Carlson’s Upgraded Sponsorship
I took a trip through the brand new business school building on campus today, which I didn’t even realize had opened yet. I decided to take some pictures. (With my Centro, so excuse the relatively poor quality.)
When I first arrived on campus six years ago, people in the social sciences were shocked at how the (then only, but now first) business school building on campus had begun selling sponsorships of all their classrooms. So students were attending classes in the “Wells Fargo Classroom” for example. All the rooms in this first building have signs like this:
For people in the social sciences & humanities this was, of course, a shocking example of the corporatization of higher education. With this new building, however, they’re taking the sponsorship to a whole new level:
Yes, that’s the 3M© classroom, the General Mills© classroom and the Target© atrium. Giant signs with logos and all. All the classrooms get this treatment. Here are the SuperValu© and the Travelers© classrooms, respectively:
And, like the first business school building, there’s massive amounts of open space in the new building:
I remember when I was a first year grad student, Tim Clark gave us a tour of campus and when we got to the business school he pointed out that you could always tell how much money a school had by how much space they wasted in their building. Here, for comparison, is the largest open space in the sociology department:
