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The University of Mary Washington's top weakness is its image |
The University of Mary Washington's image as a "private, all girls school" is its top weakness, according to a marketing firm hired to help with the university's public promotion.
The 26-page report, authored by marketing firm Barton, Matheson, Willse and Worthington of Baltimore, is based on interviews conducted in February with groups of students, faculty and staff.
The Free Lance-Star obtained the document--dated March 31 and distributed to senior staff at the university--through a Freedom of Information Act request.
BMW&W was hired to help the school promote its new university status, which went into effect on July 1. The firm has helped many colleges and universities, including Harvard, Duke and Yale, polish their images.
Findings from the interviews identify the school's strengths and weakness. Two of the top three weaknesses involve the school's name.
The No. 1 weakness--which means it was cited most frequently by interviewees--was the university's image as a private, all-girls school.
The second weakness was low minority enrollment, and the third was that the "feminine-sounding name hurts in developing interest."
"Our biggest impediment is 'Mary,'" said one anonymous faculty member quoted in the report.
The university was a women's college until 1970, when it began admitting men. In 2003, approximately 66 percent of the school's nearly 4,000 undergraduates were women, and 33 percent were men.
By comparison, another public liberal-arts college in Virginia, the College of William & Mary, is 54 percent female and 46 percent male.
Top strengths mentioned in the report were the university's strong academic reputation, close proximity to Washington, safe campus, small class size and high-caliber students.
It's common for colleges and universities to hire marketing firms to get a sense of their status in comparison with other schools, said Ron Singleton, senior vice president for university relations.
"It helps us get a handle on how we're viewed," Singleton said.
The report, which was financed by the private Mary Washington Foundation, was not given to the university's board of visitors, he said.
"It's an internal document," Singleton said.
The public perception's of the school as a women's college is, to some, an admissions challenge for recruiting both men and women.
During a Nov. 18, 2003, meeting of the 21-member College Image and University Name Committee, the school's vice president for enrollment said the school's image as a women's college turns off prospective students--male and female.
"Research that's been done by the Women's College Coalition indicates that something like 3 percent of the women, young women in this country, high school students, are even willing to consider a women's college," said Martin Wilder. "So if they make an assumption and never take the tours to look, and write you off, the concern is far greater in terms of recruiting quality female students than simply the matter of recruiting male students."
A faculty member mentioned at the same meeting that people outside the school don't recognize its name.
Carter Hudgins, distinguished professor of history, described how people at a recent cocktail party reacted to his place of employment:
"The name Mary Washington--I can't even finish the rest of it before the pupils of people's eyes narrow, and it's not the alcohol because it was very early. The pupils narrow, the expression of disinterest, and then the gaze is somewhere off. Now, if I say not where I'm from but what I do, the conversation makes it to the second stage. But in most cases if I say where I'm from and where I work, the conversation never gets beyond that. The person whom I'm talking to politely expresses at least superficial sort of pleasure in having made my acquaintance, but then the conversation moves to somebody else," Hudgins said.
The committee voted during the same Nov. 18 meeting to recommend Washington & Monroe University as the school's new overarching name. A close second was the University of Mary Washington.
Later that week, the board of visitors unanimously voted for President William Anderson's choice--the University of Mary Washington.
"I recommend that we move forward with the name University of Mary Washington," Anderson said at the Nov. 22 meeting. "That's what, in my opinion, will bring us together, let us go forward."
Students and alumni had lobbied hard to keep 'Mary Washington' in the school's university name, even staging a rally shortly before the board vote.
Yet the report demonstrates many on campus still feel the name is a liability.
Men's basketball coach Ron Wood recently told the Free Lance-Star that the school's new university name won't help with recruiting.
"If it's still Mary Washington, then it doesn't help our male programs at all," Wood said. "One hundred percent of recruits that don't come here say that they can't overcome the female name."
Patricia McGuire, president of all-female Trinity College in Washington and board member of the Women's College Coalition, disagrees that being mistaken for a single-sex institution is a weakness.
"That is a reflection of the continuing hurdles that women have to face in our society. That a women's institution would be perceived as negative or somehow less worthy is the reason why women's colleges continue to exist, because women continue to face this kind of discrimination in so many aspects of life," McGuire said.
"The fact is that if the name was Michael Washington University, people would probably think that was strong or good. George Washington University--nobody's got a problem with that. Why is George Washington a perfectly fine name for an institution, but Mary Washington is not?" she said.
But it's not the university's fault that potential students--male and female--make such value judgements over a name, Hudgins said Friday during a telephone interview.
"As much as we would like to think we live in a gender-blind world, we are bound by our culture, and by the way we as a culture have oriented ourselves. We're bombarded daily by messages that are gender-laden," Hudgins said.
Future students absorb those messages, he said, and the university can't change that.
Hudgins said the marketing report exists simply to raise awareness of the public's perceptions, and identifies the realities the school must face if it wants to stay competitive.
"The challenge to us, but it's also a challenge to other selective places, is to make sure we're in the best possible competitive position, so we can continue to draw large numbers of highly qualified applicants, so we can select the best-qualified students for the best student body," Hudgins said.
Yet McGuire said that instead of repeatedly correcting people about its co-ed status, she thinks the school should capitalize on the misperception.
After all, McGuire said, women's colleges may not attract all prospective female students, but it will attract bright, driven ones committed to strong academics.
"The university could capitalize from the controversy They could say, 'We're co-educational, but we also want to make women successful.' Why not do that instead of saying there's something wrong?"
Staff writer Taft Coghill Jr. contributed to this story
To reach KELLY HANNON: 540/374-5436 khannon@freelancestar.com
