When Karen L. Gould took over as president of Brooklyn College in 2009, one of her first acts was to suck $107,000 from some mysterious, unacknowledged source in order to beget a new logo.
Gould and others believed the old logo looked too much like a giant penis, reports the New York Post. The old logo was the silhouette of the City University of New York-affiliated school’s iconic La Guardia Hall clock tower.
Gould, a scholar of French-Canadian literature by training, became the school’s first female president in June 2009. A couple months later, Brooklyn College contracted with Neustadt Creative Marketing, a Baltimore-based firm, to design a new, non-phallic logo and remake the school website.
The project cost the 16,000-student school a grand total of $107,000. There was no bidding process for the design work. A former college employee told The Post that Gould ignored the school’s fully-staffed, in-house design studio. The in-house staff had designed the old logo.
The new $107,000 logo scrapped all reference to the clock tower, which was erected in the 1930s.
The new logo amounts to a bunch of words. It’s stiffly horizontal and long. It boasts “Brooklyn College” in large, pinkish letters and “The City University of New York” in the top right corner in small gray letters.
Neustadt Creative Marketing calls the limp collection of words “a fresh, youth-oriented design that would help the college stand out,” according to The Post.
A 29-page “Visual Identity System” published by Brooklyn College after the unveiling of the text-only logo instructs employees: “never attempt to redraw or reset” the logo.
Back in 2009, one apparently phallus-averse education professor was an eager beaver for the new logo.
“Can you send me a copy of the new Brooklyn College logo?” requested associate professor Barbara Winslow in a December 2009 email obtained by The Post. “We want to make a Women’s Studies banner, and want to use the not-so-phallic logo.”
Keisha-Gaye Anderson, a spokeswoman for the taxpayer-funded school, would not divulge the source of the $107,000. She did swear it wasn’t government funds or tuition, though.
Gould makes $254,421 in annual salary, according to FindTheData.
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