The brands of universities are best understood not as trademarks, but as geographical indications. The conventional American theory of trademarks has always been an ill fit for the merchandising uses that universities enforce their brands to protect, because those uses are grounded in anti-misappropriation impulses that traditional American trademark law has always looked on with ambivalence. But the use of a signifier to channel material support from consumers to a productive community (such as a university), out of support for the community itself rather than out of market demand for the community’s outputs, is perfectly consistent with the justifications typically offered for protection of geographical indications. While understanding university brands as geographical indications provides analytical clarity, it also reveals such brands have a potential dark side: they may give the community’s most generous and idiosyncratic benefactors an outsize role in deciding disputes over the community’s priorities and values.

Faced with budgetary pressures, American universities have embraced propaganda within their athletics programs in order to maintain lucrative partnerships with global corporations. These university administrators become, in effect, educators-as-corporate-propagandists. This chapter examines the controversial relationship between Nike and the University of Oregon. Nike has constructed the University’s brand identity, taken control over its communications and public relations, and spread its habits and impulses to every facet of University operations. But private interests do not always overlap with public or educational ones – even to the point of violating state and federal law. The partnership between Nike and the University of Oregon casts two very different shadows over the question of usefulness of propaganda in a democratic society. On the one hand, its efficacy is unquestionable, especially in the realms of politics, business, activism, and education. On the other hand, propaganda’s utility for democracy is questionable, and in the realm of public education is often incompatible with democratic ends. America’s financially struggling public universities may need to reimagine their use of propaganda. Their success or failure may depend, ironically, on the effects of propaganda elsewhere in society: What use is a university, after all, in a society which has no use for truth?