What a foolish waste of our limited TV exposure in the first place. Not our cutting edge medical research, our Engineering and Tech transforming the future, contributions in Economics and leading researchers in different fields. Previous commercials also highlighted our interesting students excelling the athletics and the classroom and advancing society.
Instead we highlight a politically correct topic of “Performance promoting resilience and healing in difficult times” and a job hopping professor. Glad our publicity helped him find a new job.
BTN cuts promos like that for all of its member schools, and have done other issues for Northwestern like entrepreneurship. (Here's a whole YouTube playlist of them (
https://www.youtube.com/user/BTNLiveBIG). Odds are, it was probably part of the deal to establish BTN - "X% of programming is devoted to documenting research and academics" or something to that extent. In turn, BTN gets more content to fill the hours and hours of time on that channel. Based on my knowledge of such arrangements, the universities likely provide their own pitches for stories, so again, it's likely that NU wanted to tell this kind of story.
NU does plenty of hyping its celebrity alums (Julia Louis Dreyfus, Meghan Markle, Stephen Colbert, Purple Sports journalism mafia, et al). This isn't an either/or type deal, NU has plenty of marketing money and muscle. Finally - what might be "politically correct" to you, might seem to someone like me as "cool, there's a place for folks like me on this campus." Might as well use the "sunk cost" avenue to advance that story.
