by Eric Ruark

Created on: February 03, 2009   Last Updated: March 17, 2009

For several years, I was an Adjunct Professor at the New York Institute of Technology in New York City. I taught undergraduate and graduate classes in advertising, specifically Integrated Marketing Communications. For the most part, my classes were made up of exchange students and extremely bright American students, most of whom lacked what I considered the rudimentary basics of the English language. I could understand that from the European and Asian students. English is not an easy language to master. However, anyone who wants to play the mind-games that advertising calls for, needs to master the language in order to use its puns and innuendos.

I learned advertising the old fashioned way. I started in paste-up and worked my way up to copywriter where I was assigned to a team and we brain-stormed ads that appeared in many of the nation's leading newspapers. To my horror/humor I discovered that at NYIT I was the only teacher at the campus with agency experience. The others, including the head of the department were Ph.ds who had impressive degrees behind their names, but had never dealt with a client or had to plan out or budget an advertising campaign in the real world.

I was expected to teach advertising from a book. Academics had reduced something creative to something that could be measured and graded. As a teacher, there-in lay my dilemma. If I had been a creative director at an advertising agency, none of my students would have been allowed in the door. There grasp of the basics of the English language did not allow it. Simple things like how to punctuate introductory adverbial phrases were beyond them. You have to know the rules of grammar before you can explode them and warp them to give people the impression that you are actually saying something legit. For example: "Winston tastes good, like a cigarette should" is not only bad English, but it doesn't mean what you think it means. It leaves you with the impression that Winston tastes good, which is not what it actually says.

Looking over my class, I knew that none of them posessed the basics of what it would take to get a job on Madison Ave. Therefore, I had to make the choice between do I grade them on creative content and strongly urge them to go back and re-study the basics which they should have learned in the 9th grade; or do I grade them on their nuts and bolts performances?

After speaking with several of the other teachers there, I chose to grade the students on their creative content. It gave them the hope that one day, they just might achieve their goals. But was hope enough? To this day, I'm not sure that I didn't do them a disservice.

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