Samantha J. King
Physical Education Program, University of Arizona, USA

Branded Learning: Athletic Apparel Contracts, U. S. Universities, and the Corporatization of Educational Culture

The commercialization of college sports in the United States has received considerable scholarly attention in recent years (Duderstadt, 2000; Shulman & Bowen, 2001; Sperber, 1990; Sperber, 2001; Watterson, 2000; Zimbalist, 1999). Taken together, this research has highlighted the increasingly large sums of money athletic departments derive from boosters, television rights, licensing, and corporate sponsorship. It has also questioned the effects of these relationships on the academic performance of athletes, on gender equity, on the pay and working conditions of athletes and coaches, on the disparities between rich and poor programs, and on the values of higher education more broadly. This paper seeks to move beyond this approach by exploring how one particular feature of commercialization - athletic apparel and equipment contracts between universities and multinational corporations such as Nike and adidas - is helping to reconfigure campus culture as a whole. That is, it seeks to problematize research that focuses either very specifically on the effects of commercialization on the organization and values of college athletics in itself, or very generally on the 'educational mission' of the university.
     Building on the insights of Naomi Klein's (2002) No Logo, I argue that these contracts reveal how corporations are not simply aiming to sponsor the university, but to be the university. This is evidenced in, among other things, hyper-policing of corporate logos, the guarantee of office and retail space on campus to corporate partners, agreements to give corporations first refusal on signage for any new spaces that become available, the corporate take-over of recruitment of both athletes and the general student body, and non-disparagement clauses which ban criticism of corporate partners by members of the university community. In evaluating the effects of these contracts, I show how universities are competing with one another to offer corporations the most lucrative contracts, often with the least amount of accountability to students and faculty. And, moreover, how the university is being transformed into a space of leisure consumption dominated by an increasingly small number of corporations.