How do you take something serious, and make it trivial in twenty minutes?

In the same spirit of having to get a chickenpox vaccine, I today took the Mandatory Training in Hazing online course, called "Choose Kindness, Don't Haze." This was presented via a SCORM course, and it was exactly as one might expect from a required training. My favorite moments included:

The stock art of very sad people holding their heads in black and white:

(They ran out, and had to use him twice:)

The photoshopped students on a blurry background:

and the attempt to relate to Kids Today by using text-messaging style visualizations:

What's nice, though, is the sad students become happy at the end when you pass the course:

What's Not So Nice is that the thing takes an extremely important topic, grounded in what appears to be very thoughtful and thorough academic research by Allan & Kerschner, and then turns it into something ridiculous:

I'll spare any more editorializing, but I will call out that it was curious to see things like this, trademarked:

The whole platform seems to be a commercial endeavor. I thought StopHazing.org was a non-profit, because it has a Donations & Fundraising link at the bottom, but the IRS doesn't have a 990 for it; the privacy policy refers to it as StopHazing Consulting.

The website describes that "In just 20 minutes, participants gain practical tools to recognize warning signs of hazing, take effective action, and create positive group cultures." It costs "less than $2 per learner," which at UCI is about 7000 students, and at the whole California system is about 63,000 students. Figure half of those turn over each year, so that's about 66k ARR, just for the UCs. I found a University of Maine sole-source showing 237k for 2024. Seems like at least a 1M or 2M business with basically no overhead?

I suppose Markets in Everything, and good for them in monetizing their research I guess?

What will grad school bring next....