but the school was doing other things as well.
“It’s nice to know that you’re building up academic profile as well,” McNamee said.
Sands said a faculty member who attended a Modern Language Association conference came back with news of a buzz about the University.
“He came back and said, ‘I could not believe how many people came up to me to ask what was going on at LSU, and that they see us on the move,'” Sands said. “Those are a group of academics out there who gather to talk about Shakespeare and Chaucer who are hearing this message, and that’s exactly the kind of audience we want to reach.”
“The fact that we hired Ed Seidel, a world-class astrophysicist, from the Einstein Institute in Berlin is huge. Those are the star quarterbacks in the academic field.”
Palm wants others to know the University better because it will give Louisiana residents and LSU graduates more opportunities.
“We’re trying to be a national player,” she said. “Parents and prospective students look at [the rankings], and potential employees and donors pay attention to it as well.”
“This has an impact on how we recruit employers, faculty and students. It’s not a direct feedback, but indirect. We don’t want to be evaluated for more than we deserve, but we want it to be fair.”
For Emmert, the more recognition and higher rankings will provide a sense of excitement around the University and create more faith in LSU’s capabilities as an institution.
“One assumes that it has impact on how people look at us in terms of student and faculty recruitment, but it’s institutional pride,” he said. “You could ask the same thing about winning a football championship. How are we different today? You didn’t see any dramatic change on campus after the Christmas break, but it sure had a positive impact on the way people look at us and the way they think about us. It just affects people’s mindset.
“People want to be a part of winners. You can’t go to people and say, ‘Oh look how terrible we are. Give us some money and respect.’ They want to be part of something that’s energetic and moving forward. The fact that we’re stuck in the third tier is ridiculous, because we’re objectively better than some of the schools in the second tier. And that’s why we’re working to get us out of there.”
As progress develops, the University soon will become the nationally competitive state university people know it can be. The benefits could reach many aspects of the University, from getting more research and grant dollars, hiring more faculty and having a competitive academic future. But more importantly, for students graduating from a nationally known university, degrees could be worth more and produce better opportunities.