They already name stadiums and buildings, monopolize student unions, and pervade almost all other non-academic aspects of university life in America. But should corporate interests be sponsoring our classes?

Hunter College thinks maybe they should. [via]

The department head says no academic freedom issues popped up during the class, which essentially used students to develop a very specific guerrilla marketing campaign on behalf of the International Anticounterfeiting Coalition (IACC). This is despite the fact that the course was not reviewed by a curriculum committee before being taught.

The class also created a fictional Hunter student - Heidi Cee - who was pawned off as real through distributed leaflets and, of course, a blog. Ethical issues aside, Heidi is totally and completely obnoxious. Ethical issues not aside, they even went so far as to create a fake uncle who they gave a fake stroke so fake Heidi could have a fake emergency as an excuse for missing an actual anticounterfeiting event. “Whoa,” indeed.

And how about the completely real professor, Tim Portluck, who taught the course, despite declaring himself completely unqualified to do so:

[Portluck] said that he told his chair that he was “totally unqualified” to teach the course, but he was eventually told “you’re going to teach this course.” Portlock also said that conference calls were set up with IACC officials to discuss plans and that he didn’t feel he could challenge those plans. “They gave us the materials to refer to. They told us the subject matter to cover.” IACC officials also “came to visit” the course “to see how we were progressing.”

Copyright is “a complex issue,” Portlock said, but he said that he couldn’t really explain that to the students. “On the one hand, they said I could teach things from different perspectives, but when I suggested any kind of critical, sort of an opposite perspective, I was basically told in a very sarcastic way that that was not going to happen,” Portlock said.

If that’s academic freedom then I totally porked Heidi Cee over Christmas break.

Just kidding. I didn’t. I mean, I tried, but it turns out Heidi is not nearly as slutty as Hunter College.