Bright Satanic Mills: Universities, Regional Development and the Knowledge Economy

Not so long ago, in a dimly remembered world, universities were in the habit of advertising themselves principally through the medium of the prospectus. Prospectuses varied enormously in their length, their design quality and their command of grammar, in the ease with which they fitted through the average letter box and in their propensity to induce premature sleep amongst their readership. In essence, though, they were simple documents whose basic format varied little between institutions. They had a single, well-defined audience - potential students - and were dominated by factual content which alerted this readership to the courses on offer at any one time. A secondary aspiration of prospectuses, achieved with varying degrees of success, was to give an upbeat view of the environment - be it scholarly, social, cultural or economic – that students would encounter upon taking up their studies. Today, the armoury of university self-promotion is vastly enlarged, and its weapons are trained on a broader array of targets. The gentle, if loaded, competition for students that characterized the 'prospectus age' has given way to a thinly disguised war for investment waged, in part, through a multitude of branding exercises in which universities - and, increasingly, their component faculties, schools, departments, research centres and even individual academics – parade their ostensible strengths and draw a discrete veil over any weaknesses. Whilst prospectuses have certainly not disappeared, they now jostle for attention, in the labyrinth that is the modern university website, with a battery of annual reports, benchmarking exercises, performance reviews and corporate mission statements.