Monday Monday: This column brought to you by Accenture™

Hello Duke University! You can call us Accenture™. In the Duke administration’s ongoing bid to commoditize its students and set them adrift in a sea of corporate symbols, we’ve been invited to write a Chronicle column, and we’d just like to say how thrilled we are to be here!

You may have seen some of our recruitment materials around campus this past week. We certainly hope so! We’ve been really busy the last few days hanging our Accenture™ door-hangers on all your doorknobs, spray painting the West Campus sidewalk with our signature Accenture™ stencils and projecting our name, which we’d love for you to know by the way is Accenture™, onto the sides of both the Bryan Center and Rubenstein Library. We’ve been listening to your feedback and many of you have been asking the same thing – “Isn’t this kind of invasive?” We heard your doubts and decided to eliminate any nagging uncertainty.

Beginning this coming week, Accenture™ will begin Accenture™’s all out shock-and-awe campaign of student outreach. The first action on this warpath will see us working with the Duke Men’s Basketball team. We will get these humans together, and we will have them say “Accenture™ is good. Accenture™ is the way I like to do things. Yes, that Accenture™ yes.” They will all say these things, and we will record each of them. The resulting montage will be played at the beginning of every class for a week. We will then commission a sequel in which the basketball players will be joined by a clever talking puppy, and they will fight crime. This will be shown on the quad, and all students will be forced to attend by the promise of free shirts. At the end of the sequel, the heroes will discover the meaning of life, which will be Accenture™. Once the screening is complete, your Larry Moneta will be publicly branded on the forehead with the name of Accenture™, and upon the branding’s completion, he will proclaim “I love you, the Accenture™,” before issuing a snow day warning and passing out.

We have also acquired the rights to advertise on your Chapel. Once the scaffoldings have been taken down and the billboards are visible, we will begin our advertising there. The first advertisement will depict in a minimalist fashion the entire life of a hypothesized Duke student who, having joined Accenture™, ultimately by this triumph goes on to conquer much of Central Asia. We have already bought it many international ad design awards.

Unfortunately we face competition and have not been able to acquire all of the ad space on campus. Pornhub, for example, has gained the hundred-year lease for advertising on the crane and intends to hang a floor-length banner from its arm publicizing their new emphasis on “green” pornography. Additionally Hellmann’s, fearing their mayonnaise no longer holds brand recognition among millennials, is planning on building a giant 3D billboard in the shape of a jar of Hellmann’s mayonnaise around Crowell dorm. We fear this may make students want to eat mayonnaise and masturbate rather than join Accenture™.

Our slogan for this campaign is “Your Career. Your Adventure.” We at Accenture™ are firmly of the belief that every great adventure begins with a widespread and invasive corporate marketing campaign. We hope to engage you in our adventure by submerging you in a new world entirely of our design; a better world where everyone has access to our consultancy. A world in which a child, crying out for milk, can have its woes soothed through an effective, means-tested problem-solving methodology. That is the Accenture™ world. And we want you to help us build it.

Of course, there are those who oppose our blue-sky thinking, those who cast away our doorknob hangers or wash our logos from the sidewalk. They try to escape Accenture™, but escape from Accenture™ is not possible. For Accenture™ has capabilities far beyond mere billboards or administrator brandings. Accenture™ will burn its name into your consciousness. Accenture™ will hang door hangers from your door hangers. Accenture™ will mark its name onto the inside of every pregnant womb. Accenture™ will warp reality itself. Through practical problem solving approaches, we will retro-engineer the world such that, from the day of your pitiful birth to the day your lover leaves you for an Accenture™ employee to the day you die unremembered and buried under this sad Earth, on the sky through it all will be burned the word “Accenture™”.

So we hope to see you at the info session this Friday!

Monday Monday has few employment prospects.