By Bradford J. Senning
Arizona Daily Wildcat
April 10, 1998

Have a Coke and a suspension

At Greenbrier High School in Evans, Georgia, if you wear a Pepsi t-shirt you could get suspended.

They've got a celebration there called "Coke in Education Day." The idea behind this plan is that Coke wants to sell more sugar-water, so it establishes a promotional base right where the customers are at. No, I'm wrong. It is a day in which creativity is promoted. Seriously, this is what I get from the Coke people: they give $500 to the "Columbia County school that comes up with the most creative method of distributing promotional discount cards to students." I don't know what exactly that means, but it's got the word "creative" in it.

Enter Mike Cameron, a creative adolescent who accidentally wore his Pepsi shirt on Coke Day. But that's okay. He wore it underneath another shirt. Then, as photographers were taking a group picture of the students, all with their brightest Coke smiles, Mike Cameron accidentally took his top shirt off. I'm guessing it was all an accident, because if it was intentional it would be damn near the most creative thing I've heard of.

Instead of giving Mike Cameron the $500 outright for his individual creativity (forget the school, eh?), administrators gave him a one-day suspension.

First of all, you can wear a gym shirt of the opposing school on Homecoming game day in high school without being reprimanded. You may get your face altered by one or several football players, but I'm pretty sure the schools have no policy against tasteful but inappropriate t-shirts.

If you can do that, when football is the backbone of American high school culture, what makes inciting cola wars on campus such a villainous offense?

Mike Cameron needs to step back to square one, where the new school ethic has been restated. It now says, "School is a business." That was easily said about the university system. What with UA administrators trading their ethics in for fashionable basketball shoes and billboards advertising our "Amazing Discoveries" instead of our academics, we might as well drop an "Inc." behind "Arizona" and call it a foregone conclusion.

But high schools? Are they becoming the next American franchise?

You don't need to go as far away as Georgia in order to answer this question. You can drive down the street. Look at the marquees out in front of some high schools and middle schools around town. They've got ads on them. Doolen Middle School on Grant has an ad for Bookman's on its marquee. Booth-Fickett on Prudence has an ad for Jim Click. Call them corporate "sponsorships," just for fun. Then consult your physician about that cranial-rectal inversion problem of yours.

Any exchange of money for advertising is beyond simple sponsorship. In fact, "sponsorship" is now a marketing strategy (altruism with perks). Companies do it because it's a tax write-off that comes with free advertising. And the advertising they get makes them look like they care about education. It's hard to know what they care about because the benefits are often much greater than the costs. They operate in a gray area like the opportunists of Dante's Inferno who are "neither for good nor evil but only for themselves."

I substitute teach three days a week. I've seen some ugly business stuff in the Tucson Unified School District. One day at Sechrist Middle School some marketing researchers visited the classrooms in order to figure out what the lingo was these days. You remember when "cool" was the cool thing to say, and then the following year it was "radical." These researchers were trying to determine middle school catch phrases. Why? Look at Mountain Dew commercials. I'm damn sure their current stranglehold on the 13- to 18-year-old market wasn't the result of a concerted grunge kingpin buyout. Mountain Dew did their homework and is coming to an elementary school soon.

I used to think "The Simpsons" was a show filled with vitriolic social commentary. Now when I watch re-runs at 5:30 and 10 p.m. they look to me like halcyon days. Remember the ruckus Bart caused when he wore his "Down with Homework" t-shirt? Now it's something as tame as a Pepsi t-shirt. A Pepsi t-shirt earns you a one-day suspension. Why? Because we need cola wars to fill the void we've felt since the end of the end of the cold war. I would tell you to avoid Georgia at all costs. However, it's now not only the global corporate headquarters of sugar water but the inevitable successor to the Department of Education. You may want to start sending your local lobbyists to Atlanta for education funding and Coca-Cola t-shirts. You'll likely need to be on the Coke team in order to get your school funded.

Brad Senning is a senior majoring in American literature and creative writing. His column, "The Emperor of Ice Cream," normally appears every Thursday. He would like to remind his readers that the only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.