Marketing Neo-Conservativism in Universities

For those readers who haven't noticed, we've taken a bit of a hiatus as Tim, Max and I suffer through exams, but I wanted to briefly share with you a topic of incredible concern to me before I return to writing an essay on the what a couple of dead theorists WOULD have thought of the Internet had they been alive...

I just returned home from my Monday night Intro to Marketing course, completely horrified. The professor has had a knack for making ridiculously ignorant comments throughout the semester, but for the most part has been excused with assumptions like "well, he's kind of old" or "maybe he doesn't watch the news". But tonight went too far.

It began with his statement:
"I have to say, this global warming thing doesn't sound quite right to me."

I look up, distracted from rolling up my rim (I'm Canadian), immediately on the defense but making a distinct effort to hear him out regardless.

He continues, and I'm not even joking:
"The Earth's really big. If you ask me, what's heating it up is the sun!"

I turn to the guy beside me and say in a stunning display of my own intelligence:
"What the fuck?!"

But the professor goes on:
"And why do they call it Greenland? When the Vikings first arrived, it was green, and they planted things, and called it Greenland. That says to me that at one point the Earth was a lot warmer than it is now."

At this point I'm taking deep breaths and the guy beside me is squeezing my hand.

"Besides," concludes the professor, "we're Canadian... it's cold here. If we cut back our energy usage, we'll freeze. What, do they want us to go back to dogsleds?" He laughs at his hilarious comment. "It's just not practical."

This man is teaching tomorrow's leaders. Tomorrow's business men. Tomorrow's MARKETERS, and we certainly don't require further proof of the influence marketing has on society. The class has 200 students, and he teaches 4 other sections with goodness knows how many more students in each. To make matters worse, he's been teaching the course for some 20 years.

And the madness didn't stop there. We were next shown a series of billboard ads for a workboot company, featuring attractive female models in sexy lingerie wearing workboots and holding powertools in suggestive poses. He then showed a clip from a CBC report on the women who were offended and their success in having the billboards removed. I, like an idiot, am thinking "oh okay, finally he'll influence these future marketers for the better and maybe do some good in terms of the objectification of women." But no.

He explains his point:
"By putting these ads on billboards where anyone could see them, this company missed their target audience. People were angry, and the result was negative publicity for the organization. These types of ads should be strategically placed in men's magazines, etc. where they will not be seen by women who'll take offence."

Just before I began to pack up my things to leave in a fury, he made a comment regarding taxes on SUV's and other larger vehicles, claiming it doesn't make any sense for the Canadian government to harm the automotive industry just for the sake of the environment.
"The last time I checked, the only fuel efficient car manufactured in Ontario was the Toyota Corolla. So should the government penalize the entire industry? I don't think so." What!?

And to top it off, a final comment that I plan, for my own sanity's sake, to place in the "maybe he doesn't watch the news" category:
"How will pet food manufacturers market their organizations as trustworthy ever again? Did you hear about what happened? Completely innocently, they had rat poison in their warehouses that got into the pet food, and is now killing pets!" Click here or here if you'd like to join me in wondering where the hell he came up with that.

It was time to go.

This man has a responsibility to the future. He is an educator, and more importantly, an educator of one of our culture's most influential (not to mention harmful!) industries. It is not a secret to anyone reading this (way to preach to the choir, I know) that advertising is the root of much of Western society's ailments. Ask Noam Chomsky, or Sut Jhally, or read a little Marshall McLuhan. And this professor, unlike many of us, is actually in a position to do some good. But instead, he promotes a neo-conservative free market capitalist agenda to the world's future business leaders, claiming that global warming is junk science, and what those crazy feminists don't know can't hurt them.

How do you fix this?