If perception continues to be a major area of concern for NIU, then spending $76,000 on a marketing strategy survey won’t benefit anybody.

In President John Peters’ state of the university address, he announced that marketing would be key to bringing in better faculty, better students and improving the overall image of NIU. The survey, which will be administered by the Chicago marketing firm Lipman Hearne, supposedly will be the first step in that process.

One should remember that the first step anyone makes at NIU means a step on campus.

Maybe the fear comes in taking the information gathered in these focus groups and phone interviews, filtering through all the opinions and deciding to change policies. And all the while, under this assumption, the unsolicited and free opinions of the NIU community lose significance.

That very well could be true, at least among the more cynical in the community. But the idea most troubling in the whole marketing concept remains centered on that all-important money.

In the university’s budget, maybe $76,000 seems like small potatoes. After all, when multimillion dollar facilities teeter on the edge of delay, the small stuff just isn’t crossed off on the NIU “To Do” list.

Try telling that to the Campus Activities Board, a group that teeters as well on the brink of obsolescence. Yes, yes, there are clear-cut and different sources for CAB funding (student fees) and normal, student and state-funded university business. But CAB represents an easy symbol of the monetarily needy and increasingly disenchanted (aka, non-donating alumni).

The NIU community’s morale isn’t something you can gauge easily (then again, it can’t be easy if you’d rather talk to people who might come to NIU rather than the ones who already keep the university running). NIU attempted to do this last fall with the President’s Task Force on Undergraduate Life, and presidential assistant Nolan Davis came back with a thick packet full of ideas.

Those ideas, from improving Greek Row to offering more outlets to combat suitcase-schoolitis, were thought of knowing solutions would take time, a concerted effort and financial backing. Nowhere in that report did it mention the need to know what someone in the 312 area code thought about the university so many others hold dear.

Just try spinning a positive on that perception of priorities.