Buying Harvard

When JetBlue Airlines started running discount flights between Boston to New York, they knew Harvard students would be interested. To get the word out, they went right to the source, recruiting a pair of undergrads to sprinkle the company’s name across the Harvard campus.

The two lucky deputies, recruited through the Office of Career Services, had grand visions for the partnership. To kick things off, Daniel A. Friedman ’06 and Ming E. Vandenberg ’08 sent an e-mail out to every House Committee (HoCo) chair on campus, offering JetBlue’s “support” to any upcoming “stein clubs, formals, charities, plays, etc.” Friedman even told The Crimson that he wanted to get the airline involved in the Harvard-Yale football game.

Think Judge Doom at the end of “Roger Rabbit­”—eyes were wide with the possibilities for promotion, commerce, and advertising.

Unfortunately for Friedman and Vandenberg, though, the College administration wasn’t happy when it caught wind of their big ideas. After just one promotional event, University Hall declared the Harvard campus a no-fly-zone for the airline, reminding student groups that corporate sponsorships are strictly regulated and often forbidden.

Plenty of student groups had worked with corporate sponsors in the past though, reaching out to companies like Lehman Brothers and Adidas for help with funding parties, trips, giveaways, and conferences. But the JetBlue deal seemed to strike a nerve in University Hall—and despite all the specific rules laid out in the Student Organization Handbook, confusion remains.

According to Judith H. Kidd, Associate Dean of the College, corporate sponsors cannot have a presence on campus, a rule intended to prevent Harvard from becoming a giant billboard.

But then, how could Veritas Records partner with Adidas for last year’s CD-release party at the Roxy? And how come a Kirkland House junior had almost 600 hundred promotional bottles of Vitamin Water sitting in his room last spring, ready for distribution at parties and special events?

As Friedman and Vandenberg are surely learning, Harvard’s regulation of corporate sponsorship allows for a vast gray area—and unless the JetBlue situation is an indication of a renewed vigilance in University Hall, student organizations will keep pairing up with outside companies, and making the deals that have become such a large part of their livelihood.

SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE

For their first collaborative promotion at Harvard, JetBlue gave Friedman and Vandenberg a round-trip ticket to be auctioned off at an Adams House Katrina benefit.

After the auction, Dean Kidd warned Connie Zong ’06, the Adams HoCo co-chair, against pursuing a relationship with JetBlue. While the airline’s donation of the ticket did not violate any rules, Kidd told FM in an e-mail, “corporate sponsorship, as differentiated from a corporate gift, is not allowed.”

“It is not fine for JetBlue to sponsor a brain break or an event,” Kidd wrote. “It is not okay for Harvard students, as campus reps, to advertise JetBlue in Dorms, Houses or College buildings without permission from building managers. We want to keep our living and learning and athletic spaces free from corporate advertising.”

Vandenberg and Friedman declined to comment for this article.

Zong expressed some initial concerns about Harvard’s decision, but she came around after sitting down with Kidd to talk about it.

“At first, it sounded to me like, ‘We’re Harvard, we’re snobs,’” she says. “[But] at my graduation I don’t want to hear, ‘Here’s your degree from Harvard, presented by such-and-such a company.’”

The rules are meant to prevent large companies from advertising all over the Yard, Zong realized—to protect the Harvard campus from the kind of commercialization that has overtaken so much of America’s public space.

Friedman and Vandenberg are now reconsidering the scope of what they can do with the JetBlue name, and any future promotions they try to pull off will have to be cleared with Kidd. However, it seems that other groups are not subject to the same scrutiny.

A pair of students on the payroll of Cartoon Network, for instance, hold promotional events around Harvard Square and are planning a TV discussion night with Peretz Professor of Yiddish Literature Ruth R. Wisse. Adam C. Estes ’07, meanwhile, has been busy working for Vitamin Water as a student representative. Last year, he brought a thousand bottles of the stuff to the Harvard-Yale tailgate, giving it out for free as a “non-alcoholic alternative” from the Newsweek-sponsored Current Magazine tent (Estes, a Crimson editor, is president of Current Magazine).

And, though not on company payrolls, many other student groups aggressively pursue sponsorship deals with companies like Daimler-Chrysler, Morgan Stanley, and Puma, holding events off-campus, where they say Harvard officials can claim no jurisdiction. None of these groups have been scrutinized by the College.

According to the Student Organizations Handbook, a student group may accept cash and gifts from a sponsor. And as long as the display isn’t ostentatious, they can acknowledge the company’s contributions and display their affiliation with it publicly. The student group cannot hang advertising banners from Harvard buildings or officially endorse their sponsor’s product, and they’re not allowed to have corporate booths at college events. Beyond that, it’s kind of a free-for-all, and loopholes abound.

Friedman and Vandenberg have not followed up with any of the HoCos since Friedman’s introductory e-mail, and they have not planned any additional promotions within the University’s gates. But, as the pair is finding out­—and as a string of ongoing corporate sponsorships indicate—there are a lot of ways to enjoy lucrative company cash without crossing any obvious boundaries.

For example, Women in Business, a group that helps its members network with finance big-wigs and prepare for professional life, partnered with investment banks like Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley for last week’s convention at the Marriot Hotel in Boston. The Harvard Project for Asian and International Relations boasts a similarly impressive list of conference sponsors, including the Mitsubishi Corporation, Daimler-Chrysler, and the Daiwa Securities Group.

Friedman and Vandenberg have taken a cue from such groups, and this month, they plan to move their operation off campus for a “JetBlue Day” in the Square, where they will hand out airline tickets and other freebies to Harvard students wandering from the Yard. Because JetBlue Day is not being held on Harvard property, University Hall can’t get involved.

Unlike Lehman Brothers or Mitsubishi, though, JetBlue is not sponsoring any one particular activity, but waging a total-war campaign for campus exposure. While WIB solicited Lehman’s help, JetBlue is taking all the initiative—and putting down all the money—to get campus groups to advertise for them. Like Vitamin Water and Cartoon Network, JetBlue is doing exactly what Harvard’s anti-corporate policies were meant to prevent: trying to turn the University into its own personal billboard.

But is the distinction actually material? At the end of the day, a deal is a deal—and it’s unclear whether JetBlue deserves more scrutiny than any other company looking to get in with Harvard youth through student groups.

BLURRING THE LINE

One of the first groups to experiment with corporate sponsorship was Veritas Records, the student-run record label launched at Harvard in 2003. According to James M. Rhodes ’06, the label’s president, Veritas first approached Adidas two years ago, when the sports-apparel store opened in Harvard Square, and the two of them worked together to produce CDs and organize concerts. At the swanky 2004 CD-release party for the first Veritas Records compilation, held in Boston at the Roxy club, Adidas provided headbands, wristbands, and a banner to display on the stage.

Since the release party, however, the relationship between Veritas Records and Adidas has rapidly waned. Rhodes attributes the breakdown to the fact that the store owner moved to Oregon—but he says he’s gotten a little miffed that Veritas’ requests for in-store listening parties and black-tie events have gone unanswered. If the Adidas deal doesn’t heat up again soon, Rhodes says, Veritas will try to branch out to other sponsors.

At the moment, he has his eye on Tweeter electronics and Puma sports

wear. “With Puma, we’d be looking for them to help out with giveaways—maybe sponsor a giveaway at a Pub Night where we can raffle off shoes,” Rhodes says.

But a Pub Night raffle seems to walk a fine line between the forbidden and the approved. On the one hand, it’d be a donation, which is allowed, but on the other hand, it would bring the company to campus.

It’s unclear whether there’s a difference between this kind of arrangement and the one JetBlue has tried to establish with Friedman and Vandenberg.

After all, if the University was really worried about commercialization, it would try to regulate sponsorships across the board. As it stands, there is no obvious guiding principle behind the limitations placed on Friedman and Vandenberg. And as long as there’s a way around those rules, student groups will continue to seek out lucrative sponsorships, and the question of what’s acceptable and what’s not will remain lurking somewhere in the gray skies of uncertainty.