The University Council discussed branding and student retention during its final meeting of the Fall 2010 semester.

NIU President John Peters called the meeting to order Wednesday afternoon in the Holmes Student Center Sky Room.

Peters updated the Council on the university’s mission to come up with a tagline for future branding of NIU.

“We’re such a wonderful and complex university, so it’s hard to brand us,” Peters said.

Peters said NIU surveyed 4,000 students, parents of students, alumni, faculty, staff and high school counselors, asking them to rate twelve different taglines.

High school counselors were an especially important group to survey because of their ability to help influence students to choose a university, Peters said.

About 20 percent of the sample responded, Peters said.

The taglines were rated on ability to attract attention, represent NIU, encourage further interest in NIU, originality and easiness to understand.

They were also rated on being memorable, believable, matching NIU’s perceived image and representing what NIU should be.

The desire was especially to find a tagline students would respond well to, Peters said.

“The big purpose of branding is students and student recruitment,” he said.

After receiving the results of the survey, the winning tagline is “learning today, leading tomorrow.”

“It sums up what education at its best is all about,” Peters said.

Peters said the tagline was especially popular with staff and high school counselors; students rated it highly as well.

“I’m comfortable with that; it cuts across a lot of stakeholders,” Peters said. “We are now going to develop messages around this theme.”

“Your dream, our mission” received 12 percent of the vote, and was the most popular student choice.

Now that NIU has a new tagline, the university will be going through the process of designing a new logo.

After the University Council finished the discussion on branding, it turned its attention to a report by Kerry Freedman, University Advisory Committee representative.

There was a moment of confusion when Freedman noticed part of her report was missing. The report asked “with regards to student success, will faculty members be asked to reconsider academic standards in order to improve retention?”

The answer had somehow been deleted, but Freedman was quick to answer it.

“The answer I heard was ‘no,'” she said.

How the sentence was missing from the report is still a mystery.

“I don’t know how that could have happened,” said Alan Rosenbaum, executive secretary of the University Council.

Peters made sure the sentence would be added to the record, and the meeting moved forward.

Before the meeting adjourned, Peters took time to congratulate the NIU football team, who will be playing in the MAC Championship against Miami (OH) on Friday in Detroit.

“Our coach and team are in an amazing spot,” Peters said. “Our team, the band, and everyone who works with them are fine people.”

The next University Council meeting will be Jan. 26.