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University of Oregon
ANOTHER PERFECT STORM FROM OREGON?
First, as always for readers of my cast of mind, some history is in order. Please bear with me.
For those of my vintage, Peter Drucker is everyone's favorite business guru. My guess is if you were to ask Peter what is the most difficult problem of large institutions, or large elements within any society, it is to cause a cultural shift. His best example took place with Detroit auto makers who, in the 60's and 70's, were forced to make quality cars equal or better than those flooding the market from Germany and Japan. Changing the fins and the shape of the hood was easy. Changing six decades of sloppy, wasteful practices was, very nearly, impossible.
It was a struggle that had to change the habits of every worker from factory floor to executive suite, change the thinking of every business editor from the New York Times to the local gazette, change Wall Street and Main Street from the negative to the positive. They did it and it's a history worth reading.
Now, fast forward that story to another bit of history. This one is easy for those who follow college football; and especially easy if you are from Oregon.
Blessed with an outstanding quarterback in 2002, and blessed with a decade of rebuilding the Duck football program, the gurus behind all of it took a $250,000 gamble that an outrageous five story high billboard placed high in Times Square would create quite a stir. On it's face, theirs was a campaign to get Joey Harrington the Heisman.
In fact, it was an brilliant ploy to elevate the perception that the Ducks had arrived at the mountain top of collegiate sports.
The payoff was that their $250,000 gamble resulted in thousands of hours of radio, hundreds of articles in magazines and front page coverage by newspapers across the country. Madison Avenue gurus declared it the "perfect storm" of advertising; those who track this sort of thing gauged the publicity to be worth about $70 million dollars.
Let us now fast forward to the largest single problem in the American college world -- alcohol abuse. While it would be helpful to do so, you don't need to read Barrett Seaman's' brand new book Binge. What Your College Student Won't Tell You to know how serious is this problem.
And it's even more serious for Greeks, to whom a great many of the university and societal arrows are now pointed.
Most people who deal with the problem on a daily basis will be the first to tell you that this is an intractable problem; it would be easier to stop teen age girls from using lipstick than get sizeable numbers of collegians to rethink their attitude about alcohol. Not so says Brandon Busteed, founder of Outside the Classroom. Brandon's idea is to offer universities on line courses about alcohol use and abuse. In turn, they would make these courses available (and in some cases mandatory) to their students. So far, some 450 universities have taken up Branden's offer. The results are exceptionally positive.
So what has all this to do with Sigma Chi?
We, like the rest of the Greek world, suffer from both a wide spread image of alcohol abuse inside our Houses and from many, many recruiting challenges we have to overcome as a result of that perception. We also -- let's admit it -- have problems within the Fraternity directly related to alcohol. And, as proud as we are that Sigma Chi has spent millions of dollars to "change the culture" toward one of "responsible drinking", very often it's been three steps forward and four steps back.
I will not pretend there is any silver bullet. But I will advance the proposition that if we can use the same level of creativity that was shown in the Joey Harrington campaign, and the same level of persistence that Peter Drucker wrote about, big changes are possible.
How? Please write John Hibbs for follow up information. He's from Oregon, he's passionate about Sigma Chi, passionate about kids and passionate about baseball. He's also passionate about the use of technology in the classroom and how the Internet can put an out-of-the-box media campaign on steroids.
John would be happy to share thoughts about another perfect storm from Oregon.
