Boulder – Students start returning to campus this week, filling the bike racks and claiming tree-shaded study space on the grassy Quad near Old Main.
Their arrival marks a fresh start for the University of Colorado.
This is the year interim president Hank Brown will try to restore the university’s image and show the state and the nation that CU is more than a scandal-ridden football team, more than a professor who created a media firestorm with an essay about Sept. 11, 2001.
It’s the year when, the CU community hopes, the scandals will start to fade and the university will begin regaining its national prestige as a top research institution where 16 alumni have become astronauts and scientists have won the Nobel Prize.
Brown can’t possibly erase the scars in one year, but many in higher education say they hope his leadership will show a way out of the mess.
“Whenever a new president comes in, there’s always that opportunity for a fresh start,” interim chancellor Phil DiStefano said. “Certainly, the university and the Boulder campus need to rebuild its image.”
For starters, CU plans to survey the public to find out just how bad its image is.
The regents have hired Christopher Simpson, a Virginia consultant who handled the Bobby Knight controversy at Indiana University, to organize a survey of prospective students, alumni, donors and political leaders.
Then, CU might hit the public with television commercials, radio spots and newspaper ads to brag about the positive things happening at the university and explain policy changes that have strengthened the school since the scandals, said Ray Gomez, who recently resigned his position as vice president for communications.
“Refocus on its branding”
Gomez envisions a television commercial featuring a small-town Colorado student who becomes a doctor or teacher at CU, then returns home to open a practice or work in a classroom. Other ads could explain how CU instituted strict policies in the football program after allegations that recruits were lured with sex and alcohol, or how the university is reviewing its tenure process because of Ward Churchill’s essay comparing terrorism victims to a Nazi leader.
“This is a good opportunity to at least come at the problems that exist with a fresh perspective and determination,” Gomez said. “After 16 months of headlines and scandals and controversy, the university, in my opinion, needs to refocus on its branding. That has been significantly tainted.”
It’s impossible to say just how much the bad publicity has affected CU, but there are a few clues.
Fall enrollment is down 12 percent, including an 18 percent drop in out-of-state applications. Much of the decline, though, likely is related to rising tuition costs, CU officials have said.
Also, fundraising by the CU Foundation, which raises money for all four campuses, suffered some this year, in part because of the university’s image, said foundation president Michael Byram. But a strong push in the past few months and the belief among donors that CU would start fresh with a new president helped the foundation close the fiscal year with 4.5 percent more in donations than last year, Byram said.
Being more forthright CU also is overhauling its inner communications system.
That process began with an overall attitude change – CU officials realizing that being forthright about their problems was better than being defensive, Gomez said. CU should “come forward with its own bad news instead of it coming from a reporter or a legislator or a stakeholder of some kind,” he said.
Gomez and Mike Hesse, vice president for advancement, were hired by former president Betsy Hoffman to help deal with the football scandal. They resigned their $150,000-per- year jobs in time for last week’s arrival of Brown, who immediately eliminated their positions and eight others in the president’s office.
They leave behind a “communications and rebranding” plan that says CU had “untrained media spokespersons, including university leaders” and a “hostile and defensive attitude” toward the media. They suggest creating a “talking-points book” for regents and administrators, and holding more presidential breakfasts and lunches with the media, donors and politicians.
CU certainly isn’t the first university to worry about its image after a deluge of bad publicity.
“Large research universities increasingly devote care and attention to their public image,” said Terry Hartle, senior vice president for the American Council on Education in Washington, D.C. “This is not any different than what goes on with a large corporation in the private sector.”
Universities have the potential to become “public relations nightmares” because they have to worry about many audiences, including faculty, students, parents and political leaders. And most of what they do is open to public scrutiny because of access laws, Hartle said.
“What no organization would want is to have the football-slash-sex scandal and the controversial faculty member shape their image within the state and within the country,” he said. “It would be a loss for the university to have that happen, and it would be a loss for Colorado.”
Hartle says in speeches across the country that “wherever public education is going in the United States, Colorado is going to get there first.” Now, around the nation, “CU became defined by the football problems in particular,” he said.
CU regents authorized spending up to $150,000 per year on the latest public relations contract with Simpson Communications. The regents had already paid Simpson $24,400 to write a marketing plan and conduct a communications seminar, and the university had a contract for $275,000 with the Denver public relations firm GBSM, which helped CU deal with the football and Churchill scandals.
Still, the pressure to rebuild CU’s image falls mostly on the university’s new leadership.
“It’s going to take more than just PR to help change the image of the university,” said Rick O’Donnell, director of the Colorado Commission on Higher Education. “It’s going to take doing the right thing over a period of time.”
Staff writer Jennifer Brown can be reached at 303-820-1593 or jenbrown@denverpost.com.
