PEACE AND CONFLICT STUDIES INSTRUCTOR WINS SLOGAN CONTEST

Tristan Mabry, an instructor in the Haverford-Bryn Mawr Peace and Conflict Studies Program, calculates that he's used up about 13 of his 15 minutes of fame. After he won a contest to write a catchy tourism slogan for the state of Pennsylvania, he appeared at a news conference with Gov. Ed Rendell. Mabry, who left a career in journalism to pursue a degree in political science, was surprised at how heavily the story was covered by press, radio and TV outlets around the state.

His slogan, "The State of Independence," evokes Pennsylvania 's historic role as the site of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Because he doesn't watch much television, Mabry didn't realize that for more enthusiastic consumers of popular culture, the slogan also evokes a commercial for Saab, the automaker, which uses the identical phrase. Mabry saw the commercial for the first time on Monday night, just before the press conference. He learned about the coincidence of wording a few weeks earlier, when the governor's office told him that it was checking with Saab to make sure the company didn't object to Pennsylvania 's use of the slogan.

"Saab was very gracious. They said, ‘we're a company that sells cars, and you're a sovereign state of the U.S. People probably won't be confused. Go right ahead,'" Mabry explains.

Mabry entered the contest online at the urging of his wife, Holly, who discovered his knack for turning a catchy phrase when she worked in advertising. The Governor's office called him in January to tell him that he was one of five finalists in the contest (17 entrants had suggested "The State of Independence," and Mabry's name was selected randomly from the 17, putting him in the finals). "The State of Independence" won the contest in an online vote.

Mabry's prize is two three-day weekend vacation packages in the Poconos. A requirement that he claim the prize within a year might serve as an enforced vacation for the Penn Ph.D. student from his work on his dissertation, which deals with nationalism, language and Muslim minority conflicts of succession in Asia. Sloganeering isn't likely to lure him away from scholarship permanently, he says. If he could choose the source of his remaining two minutes of fame, he says, it would be a bestseller about language and nationalism.

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