Eastern Washington University (EWU) has struggled with its identity for decades, and now its leaders may position the university as a “polytechnic” school, rather than its current model as a “regional comprehensive” in a bid to attract more students.
This idea isn’t new.
To stave off an enrollment crisis in 1997, a state legislator proposed that Washington State University take over EWU. The proposal failed after the university community rallied against it and then-Gov. Gary Locke signed a law that maintained the university’s independence.
But that law didn’t solve the enrollment shortfall, and EWU’s president at the time, Stephen Jordan, was already eyeing a course correction. Namely, he wanted to take the university to a “polytechnic” model, by definition focusing on the “STEM” fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Prominent examples of polytechnic institutions are Florida Polytechnic; Worcester Polytechnic; and California Polytechnic University, Humboldt. Humboldt was founded in 1913 as a teacher’s college but in 2022 transitioned to a polytechnic model, instituting dozens of new programs at a cost of half a billion dollars to California taxpayers.
At the turn of the century, the idea didn’t stick at EWU.
“In conversations with faculty and all of us, and as [Jordan] got to know us and got to know Eastern, he realized that's not who we really are,” said Dale Lindekugel, a longtime criminal justice professor who was then the president of the Faculty Organization and was in close talks with Jordan about the university’s direction. EWU is what’s known as a “regional comprehensive”: a kind of university that serves the broadest range of students, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds, primarily from local communities.
Jordan instead began portraying EWU as a school with “strong professional programs built on the liberal arts foundation,” Lindekugel said. There were some elements of polytechnic institutions — which many public schools like EWU have — and a strong presence of liberal arts.
“Enrollments rebounded,” Lindekugel added.
Today, though, regional comprehensives are at a decisive disadvantage compared with state flagships, and EWU — like many public universities across the nation — is once again experiencing an enrollment crisis. As a result, the university has an $11 million hole in its budget. And, according to its Marketing and Identity Workgroup, the solution is not to slim down athletic spending or lobby for better state funding. It’s to look back to Jordan’s original idea, embracing the logic of the market to bring the students back.
On May 1, the marketing workgroup, an ad hoc faculty body commissioned in October by EWU’s governing board specifically to look at polytechnic marketing, announced it wanted to add the phrase “the Region’s Polytechnic” to the university’s logo. It’s a tactic the top echelons of the university think might boost enrollment.
A polytechnic that’s not a polytechnic
Like it was decades ago, the idea to change models is still controversial, with much of the faculty saying EWU is not at its heart a polytechnic. And they worry that meddling with the university’s outward identity may mean more than marketing. One week after the marketing workgroup’s presentation at Showalter, on May 8, sociology professor and Faculty Organization President Pui-Yan Lam published remarks as part of her regular president’s report sharply criticizing the idea as one that could erode both liberal arts and diversity at EWU.
“I can think of one scenario where the polytechnic marketing pitch makes sense — if the niche that we are turning to is the conservative white population who are critical of the ‘liberal’ universities,” Lam wrote. “A polytechnic marketing campaign may signal to that market niche that we are different from those ‘liberal’ or ‘woke’ public universities where faculty in those impractical disciplines like ethnic studies (or sociology) seek to ‘indoctrinate’ students.”
RANGE asked EWU spokesperson Dave Meany to respond to those criticisms. He said in an email the “polytechnic” logo proposal was too preliminary to merit comment from the university.
“This is really premature since we’re smack dab in the middle of examining how we want to proceed with our marketing efforts,” Meany wrote in an email. “The university is trying to take steps to enhance our marketing/identity to improve enrollment in this competitive environment.”
He insisted that marketing EWU as a polytechnic is just that: marketing. The “polytechnic” portion of the reimagined logo would not represent a substantive change. The new moniker would only be an outward-looking makeover designed to boost enrollment.
“EWU is not looking at becoming a polytechnic university or implementing a polytechnic model,” Meany wrote in an email to RANGE. (Emphasis Meany’s.) “I believe we’re looking at using that word in some of our identity messaging.”
A mock-up of the potential new logo for EWU. (From idfive report)
Identity messaging & the blue ocean strategy
The impetus of the polytechnic rebranding, EWU President Shari McMahan said at the May 1 presentation, is that the university cannot differentiate itself in a market flooded with public universities. By saying it’s a polytechnic — and it would be Washington’s first — EWU’s signal could rise above the noise.
“We have 34 community colleges, of which many offer an applied baccalaureate degree,” McMahan said. “We have 18 private institutions, now that offer a lot of financial support … and we have our six public universities. … That's a pretty saturated market for a state that ranks 48th in terms of going to college.”
These facts led idfive, a marketing and communications agency the university hired to assess its PR campaigns, to emphasize an admittedly “morbid” metaphor called the “blue ocean strategy.” What is the blue ocean? It’s the opposite of the red ocean.
“That's where the blood is in the water,” said Peter Toran, the senior strategist from idfive who presented part of the polytechnic marketing idea to the BoT on May 17. “That's where everyone is. They're all fighting for the same resources, and that is where most people in the sector are going to be.”
While all of higher education is battling the “enrollment cliff” from the diminishing numbers of college-aged students and a cultural perception that the value of college is diminishing, labeling EWU a polytechnic would lift it out of those crimson waters and establish a new education seascape in the state with less competition, Toran said.
“We have to increase our bottom line,” music professor Jonathan Middleton told RANGE after the marketing workgroup presented the campaign to a skeptical faculty in Showalter Hall on the Cheney campus. “So we have to start thinking about branding and marketing.” Middleton is part of the workgroup, and said that though the situation regional comprehensives are in is regrettable, such institutions have to find a way to boost enrollment.
“EWU has been a regional comprehensive for a very long time,” Middleton said. “Advertising and marketing itself — bragging — isn't in our DNA because we're a state school. We're here to provide a public service, and we're not like, ‘Me, me, me, look at me.’”
That has to change, he said.
‘We should just call ourselves Harvard’
The proposal did not resonate well with some faculty members: if “polytechnic” is meaningless, why not shoot for the stars?
“We should just call ourselves Harvard,” said Larry Cebula, a tenured history professor. “Words don’t mean anything.”
But if “polytechnic” does mean something, others have argued that it might not mean anything good.
Lam wrote in her Faculty Organization remarks that if the university labeled itself a polytechnic, it would be embracing “neoliberalism,” the political philosophy that government should exist for the benefit of the marketplace, rather than individuals.
Lam linked to a 2021 report in the journal Architecture and Culture by British academics Igea Troiani and Claudia Dutson that said governments have increasingly divested from higher education since the 1960s. As a result, universities have become more focused on kowtowing to the demands of private industry rather than teaching students how to think critically.
“Where the liberal university was recognized as a space for critical thought, slow contemplation and transformative becoming for both student and university worker, the imperative of the neoliberal university is to continuously increase performance – measurable in ultimately economic terms, imposing a new auditable disciplining, and quickening pace, of learning, thinking and working,” Troiani and Dutson wrote.
This year’s proposal to rebrand EWU as a polytechnic follows the university’s flashy New Think marketing campaign, which launched in 2022 and portrayed the university as “powering the region’s workforce and discovering new ways to solve old problems.”
“I wonder if the ‘New Think’ of EWU then signals a brave new era of EWU in which our leadership … fully and openly embraces neoliberalism,” Lam wrote. “Traditionally speaking, Academic Affairs would be the unit that sets the direction for a university. But under the ‘New Think,’ marketing will drive our university’s direction.”
And while university spokesperson Meany contended the polytechnic branding would not change the university, some said the label doesn’t stack up well against EWU’s identity.
“It's not who we are,” Lindekugel said. “Why advertise yourself as something that's not who you are? Our strength is our breadth and the totality of our programs.”
Slicing & dicing to save money
The marketing workgroup’s proposal also comes in the wake of EWU’s Strategic Resource Allocation (SRA), which is part of a belt-tightening process to address the university’s budget gap. As part of that process, leadership formed two task forces in 2023 — one focused on administrative services and the other on academics — to answer questions central to bridging that gap. Which programs were bloated? Which were not serving the mission of the university?
The task forces made recommendations for hundreds of individual university programs, structured into five tiers: “invest,” “maintain,” “streamline,” “transform” and “disinvest.” The University Services Task Force, which focused on administrative programs, said 39 programs should transform, including three sports programs.
Football was a flashpoint in the report, which recommended that the program should be moved out of Division I athletics to save money.
“Football needs to be transformed in order to bring it in line with EWU’s budget challenges and other regional universities in our area,” the services task force report stated. “This process can only succeed if there are no sacred cows.”
It said the football program spent more than four times the revenue it earned. More importantly, many felt a polytechnic model might sacrifice the humanities.
Shortly after publication of the SRA reports, former Spokesman columnist Shawn Vestal noted that nearly 20% of tuition dollars flow to sports — four times more than comparable universities in Washington.
The services task force wrote that the process was “emotionally gut-wrenching and painful.” Other administrative services recommended for transformation were the student newspaper, The Easterner; Media Relations; employee recruitment; diversity, equity and inclusion training; and Africana and Chicano student services. On the academic side, the SRA recommended disinvesting in more than 150 programs.
It was not the first time the university commissioned such a project — in 2019, a special Faculty Organization committee also suggested moving athletics out of Division 1.
Physics professor David Syphers led that committee and after attending the May 1 presentation, he sensed two problematic possibilities in the polytechnic plan: first, that the polytechnic label would be simply that — a label — but it would misrepresent the identity of EWU as a regional comprehensive university; the other that EWU would become an actual polytechnic, eventually changing the university and further eroding morale among faculty, who are already weary from the resource allocation process.
“The people serving on the SRA put in a tremendous amount of effort, and it wasn’t only intellectual but it was emotional in many ways,” Syphers said. He worried that a change in the identity of the university might require a full-scale redo of the SRA.
“We have all these things that we don’t really associate with a polytechnic,” he said.
Bullish board
None of this was mentioned in either presentation given by the marketing workgroup to faculty or to the trustees. But McMahan noted on May 1 that it would be rolled out in tandem with the Strategic Plan the university is currently implementing as a result of the SRA.
Even if it’s very early in the process of creating a new identity for EWU, the highest levels of the university seem optimistic about the concept of the polytechnic logo.
When the marketing workgroup presented to the BoT, Trustee Christine Johnson said, “All of us are very excited. I support this. I can’t wait to get started.”
McMahan, who sat next to Johnson during the meeting, reiterated that the polytechnic label was not yet set in stone, but basically agreed with Johnson.
“We can't say 100%, ‘We do this at Eastern,’ but we can get there,” she said. “I’m very confident in that.”
