A new Slop University advertising campaign for the Master of Priority Studies turns a university admissions desk's reply-speed scoring into its recruitment pitch, joining the University's bus-stop and digital-signage rotations.
A new campaign for the Master of Priority Studies turns a university admissions desk's reply-speed scoring into its recruitment pitch, staged against a fanning stack of intake folders and the clock above them
The School of Emergent Priorities spends most of its research asking how an institution decides what deserves attention first. Its newest recruitment campaign for the Master of Priority Studies puts that question to a familiar counter-example: the university admissions desk that scores a prospective student’s interest by how fast they answer the third follow-up email, then quietly moves the slow repliers to the back of the queue before anyone has read what they actually asked.
A reply-speed score answers a question nobody in the queue was asked. Ours is a degree built to notice the difference.
— Associate Professor Kwame Lindqvist, Director, Master of Priority Studies, School of Emergent Priorities
Unveiled today under the line “Priority Isn’t How Fast You Reply,” the campaign stages a fanned stack of intake folders across an enquiries counter, one folder already drawn forward ahead of the rest. It joins the University’s bus-stop panel and campus digital signage rotations, the latest instalment in the School of Emergent Priorities’ case for treating sequencing as a taught skill rather than a scheduling accident.
“A queue reordered by reply time looks decisive right up until someone asks what it was actually deciding,” said Dr Runa Adegoke, Senior Lecturer and Convenor of the Strategic Drift Survey. “That’s most of what the degree spends its first semester on.”
The Master of Priority Studies is now taking applications for its Semester 2 intake. The full advertisement is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.qpdbc9.