Ohio State University pulled off a Glee-inspired viral-marketing coup in the spring that at least 24 other colleges have tried to emulate.
In the middle of the student union, 69 students, professors, and staff members surprised hundreds of onlookers with a meticulously choreographed dance performance to “Don’t Stop Believin’.” The university’s president and mascot joined in at the end. A video of the spectacle on YouTube was viewed more than half a million times in its first three days online.
Ohio State called the dance a flash mob, a term that originally described quirky public disturbances organized over the Internet. The Buckeye dance and its imitators are a new, squeaky-clean breed of mob. More akin to publicity stunts than to the original flash mobs, the dances have become the PR tool du jour on college campuses.
The dance mobs are used to enliven official events and promote campus organizations. “People are jaded by traditional media,” says Stephen H. Craft, a professor of marketing at Birmingham-Southern College, which organized a dance mob this fall. “The more you can involve people in an experience, the more they remember.” Admissions offices are even using footage of their dance mobs in their pitches to prospective students.
At Hood College’s new-student convocation, in August, the dean of students stopped midspeech to dance to a techno remix of “We Are Family.” The University of Cincinnati and the University of the Pacific played host to similar convocation dances.
Other events were interrupted by college-run mobs: At Wheaton College, in Illinois, students at a football game were told they would be watching a field-goal-kicking and pie-eating contest, but instead saw classmates shimmy to disco oldies. Organizers at Kalamazoo College set their surprise dance at an orientation event to Natasha Bedingfield’s “Unwritten,” whose lyrics are apt for new students: “Today is where your book begins, the rest is still unwritten.”
At West Virginia University, a foreign-language professor who was inspired by an episode of Glee put on an ensemble dance to Lady Gaga and Beyonce’s “Telephone” in the hope of promoting her department. On the first day of October, students and faculty members at Oregon State University performed an elaborate “Bollywood” dance on the central quad to celebrate the first day of Diversity Awareness Month.
The pep-rally spirit of these events is in sharp contrast to the comic and iconoclastic flash mobs that students have been organizing for several years through Facebook, e-mail, and text messaging.
In 2006 a large group of students wearing ripped clothing and fake blood staggered around Texas A&M University impersonating a pack of zombies, accosting two classmates who were in on the stunt. A year later, students at Colorado State University jumped around and chattered like rogue monkeys on the main plaza of the campus. In recent years, students at Wesleyan University have made a tradition of studying in their underwear when prospective students show up to tour the library.
At other colleges, flash mobs have taken the form of unauthorized on-campus dance parties, some of which have led to clashes with authorities. When about 1,000 students at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga held a rave last year outside the campus library—complete with mosh pit—the police reportedly sprayed the crowd with Mace and arrested five undergraduates. Students who staged a similar library dance party a few months later at Old Dominion University were pepper-sprayed.
“You may see the unauthorized flash mobs diminish as authorized flash mobs become more popular,” says Mr. Craft, the Birmingham-Southern professor.
Since the clip of Ohio State’s dance went viral, few videos of student-run mobs have been posted on YouTube. By embracing the flash mob, colleges may have made it less cool for students to unofficially appear en masse as simians, underwear models, or unhinged partygoers.