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| From the issue dated June 6, 2008 |
Your College's Good Name, Up in Smoke
Video: View videos that pop up in YouTube searches for specific colleges.
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A college can spend millions of dollars a year polishing its image, but one viral video on a user-generated Web site like YouTube can undo it all in a minute and a half.
Some colleges, like the University of Wisconsin at Madison, are lucky enough to have user-generated campus tours come up on their first YouTube hit. Others have set up their own YouTube channels: Auburn University has uploaded more than 150 videos to the site.
And then there are the ones that make college-admissions officers cringe. Here are four of the quirkier videos that recently popped up as the first YouTube hit for selected institutions:
Search term: U. of Colorado at Boulder
Video: "420 2008 University of Colorado, Boulder. Norlin Quad"
Added: April 20, 2008
Views: 13,800+
What it is: A home video showing thousands of students in a haze of smoke at 4:20 p.m. on April 20, 2008, in what has become an annual tradition of public cannabis consumption on the university's main quad.
***
Search term: U. of Idaho
Video: "Web Pages That Suck — University of Idaho"
Added: November 28, 2006
Views: 25,000+
What it is: A voice-over criticism of the former Web site for the university's children's center, wherein the narrator describes the site as "one of the strangest uses of contrast I've seen."
***
Search term: U. of Central Florida
Video: "The Crazy Preacher and His Wife"
Added: November 29, 2006
Views: 93,000+
What it is: Footage of a roaming evangelist and his wife, who apparently travel to various Florida colleges, railing against homosexuality and masturbation and drawing heated arguments from students.
***
Search term: Syracuse U.
Video: "Tyler Gets Into Syracuse University"
Added: December 2, 2007
Views: 2,500+
What it is: A 10-minute "live documentation" of one student's personal acceptance to the university in December 2006. The student delivers monologues into a hand-held camera, at one point even while using a public bathroom, and later watches his parents jump for joy at his acceptance.
Send ideas to short.subjects@chronicle.com
http://chronicle.com
Section: Short Subjects
Volume 54, Issue 39, Page A6