The missed opportunity that is the rebranding of Ryerson University

Was it a lack of vision? Did they not understand the significance of the moment?

After months of deliberations, Ryerson University’s President and Vice-Chancellor Mohamed Lachemi announced last week that the school has a new name.

As you might expect, the news came with great fanfare and the expected boastful enthusiasm for great days ahead for the University. These moments don’t happen everyday. The rebranding of an established academic institution is an exceedingly rare occurrence and a chance for an exciting fresh start.

But “Toronto Metropolitan University?” The rebranding is not just a missed opportunity. They blew it. The opportunity was squandered.

The socially-charged context of this rebranding is, by now, well-known. The school was founded in 1948 and named after Egerton Ryerson, Canada’s leading thinker in public education in the nineteenth-century, and Ontario’s first Superintendent of Education, who had established the province’s first teacher training college in 1851.

It would have seemed appropriate – and certainly non-controversial in the political and social context of the mid-20th century – to name the institution after this nineteenth-century luminary, but the recent discovery of thousands of unmarked graves at indigenous residential schools, brought to the fore the colonial roots of the issue. Children were forcibly removed from their families and communities to be “re-educated” in these clergy-run residential schools, where many disappeared and were never accounted for. Ryerson himself advocated for the assimilation of indigenous children in these schools, and the government of the day eagerly adopted his concept. This created an issue for the University which decided the best course of action was to disassociate itself from his name.

It simply doesn’t matter that Egerton’s thinking made him a product of his time. He was instrumental in promoting what we now see as racist and discriminatory policies and the institution’s association with its namesake was no longer tenable. It had to go. This much was no longer in question. Ryerson wants to be seen for what it is – a more enlightened institution – and had no choice but to dissociate itself from this toxic legacy.  

But, if changing the name was critical, the question of what to change the name to, should have been no less important a consideration. Was this an opportunity to actually make amends with Indigenous people? Could the right name be the catalyst for a significant institutional renewal? What opportunity was there to help a society come to terms with its own past failings, or more simply to provide Ryerson (the institution) a new platform for championing human rights and enlightenment?

These questions should have been central to the initiative, but they may not even have received any consideration. So many possibilities were no doubt summarily discarded for lack of courage and fear of offense; better to cut-and-run than to stand for anything meaningful.

This is precisely what Ryerson University did, and what it got wrong. It appears it simply chose to put maximum distance between itself and its namesake. Run away from something vexing rather than toward something empowering. In so doing, it missed an opportunity to make a statement, to shine a light of progress, of espousing higher ethics and consciousness, of attempting to at least reach out to those it felt had been wronged by the system, by history and some of its dominant players, and indirectly by the institution that unwittingly tied its values, and name to them.

Traditional and Transactional vs Transcendent or Transformative

It is easy to criticize while sitting on the sidelines. Given the political climate, the challenge may have seemed like a no-win scenario to those in charge. But I don’t believe it was. It feels more like it was an engineered hasty retreat toward the least potentially offensive and anodyne name one could imagine. After all, who could be faulted for resorting to the dominant convention, and adopt a name that communicates nothing, evokes no sense of the essence or values of the institution, and does nothing other than, in the most trivial way possible, grants the viewer the means to locate it on a map.

Ryerson’s own website even boasts the following statement in support of the change:
Names matter. They tell the world who we are and what we stand for. They communicate ideas, values and aspirations. They speak to the future even as they acknowledge the past. A new name offers an invitation to be more inclusive, to imagine novel ways of thinking and creating —  to open ourselves to new possibilities. 
The name they selected belies nearly every word of this statement.

What a beautiful opportunity this was for Ryerson to develop a declarative name that helped position it as a leader to the global community. Not to be too obvious, but the University of Toronto, considered one of the top universities in the world, looms rather large on the scene, both globally and locally. Ryerson’s use of “Toronto” in its new name appears to concede that fact, automatically relegating it to the ranks of a second-tier school. Not a great way to get the Alumni on side. For a school with global ambitions, positioning it as the alternative “downtown” university, means it has unwittingly shrunk its brand image, and turned it back into a regionally-focused player.

I’m not the first to notice the new name is 13 syllables long – it is popular practice to take such unwieldy names and refer to them by a shortened nickname. Will it become known popularly as TMU (the anagram we can already see in use on the institution’s website), or more colloquially become known as Met-U, or Metro University, or some other variation thereof? My suspicion is that in the absence of a compelling name rich in meaning and imbued with potential narrative power, it will remain “Ryerson” for some time to come.

This didn’t have to be the case. A clear strategy to guide the development of a new name was needed but was likely never considered or properly articulated. When this happens, anything goes, and thus, a potentially transformative event is instead managed as a reactive damage-control initiative. In this case, an advisory committee of seventeen accomplished individuals was formed, including representatives from the student body, faculty, staff, Senate, Board of Governors and alumni, among others. None of these individuals, to my knowledge, had any experience with branding, in this, or any other context. Should this matter? Indeed it does.

We are told the committee relied on 2,600 naming recommendations contributed by the “community.” Don’t get me wrong, I am all about community engagement when it comes to such programs/initiatives. But you need a clear head and strong leadership tightly hanging on to the reins in a process such as this. When solicited, community suggestions should be relied upon as a source of information, as much as anything else, and not as the exclusive source from which names for such an important initiative are to be drawn. I suspect the committee largely, if not exclusively relied on community suggestions to select from, rather than to engage in a strategic and directed process that would have taken the generation of ideas in different and more fruitful directions. Andrew Lang famously wrote, in a quote often mistakenly attributed to David Ogilvy, the famous adman: “Most people use statistics like a drunk man uses a lamppost; more for support than illumination.” I suggest this dynamic was at play in this instance.

Qualified branding experts, both from the strategy and creative sides, would have helped guide and structure the process toward an outcome that should have been rich in meaning, while upholding the history and values that are at the heart of the institution. I have found myself on more than a few occasions, in the position of having to strategically vet, validate, and defend branding options that were at first summarily dismissed by the client, for failure to fully consider their potential power. This is a critical function of the brand consultant for such an engagement, yet it is hard to imagine this role would have been effectively carried out, or even understood by any member of this committee.

I will probably regard this as one of the most important missed branding opportunities in recent memory (and there have been more than a few). Ryerson’s board failed to see that this called for something different, something better, even for something innovative. But, alas, innovation, like introspection, is something our governments and institutional leaders seem bent on avoiding, aiming instead to just comfortably and safely fit in, Canadian-style. The new name conveys no sense of purpose, vision, experience, reputation, values, history, or heritage; nor does it contain anything even hinting at atonement. That’s a shame. It makes you wonder what could have been.