UCLA

The study of academic brands intersects trademark law with critical university studies around questions both empirical and conceptual, from rather mundane things like universities’ trademark policies and lawsuits over T-shirts and hoodies carrying university insignia all the way to the complex cultural, political, and economic tensions that frame the conflicted identity of the modern university. Straddling the line between knowledge and business, public and private, or between its local ties to the state and its reach toward the global economy of higher education, the modern university seems to have found in brands a tool to construct a coherent and attractive image, if perhaps only skin deep, of itself, its role, and its “excellence.”