For a number of years now, Dan Wieden, the man who came up with Nike's "Just Do It" campaign, has taught a journalism course at the University of Oregon. This year, he thought it would be a good idea to give students an assignment in which they were forced to confront and overcome fear. Things unravelled from there, as one might expect. It's a bad idea to mix consciousness-raising and classroom teaching. It's a particularly bad idea for a teacher to tell students that they have to expose themselves emotionally in order to earn a good grade. Wieden may have had the best of intentions, but he crossed the line between teacher and therapist with this one, and the fallout was predictably ugly.

News reports are a little foggy on what the assignment actually was. Some suggest that Wieden quite seriously expected students to do the exact activities he suggested they do, while others suggest that when Wieden made these suggestions, he was speaking metaphorically. Today's Chronicle of Higher Education notes that both Wieden and the dean were surprised that students took Wieden literally when he told them to go streaking, stand up and object at a wedding, and come out to one's parents. "The assignment was not to do these things but to prepare a creative presentation," the dean of journalism told The Chronicle.

But Wieden's students did take him literally. The student assigned to run naked in public did just that, filming himself, per the assignment, streaking across a private golf course and, not unimportantly, thereby breaking the law. Other students merely agonized about being given assignments that they felt would compromise them morally, and worried about what would happen to their grades when they failed to complete the tasks required of them.

Eventually, complaints made their way to the dean, and now the university is apologizing profusely for putting students in the position of having to choose between doing homework that either broke the law or compromised them personally, and receiving a failing grade for an assignment they failed to complete. "It is clear that some students found themselves in a position that resulted in behaviors that are inconsistent with the mission, ethics, values, and vision of the School of Journalism and Communication and the University of Oregon," the dean of the journalism school told The Chronicle of Higher Education. "I should never have been exposed to a learning environment where the instructor seemingly took advantage of his authority for his own amusement at the expense of the students," declared one member of the class.

That's true. But there seems to be some question about whether that's really what Wieden was doing. Other members of the class readily understood what was being asked of them, and creatively modified the assignments in ways that suited them personally.

The University of Oregon is apologizing up and down for not making the assignment more clear. That's fine as far as it goes. But it also ignores what seem to me to be two crucially important underlying issues: Wieden's confusion of the classroom with a group therapy session, and the disturbingly blunted powers of comprehension displayed by some of his students. Neither will be addressed by promises to make things more clear in future; both will, in fact, be encouraged.

Apparently, many of these students were so intimidated by the authority of their professor that they (a) were *not* willing to ask him questions to clarify what he really wanted, but (b) *were* willing to do things that were offensive and painful to others, and even illegal, rather than to disobey what they thought might have been his orders.

Kind of reminds me of the Milgram experiment.

This sort of bad judgement seems to becoming more widespread. There was an issue on my campus of a prof (teaching a psych. class in child development) who assigned (for extra credit, I am told) students to write an essay describing their first sexual experiences.

I don't know if anyone took the assignment, but when I heard about it (through another faculty member who had one of the guy's students come to her and ask "Am I off base or is this totally inappropriate?") my skin crawled.

Davd F - was the Milgram experiment the electro-shock 'thing'where students thought they were jolting patients with ever higher jolts?
Thanks.

And one should never underestimate the ability of students (or anyone else for that matter) to take things more literally than they should. This Professor did that apparently. Seem to me that the 'convoy' method is probably appropriate where sometimes one has to take into account the speed of the slowest vessel.

I think some of the respondents are missing a major point. Should have the professor been more clear? Absolutely. Is the professor entirely at fault? NOT AT ALL!

As a college professor myself, I see some things in what Weiden did. First of all, he was providing some EXAMPLES of what he was describing. Did he say to that one student, "You should object at a wedding?" No. She heard that one example, was personally shaken because she had an engaged roommate, and thereafter shut down her listening and heard nothing else. Bad student, deserves whatever poor grade she gets.

Am I taking a hard stand? Maybe. Now, the professor is at fault for two things:
1. Should have described the assignment better, or reiterated the INTENT and CONTEXT of the assignment AFTER providing examples. Human beings tend to best remember the last few things they heard. They would have retained the essence of the assignment if the professor had concluded with that.

2. Should have approved the subject matter of the students' assignments, like approving the topics of a term paper. Then the students would come to him and say, "I'd like to do XXX for the assignment," and he can say either, "Okay," or "No, that would not be appropriate."

However, the students are EQUALLY responsible. If they thought the professor was asking something strange, they SHOULD HAVE ASKED QUESTIONS TO CLARIFY THE ASSIGNMENT!!! God knows MY students do! And if they didn't get a satisfactory answer, or where embarrassed to admit that they don't understand what's being asked, they should have spoken to the professor after class, or during office hours. Only when those options failed should they have gone to the Dean, and they CERTAINLY should have gone to the Dean soon after the assignment was given, not waiting until AFTER they were taking the inappropriate actions to complain! That's like deciding to do something you KNOW is wrong, doing it anyway, and then blaming someone else, or society as a whole, for your action. BULL! If you know you're about to commit an action that you know is wrong, then DON'T do it! If you DO do it, then you only have YOURSELF to blame, because ultimately you CHOSE to take the action, knowing it was wrong!

What, has this society gotten so mentally deficient that we can no longer think for ourselves? No wonder America is viewed with distain by other countries of the world.

Why is this encounter-group stuff about "overcoming your fears" considered by anyone commenting on this story (other than Erin, who made this point in her last paragraph) to be a proper part of a university education? Have we come that far in anti-intellectualism?

Steve, in a word, I think the answer is - yes.

One could posit that it may be (arguably) appropriate or relevant in a journalism class - if the goal is to have the students learn to ask questions of people that they may by nature be too timid to ask. It might take some encounter training to learn how to deal with a Bobby Knight for example.

This comment interests me: "It's a bad idea to mix consciousness-raising and classroom teaching."

In one of the course my peers and I had to take before we began to teach as adjuncts at our university, pretty much the only advice we were given was to try to raise consciousness. The idea that we actually had anything to teach our students about composition or literature was ruled out almost a priori. Predicatable, those of us who tried to raise consciousness in our freshman comp courses usually crashed and burned. Nothing too bad happened (nothing like the stuff described in Erin's post), but it still wasn't pretty.

Ugh.

Phil

The desire for a full-fledged Holodeck is behind this story. I work in this arena. Not a day passes when I fail to see some item in the press that relates the growing desire for a Holodeck. (For those of you who have been living on another planet, the Holodeck is a virtual environment capable of replicating any reality, from the Star Trek series.)

Trying to create a Holodeck through role-playing in the classroom is a good recipe for disaster.

Try to look into the future and you will see that the primary moral problem is unanticipated. What people want is the ability to experiment in real-life settings without cost or consequence. As you think through what this will do to people in their moral and intellect lives, allow your imagination free reign.

I tend to discount stories like this one as clutzy attempts by amateurs to accomplish what can only be accomplished by master coders, designers, engineers, etc.

Stolypin, another example of fear that journalists face is the possibility that they will be shot and killed during the course of their jobs; see the BBC guys in Saudia Arabia this week.

The thing is, anybody contemplating journalism should surely know that they might have to interview overbearing people or go into dangerous situations (depending on what kind of journalism they do). Presumably they've taken that into account and decided they want to do it. What's that got to do with running naked through a golf course or disrupting a wedding, even as a thought experiment?

"Overcoming your fear" is not an _academic_ skill. To the extent (not much, in my opinion) that "journalism" is even a legitimate university discipline, "overcoming your fear" would be something best learned in on-the-job training; university courses, even in a professional school, are supposed to deal with the intellectual foundations of the discipline, if any. That's precisely the function of internships (or equivalents such as clinical experiences for med students); they can provide exposure to aspects of the future profession that are not best dealt with in the classroom.

Ahem!

There students are adults, no? Can they not serve on a jury that sends a man to the electric chair?

Where is their strength of character? They should be able to stand up for basic morality and not breaking the law.

Punish the idiot professor, but the students also need to put a little steel in their backbones.

My sainted grandmothers - and, I suspect, milions of others of their generation - had a pretty good rule of thumb: when you're going to do something significant, think about the outcome, then decide whether it's really worth doing.

Maybe we're too late in the game to expect college students to think like that - I certainly hope not. The article didn't say whether they are freshmen or seniors.

Weiden's hedging about "I didn't really mean that" is singularly unconvincing. When they're told that a term paper is due next Friday, should they figure it's just rhetorical assignment?

On the other hand, I'd give the guy who ran naked though the golf course - and filmed himself - an A in Performance Art.

I hope the professor doesn't pay too dearly for this. The situation was almost predictable given his apparent creative bent. Creative folks try all sorts of ideas with a percentage certain to flop. Charles Rennie Mackintosh lived by this creed: "There is hope in honest error, none in the icy perfection of the mere stylist." I put this event in that category -- honest error.

I do want to comment on Erin's statement: "It's a bad idea to mix consciousness-raising and classroom teaching." For the most part that is true, but I do recall a course I took as an undergrad at UCLA in the early 70's that did just that in a positive way. It was Psychology 70, a course that was regarded as easy because 1) the professor who taught it required only one paper; that paper would serve as the entire basis for your grade, and 2) the professor made a point of stating the lectures were optional and specifically that attending the lecture would not be of any use in producing one's paper. (I, in fact, took a job in the student union during the lecture hours.)

I don't remember all the details but the paper topic related to "love" and our personal experience with it. When it came down to doing the work it turned out to be extraordinarily hard because it required looking inward rather than, say, tracking down information at the library. You then had to essentially "spill you guts" into your paper.

It was an unusual exercise to say the least and I learned something from it that was a good complement to the rest of my coursework. Only after I had been through it was I able to reflect that the mind who came up with that idea probably had something interesting to say at his lectures. I regret not ever having heard any of them.

Stolypin...yes, the Milgram experiment was the one in which students were asked to give electric shocks--including supposedly-dangerous ones--to subjects. Few resisted.

Also related: there have been several airline accidents and near-misses in which a signficant factor was the reluctance of the copilot or flight engineer to bring a problem to the attention of the captain. (aceman plse note: these include non-U.S. airlines). Airlines now teach "cockpit resource management" which, stripped to its essence, means "speak up" on the one hand and "listen" on the other.

David F. Thank you. The downing of the Korean Airline by Soviet MIG fighters is the most classic example. The co-pilot is purported to have known that the pilot neglected to make an in-flight course correction somewhere over the Pacific but he never advised the pilot.

Hi Laura. I'm not sure what students know or don't know about the real world when they pick a major - but you are certainly correct that running naked through a field does not prepare one for much of anything except some unfortunately placed mosquito bites. And anyone dumb enough to object at a frinds wedding for a class assignment should probably get out of journalism school and go directly to law school. On the other hand, I now rue the day no one objected at my wedding. :)

But, truth be told it turns out that this was not a journalism class. It was a workshop for advertising students.

Some more background is in order. Wieden is not a journalist. He is an Oregon grad, ran track, started an ad agency and landed the Nike account. He is responsible for just about every Nike commercial we have ever seen. Bo Jackson, Michael Jordan, and the 'famous' Nike commercial where John Lennon's Revolution blared in the background.

The issue arose in the context of annual (apparently voluntary not for credit) advertising workshops - for advertising majors (which must be p/o the Journalism School) that Wieden conducts. The workshop presentations were made at Wieden's ad agency. A link to an Oregon U. news article about the workshop (pre-controversy) is remarkably positive and includes some interesting quotes from the Dean. It also appears that the students knew in advance that the assignments might be troubling. Do not know if this changes anyone's mind. TO me it sounded straight out of Donald Trump's Apprentice.
The link is posted above - and here
http://www.dailyemerald.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2004/05/24/40b21f79288cc?in_archive=1

What a tool. I've been both a print and electronic journalist and I've worked in both Belfast and Beiruit and I sure don't need any 2-bit hack giving me a "confront your fear" exam. He should be so ashamed. Where has he been and what has he done that he teaches this class? If I were a student, I'd ask for a refund.

Well, for me, advertising is not journalism even if "advertising" falls under the aegis of the school of journalism. Feels more like performance art than anything else.

To paraphrase Sam Cooke I don't know nothing bout advertising but wonder if this sort of behavior is at all unusual on the creative side of things in the wacky world of advertising. Just think of all the hijinks Darrin Stevens got up to at his job.

One other thought: isn't it interesting that "confronting personal fears" seems to be defined purely in terms of doing things that will offend people? What about personal fears involving things like exposure to enemy fire, jumping out of airplanes, or even riding difficult horses?

Note that "courage" defined in these term allows one to (a)hurt others, (b)feel morally superior about it, (c)take no actual personal risks.

And also note that the willingness to offend did not go so far as to offend the person who gave the assignment, by refusing or even by asking clarifying questions.

Also...Stolypin...I had not heard that explanation of the KAL flight. My understanding was the autopilot, which was controlling the airplane, was doing something different than the flight crew thought it was doing (probably because of a poor user interface design) and no one bothered to check the position against the raw nav data.

I'm interested in this because I'm planning to write a review of a book that references this disaster. Do you have a reference or link for the silent-copilot theory?

David F, I will look it up. I seem to recall at least one major magazine piece about it, possibly NYT Magazine, possibly the Atlantic. I may also have come across something while doing accident investigation work for a matter I was involved with some time ago. I do not recall Will check my sources and get back to you.

David, I could not find my source for my comment. I checked Lexis/Nexis and couldn't find it either. The ICAO accident report and most other analysts have concluded that the manual entry of data into either autopilot or the INS system is the most likely initial causative factor. Apparently one might typically have to manually punch in over 100 digits into the INS system in order to set it The speculation I heard (and it may have been in an article, it may have been at hearings on Cockpit Resource Management, or it may have been shop talk among aviation attorneys I know - we are going back to the early 90s I think) asked the question - when did the crew discover the error that was taking them more than 1,000 miles off their flight path and why didn't they take steps to correct it. That is when the discussion got into a whole host of CRM and cultural issues, pilot losing face, possible disciplinary action for wasted fuel and returning to a location from which they could re-set correct parameters. KAL officers in the past had been disciplined as a result of these errors. (May have been in Seymour Hersh's book on the flight but don't think so. Did not read the book - but it may have been excerpted in the NYT magazine.)

By the way, if you are interested, there is a book entitled: Global Disasters, Inquiries into Management Ethics. Author = Robert E. Allinson. ISBN 0-13-145947-3. Does not discuss KAL 007 but delves into managerial issues relating to Challenger disaster, Kings Cross metro fire, Herald of Free Enterprise sinking, and the ANZ flight that crashed into an Antarctic mountain. It may or may not have some relevance to the book you are reviewing.

where can I get a copy of the streaking film??