A Real Business Course

InsideHigherEd.com (via Slashdot.org) is reporting a brewing controversy at Hunter College in New York City: corporate sponsored courses. According to the report, the International Anti-Counterfeiting Coalition (IAAC) - an organization of large corporations looking to reduce copyright infringement in the form of knock-off vendors pretending that their wares are major brand names - actually sponsored a course at the school last year, and that's resulted in the Faculty Senate getting involved:

According to the complaints filed with the Faculty Senate, Hunter agreed to let the IACC sponsor a course for which students would create a campaign against counterfeiting in which they would create a fake Web site to tell the story of a fictional student experiencing trauma because of fake consumer goods. One goal of the effort was to mislead students not in the course into thinking that they were reading about someone real. So-called “guerrilla marketing” — in which consumers are unaware that they are being marketed — is the subject of some controversy in the marketing and public relations world. But even among advocates for the tactic, there are some who are disturbed about what happened at Hunter.

Students in the for-credit class did such things as paper campus with fake fliers from an imaginary student looking for a lost Coach bag and a blog supposedly about her realizations that the bag was a counterfeit. Although being called guerilla marketing, I don't think the term applies. Guerilla marketing generally means using low-cost methods for getting interest in a business, with a premium on unusual methods - but you generally know that you're looking at something sponsored by a company.

The irony here is that this version of deceit and propoganda is trying to trick people to take specific actions much the same way as producers of counterfeit products try to trick consumers. They play on people's associations, deliberately misleading them, to gain their own ends. It's a bad situation when your own words and actions end up supporting that which you claim to oppose.