September 22, 2023
Dear President Ono,
As an artist who examines how brand messaging presents fantasy as reality, I’ve been studying the promotional arm of the University of Michigan and their Fall 2022 Welcome Video emulating a jazzy musical production with a soundtrack reminiscent of Happy Days, High School Musical, or Conrad Birdie’s serenade through the town square. As you know, although U-M’s Welcome video was created to give the impression that the new president casually strolled through campus, it is, in fact, a highly choreographed piece of theater with “Santa Ono” as the leading character. One cast of students, dressed in bright and shiny U-M gear, rotates through the performance, shifting roles from strolling companion to background extra, to selfie-takers and high-five-slappers, in celebration of our new leader. It’s a 1950s-era, all-American, nostalgic, happy video.
And yet, the U-M Communications team launched this brand messaging at the point when the university community was still reeling from survivors’ accounts of assaults by alleged predators Conforth and Anderson. Just two years before, I’d sat in a room examining sexual misconduct umbrella policies with then-Provost Philbert, weeks before the whole country learned of his sexual predation, which went unchecked by U-M for decades. More accurately, U-M repeatedly elevated Martin Philbert to positions of power from which he destroyed lives and careers. The sparkly happiness of the fall 2022 Presidential Promotion and its obvious distraction to “wipe the slate clean” of decades of corruption and harm was, thus, an affront.
Amna Khalid and Jeffrey Aaron Snyder write that the ultimate goal of any university is critical inquiry, the determination “to navigate a world in which spin and misinformation are the order of the day.” We would suspect that critical inquiry and honesty are not the values of an academic institution that choreographs the image of a selfie-taking, high-fiving university president.
Even more bizarre, the student selected to be poet laureate of Santa Ono’s 2022 Presidential Inauguration reported that U-M Public Relations had stepped in after learning of her plans to write a poem about her single mother’s educational achievements. They wrote “Regarding the poem itself … – we feel that this poem should be written … in celebration of the President … a gift to him. Content ideas, or key words that might help – Michigan, he is of the people, … new beginnings, dawn of a new day, new energy on campus, uplifting, unique characteristics/specialties of Michigan, etc. The poem does not need to be long, but a nod to Santa Ono, and unique to Michigan.”
This instruction and the Welcome Video, the brand-managed university, and the confluence of propaganda and higher education are exactly the type of contradictions and manipulations that fascinate me. The president in the Welcome Video is represented as a slap-happy puppet, a “president of the people,” anointed by PR. To enable the implicit messaging to be more explicit, I built Santa Ono, the Mascot, and featured him in a recreation of the video, which I filmed on campus in summer 2023.
I wanted to let you know of the work. I’ve described the subject as not you, per se, but as the university marketing and the presentation of leadership through their lens. The jury is still out. I hope you value the work and the inquiry it brings to this campus.
Best,
Rebekah
