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Which brings us to the disemboweling.

Back in class Fenske had the students spread their work out for review on the rows of long tables before them. He asked them to pick the best of the four or five ads they’d created and explain why it’s good and why they like it. The first, a young blond woman already blushing, held up a fake ad for Miracle-Gro plant food that showed in the lower-right-hand corner of the page a giraffe’s head that clearly cannot reach the miraculously tall leafy plant on the top left. Not exactly the future of advertising, I thought. But cute, clever.

“What is the news in this?” Fenske asked. The young woman struggled with an answer. When she finished, he groaned before launching into a set piece about the necessity of including something newsworthy, something provocative that the consumer did not know, in your ads. “Do you mind if I do this?” he said, already starting to tear the young woman’s meticulously composed yet unsuccessful ad in half.

What followed was not so much a critique of the twenty or so ads on the table as a platform for Fenske to use the ads to impart wisdom. Other than the student who happened to be on the hot seat at any given moment, the rest didn’t seem to hate it. In fact, most were transfixed, uncharacteristically alert for twentysomethings in a classroom environment, scribbling notes in journals that looked curiously familiar.

Work may literally have been shredded and egos may have been bruised, but they seemed to consider it a small price to pay for the insights being dispensed with Taoist gravity.

This is a good place for Fenske, I decided as I got up to leave. Lecturing, enlightening, and occasionally humiliating young men and women is much more effective and rewarding than doing the same to forty-year-olds.

Earlier, I had asked Ashley Sommardahl, the Brandcenter’s assistant managing director of student affairs, if graduates experienced something of a letdown when they started an entry-level job at a less-than-idyllic real-world agency.

“Actually,” she said, “there’s less of a chance of a letdown in the real world after leaving such a progressive environment, because they’re recruited by the best.” Indeed, there is a growing VCU alumni network in place at the country’s top agencies. And at a recruiting fair at the school after graduation last year, there were 125 recruiters for seventy-five students.

One of the primary issues facing the Brandcenter is how it will handle growth. The new building means higher bills and more students to help pay them. Will the increased number of students translate to a watering down of the talent base, a lessening of the admissions standards? Are there enough jobs in adland to accommodate so many graduates? Indeed, are there that many exceptionally creative people on the planet, period? And what about the increasingly polished competition emerging from other well-regarded programs like the Creative Circus in Atlanta, the Art Center in Pasadena, and Miami Ad School? For instance, according to Amanda Vendal, creative/planning recruiter at the Richards Group in Dallas, which has had a relationship with VCU since the Brandcenter opened, “For a very well-rounded art director it’s hard to top the best students from Art Center.” And while many praise the Brandcenter students’ ability to “hit the ground running” and to play well with others, some recruiters prefer portfolios where it’s easy to discern individual (rather than group) ownership of an idea.

“Talent and instinct are a big part of it,” says Linda Harless, creative manager at Adweek’s 2007 Agency of the Year, Goodby Silverstein & Partners. “But I think that you can teach ways to bring it out and polish it.”

But just when I thought that the future of advertising was going to be churned out by Brandcenter-like institutions and that it would be next to impossible in 2009 for someone to rise up through the creative ranks after honing his skills writing, say, about gallbladder surgery, wine, and high school sports, not to mention laying block in a mental institution, Harless tells me