A new Slop University advertising campaign for the Master of Priority Studies stages a campus sprinkler caught mid-arc, three metres past the garden bed it was set to water, as the pitch for the program.
A new recruitment pitch for the Master of Priority Studies stages a quad sprinkler mid-arc, three metres past the garden bed it was set to cover
Not every instrument overruns its boundary loudly. Slop University’s newest recruitment pitch for the Master of Priority Studies chose one that does it in silence: a quad sprinkler, caught mid-arc, watering three metres of open path it was never set to reach.
The pitch runs under a single line, “See The Boundary Before It Drifts,” across the University’s bus-stop panels and campus screens, in daylight and evening renderings tuned for after-dark reading.
A sprinkler doesn’t creep past its line on purpose. Somebody just stopped walking it every fortnight to check.
— Dr Ronja Oyelaran, Senior Lecturer, School of Emergent Priorities
The Master of Priority Studies takes the same premise into its opening unit: a priority, like a sprinkler zone, is set once and re-checked rarely, and the program spends its first fortnight training students to notice the metre it has already crept before anyone else does. The School treats the campaign less as recruitment marketing than as a demonstration of the instinct its whole program is built around.
“Most drift does not announce itself,” said Dr Ingrid Vasseur, Convenor of Futures in Committee. “It just waters the footpath for a while before somebody happens to look down.”
The full advertisement is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.p1dt96.