#john knapp

Two Christian Colleges Extend Employee Benefits to Legally Recognized Same-sex Spouses

Two Christian colleges located in states that had their same-sex marriage bans struck down by the United States Supreme Court’s June 26 decision that nationally legalized same-sex marriage are offering employment benefits to legally recognized same-sex spouses of school employees. (more…)

I hope you don’t mind a suggestion for the future good of Albuquerque Academy. If our leaders simply follow the latest marketing plan of the always unfailing McDonalds Corporation, there's no end to the benefits that lie in store for us!  All we have to do: rebrand the Charger, our school’s underutilized brand ambassador (formerly known as a "mascot")! (Less this. . . )

(more like this . . .) 

(and this . . .) 

Last spring, with a lot of fanfare and in reaction to shrinking profits, McDonalds announced that it's welcoming back from exile the child-entrancing spokesclown, Ronald McDonald—complete with a "hip" new makeover and a heavy social-media presence. Ronald's now got cargo pants, a vest, special bowtie, and a "whimsical red blazer" with earbud cords twirling impishly out of the pocket. (Breathe easy: the giant red clown shoes stay.) Later this year, we'll all have the pleasure of being bathed in the humble flow of new Ronald promo material—TV and internet ads, restaurant interiors, packaging, and more. The new Ronald will be a regular on social media, as well, spreading the corporation's platitudinous gospel that "Fun makes great things happen!" (that's serious). In a press release, Ronald says he's thrilled and eager to connect with people online and via Twitter, proclaiming, "Selfies . . . here I come!" http://news.mcdonalds.com/Corporate/news-stories/McDonald%E2%80%99s-Unveils-New-Mission-and-Image-for-Brand Now, most of us at Academy aren't marketers, technically, but we could follow McDonalds' prescient example and rebrand our mascot, the Charger! Surely, doing so will keep our school hip; heighten its media profile; and trigger (in students, alums, parents, and other donors) a good-zombie singleness of philanthropic purpose toward our institution! Here are some ideas to kick off what I'm sure will be an active, serious discussion; we can sift through our collected ideas soon in breakout groups. First, there's a lot of confusion about Academy's spokescharacter that we could clarify toward big bucks. What is a Charger, anyway? Just a horse? (Boring!) A horsehead? (Too Godfather-like.) A lance-wielding knight? (Gender biased, even Freudian.)  Well, common sense suggests that people like whole horses more than bits and pieces, so we'd be wise to use a full-horse body for our mascot. The rebranded Charger, designed by our talented visual-arts students, should convey strength, determination, and a high tolerance for a lot of AP classes without making too much of a big deal out of it. To balance resolve with hipness, we could give the new Charger an ironic grin, sideways baseball cap, interactive hoof, sunglasses, yoga pants (with tasteful hole for the tail), and a dyed & dreadlocked mane. Instead of being at full charge, the horse could be laid back, standing on its hind legs but resting casually on its elbows (if horses have elbows), as if to say, "Albuquerque Academy is a cool place to kick it!"—think Chester the Cheetah, the brand ambassador for Cheetos (see above). In the official Academy logo, a scroll could unroll in a graceful semicircle beneath the reimaged Charger, but we should have a new, trendier motto than Scientia ad facidendum ("learning through doing"—snooze!). Retaining the cache that Latin brings, we could update the message to be more modern and relevant: Scientia ad deprimendum ("learning through texting"; literally, through "pressing down"). Students could chant the hip new motto at sporting events, while banging coconuts to together. Note: if we decide against a horse, we could always go with another relevant character—say, a smart, devil-may-care student wielding a credit card (you know, a "charger"), or a walkin', talkin', freewheelin', mischievous Charger for a laptop or smartphone (again, with sideways baseball cap).

Right now, our brand-ambassador horse doesn’t even have a name! How can we hope to control consumers' responses to us if we don’t decide what they should call us? Here are some ideas:

Mr. Ed–jication

AP-biscuit

Floggy (as in "flogging a dead horse")

Pony Up

Houyhnhnm  (pronounced "Win 'em!"—hard to spell, but good for a chant at a football game or fundraiser. It's from Gulliver's Travels: horses who have no word for "lie" and make humans look like boorish yahoos)

Kanthaka (Buddha's horse; died of broken heart when Buddha decided that enlightenment wasn't consonant with having a horse)

Incitatus (hard to say, but cool. "At full gallop" in Latin. Also, the very special horse of Caligula, who wanted to appoint the horse as consul; he bought it a house and lots of bling)

If none of these work, fantasynamegenerators.com will come up with free "heroic" horse names in the click of a mouse.

John Knapp

FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION: THE ALBUQUERQUE ACADEMY LAZY RIVER

As our AA team scrambles to adapt to the new market after the 2008 financial crisis, it’s a good time for us to re-envision how we attract new student-customers and foster them into becoming not merely lifelong learners but lifelong loyalists to our educational brand. Recently, Academy had the great good fortune of receiving a substantial unrestricted gift, as we all know, and, humbly, I’d like to pitch an idea for the wise allocation of some of those funds. For your consideration:

I’ve been inspired by a radio story about how colleges are puttin’ on the ritz to (1) attract new consumers of knowledge / burpers-up of revenue, and (2) make current students and parents feel like they’re getting a lot of tangible bang for their considerable buck. Institutions, in other words, have opted to pour cash into flashy campus structures and amenities—outdoor movie screens, 24-hour student fluff-n-fold laundry service, sushi bars, and so on—instead of old-fangled, unsexy things like instruction and classrooms. I figure this business strategy has to be a good one because the press has now given it at least two cute names: The Edifice Complex and The Law of More.

My suggestion is that AA become a bold leader in secondary education by shamelessly copying this strategy while, of course, acting like it we came up with it in a brainstorming session.Here’s what we could do: trick out our campus with all manner of bells and whistles and shiny things. Current students and parents would soon think of Academy as resort-like, comfy, and hip—and, therefore, worth whatever we feel like charging them. Prospective students and parents, responding (as they should) with Pavlovian covetousness, would stampede our admissions office. Where’s the downside?!

Obviously, we’d need a centerpiece project to make the effort a viable development point, and I’ve thought that out, too. The perfect thing: a Lazy River, like the one pictured above at Texas Tech University! Surely, it’s easy to re-envision the main walkway, between the arches and the lower school, as a Lazy River filled with students floating pastorally from class to class. And what better place for kids to tackle textbooks and build community than in the circling warmth of their own school-issued, monogrammed inner tubes? The Lazy River would be a green, smartly sustainable project: inner tubes could be constructed from recycled Recycle Bins around campus (perhaps advisors and students could learn how to build tubes during a Make day?); we could use water reclaimed from the campus pool, bathrooms, storm drains, and locker-room showers; and, no doubt, we could stock the River with the Rio Grande Silvery Minnow, which would save itself from extinction by feeding on any stray organisms or rejectamenta in the water. Innovative teaching approaches could be assessed on the Lazy River, things like flipped classes (held upside down, underwater) and Marco-Polo-centered testing. Clearly, waterborne professional-development possibilities would abound: tube-inars, loungecasts, drifting mentorships, and collaborative tanning, to name just a few. Happily, and maybe most crucially, there’s room for technology on the Lazy River, too, so it would fit that aspect of our mission: the Lazy River would be a great place to test the practicality of cutting-edge gadgetry like underwater document cameras, interactive eels, smart flippers, Coppertone cloud storage, and tablet Speedos. (As for the challenge of designing the lower-to-upper-school-flowing side of the Lazy River, our Humanities classes could start working toward figuring out how to think about what maybe might theoretically cause water to flow uphill, and then Science and Math classes would actually get it done. And pretty fast.)

So there it is. The Lazy River. Soak it in (or soak in it). If we were to take on this bold enterprise, we could proudly proclaim, along with the Texas Tech developer hired to add pazazz to their campus: “Most of these kids are going to have a step down in lifestyle when they have to enter the working-world environment after they graduate.” It is, literally, a no-brainer.

You can’t spell “funding” without “fun”!

To read more about it:·

The radio story: http://www.npr.org/2013/05/08/181580716/with-gorgeous-dorms-but-little-cash-colleges-must-adapt·

On the Edifice Complex: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/14/business/colleges-debt-falls-on-students-after-construction-binges.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&hp and http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323830404578145591134362564.html·