John Sutherland: UCL rebranding

There has been consternation - intra and extramural - at University College London's decision to remodel itself as UCL plc.

The corporate makeover is a matter of economic necessity. You can raise money by PFI for glamorous buildings (see, for instance, the newly opened University College London hospital on Gower Street). Big hearted, deep-pocketed, donors will throw money at you for high-visibility items of university furniture - from endowed chairs to quadrangle benches (so long as the brass plate credits the generous soul who stumped up for them).

If you take more students, the government will give you cash to cover the cost (or a bit less). The research funding bodies will kick in for specific projects.

What you can't get outside money for are the day-to-day running costs of an establishment the size of a car factory - all those unglamorous expenses for toilet paper, electricity, security, room cleaning and maintenance. University College London (as it must no longer be called) is in a hole financially, running the kind of annual deficit that would have shareholders baying for management blood.

It can't go on. If, like UCL, you choose to do business in WC1 you have to become a business if you want to stay in business. You must, that is, become a profit-generating organisation and plough the profits back in. The alternative is to sell up and rebuild on a green field somewhere in the sticks as "University College [used to be in] London".

UCL will publicly launch their corporate identity campaign this summer. It will probably involve a new management structure, presidential rather than committee or senate leadership, and alterations in the line of command.

The new corporate identity will also involve a change of ethos. Teaching staff, for example, will henceforward owe primary allegiance not to their department, their colleagues, or their subject but to the "firm" - UCL. They will not be members of a community, but stakeholders and company men.

Most controversially, as it is proving, the corporate makeover will involve "rebranding". UCL, like other colleges in the University of London federation, has been negligent about looking after its brand. Culpably so. There are, for example, two great academic presses in this country: OUP and CUP. These publishing houses return prestige to their parent institutions and, in the case of OUP, make a payoff of many millions a year to the university for use of its name. My royalties, I sometimes muse, pay for a droplet or two of the wine in Balliol's cellars (may they choke on it).

Why isn't there an LUP - a London University Press? London is bigger than Oxbridge and as internationally prestigious (check out the Guardian league tables).

The reason there isn't is because the university in its unwisdom sold the brand name to a commercial publisher (who, in the event, didn't want to use it and was disinclined to sell it back). When the university decided in the 1960s it wanted a publishing house it was obliged to call it The Athlone Press - not, as it turned out, a successful brand (it, too, was eventually sold on).

It was Derek Roberts, the UCL provost in the early 1990s, who got to grips with the brand issue. A scientist with a background in business Roberts pondered the conundrum - if UCL was a world leader in scientific research why were its initials not as universally recognisable, worldwide, as MIT? Secondly, how could international name recognition, and brand respect, be achieved for UCL?

One of the things that has always confused outsiders is the word "college", suggesting that UCL is not a university (which it is) but a subsidiary part of a university - an offshoot (which it is not). Behind this misunderstanding is another lamentable surrender of titular property. UCL was, when it was founded in the 1820s, simply the University of London. It parted with that sovereign title in order to embrace, federally and on equal terms, a constellation of later founded London campuses - King's College, Westfield College, Royal Holloway College, etc.

All of these now defederated institutions have equal claim to the brand name University of London - and all of them have the degrading college modifier strung round their necks.

Roberts made some valiant, but unsuccessful, efforts to recover the University of London marque for UCL. Also unsuccessful was his fall-back attempt to rebrand the college as "the original University of London" - a slogan which mightily peeved the unoriginal colleges.

In this latest exercise UCL took expensive professional advice on how to brand its new corporate identity. The centrepiece is a new logo - a massive white on black UCL with a tiny image of the college portico in the distant background. The aim, as the 51-page style guide puts it, is to make UCL a "viewfinder" - to imprint the three letters on the viewer's mind as a branding iron might scorch the ranch insignia into a cow's hide. The term "University College London" has been prohibited from all UCL use, except as part of the postal address. Thus, it is hoped, the hated word "college" will be, if not expunged, obscured.

I hope it works. But I have a major anxiety. Among the new universities (ie former polytechnics) which now ply for business in the capital is the University of East London. It too has a handsome logo, UEL (you'll see it advertised prominently on the London Underground). If anything, I think the UEL logo is rather more handsome than UCL's - the "e" being wittily coloured, lower-case and italicised (check it out on their website).

The UEL campus is, for my money, one of the most handsome in London. It nestles alongside the river and the Dockland Light Railway delivers you to the front gate. The architecture is award winning. UEL's new Stratford campus will get a huge boost from the 2012 Olympics. UEL has an energetic PR department - they push their logo aggressively and ubiquitously in London.

As a teaching institution UEL rates commendably high (return to those Guardian league tables). As a research institution UEL can't hold a candle to UCL and it won't be able to for decades to come. It takes a long time to grow a world-class university. In the next research assessment exercise, there's no contest. UCL will be in the top three, UEL nowhere. You want a fair fight? Wait until 2050.

In the meantime, however, how will those who don't know the backgrounds distinguish between these bafflingly similar logos? They sound alike, they look alike. It's as if there were a Yale University and a Yule University at New Haven. It creates a false equivalence: "UCL - is that the University of Central London?"

I'm no PR consultant and doubtless those that advised UCL took the lookalike UEL issue on board, weighed it up, and decided to go ahead with UCL all the same. It is not a blunder, but a gamble. I hope it pays off. There's a university at stake.