The Disneyfication of a University

by Dane Kennedy, Academe Blog:  https://academeblog.org/2020/01/30/the-disneyfication-of-a-university/

The George Washington University faculty and staff ain’t got no culture. Or worse, we’ve got a negative culture. This was the verdict of the Disney Institute, which the president of our university commissioned last year to assess the culture on our campus. Fortunately, the institute, which is the “professional development and external training arm of The Walt Disney Company,” has a remediation plan. It has designed workshops to teach us the cultural “values” and “service priorities” we evidently require.

The culture that Disney has crafted for us is not, it should be said, the high culture of the arts that the poet Matthew Arnold described as “sweetness and light.” Nor is it the anthropological notion of culture - a system of meaning that shapes social behavior. Rather, it is corporate culture, a creature that has become all the rage in the business world - and now, it seems, is burrowing its way into universities. Its professed aim is to instill a sense of shared purpose among employees, but its real objective is far more coercive and insidious.

Our president is rumored to have forked over three to four million dollars to the Disney Institute to improve our culture (he refuses to reveal the cost). A select group of faculty and staff, those identified as opinion leaders, are being offered all-expenses paid trips to the Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando “to gain first-hand insight into Disney’s approach to culture.” For everyone else, the university is conducting culture training workshops that run up to two hours. All staff and managers are required to attend. Faculty are strongly “encouraged” to participate, and some contract faculty, who have little job security, evidently have been compelled to do so.

I attended one of these workshops. It was a surreal experience. About a hundred mostly sullen university employees - maintenance workers, administrative staff, faculty members, and more - filled a ballroom. Two workshop leaders strained to gin up the crowd’s enthusiasm with various exhortations and exercises, supplemented by several slickly produced videos. The result was a cross between a pep rally and an indoctrination camp.

We were introduced at the beginning of the workshop to the university’s brand new slogan: “Only at GW, we change the world, one life at a time.” Hold on. We change the world only at GW? And we achieve this absurd ambition how? The answer, it turns out, is pretty vacuous - by being nice. “Care,” we were told, is one of our three “Service Priorities.” We were given “Service Priorities” table-tent cards, conveniently sized for our pocketbooks and billfolds so we can whip them out whenever we needed to remind ourselves how we change the world. These cards offer a series of declarative statements - pabulum, some might say - about our “care” priorities. Here’s a sample: “I support a caring environment by greeting, welcoming, and thanking others.” To help us care for others, the university has established a “positive vibes submission” website, where we “can send a positive vibe to someone.” It was hard to detect many positive vibes in the workshop itself.

The other two “service priorities” give us a clearer idea of the culture initiative’s real agenda. One is “safety;” the other, “efficiency.” Both exhort employees to improve their work performance. The very first “safety” recommendation is an injunction to “keep areas clean, well-maintained, and inviting.” An important measure of “efficiency” is a willingness to “embrace change and [be] open to new ways of working.” One might wonder whether work efficiency would be enhanced by redirecting the millions of dollars that are going to the Disney Institute into staff salaries or bonuses instead. But that misses the point. The main purpose of this corporate culture initiative is to create a more disciplined and compliant workforce. Our workshop leaders actually acknowledged that “compliance” is a central pillar of the project.

Lastly, we were introduced to “Our GW Values” - “ours” only in the sense that they were being imposed on us. One might think that our president would be interested in promoting and honoring the values that are specific to our mission as a university, such as innovative research, teaching excellence, critical inquiry, and new ideas. Think again. As crafted by the Disney Institute and its administrative acolytes, “Our GW Values” are “integrity,” “collaboration,” “courage,” “respect,” “excellence,” “diversity,” and “openness.” All worthy values, to be sure, but is it possible to offer a more generic and innocuous set of standards?

The GW culture initiative can be summed up in two words: Mickey Mouse.

Guest blogger Dane Kennedy is the Elmer Louis Kayser Professor of History and International Affairs at George Washington University.