Hartley Jafine

It was just the first time it had ever been done.

And then after that, shows kind of immediately took that format.

And Big Brother was born.

The Amazing Race was born.

Other reality shows took that model of having players work together and also have to eliminate each other.

But that had never been seen or done on TV before.

And I think that's what made it really compelling television.

Short of actually going on Survivor Hartley and winning and making that money, which is, you know, hard to do, you have decided to make a career of this, or at least a career in part, Survivor, another way, teach a course on it.

What inspired you to, like, pitch to a university, we need to do a course like this, and decide to teach something like that?

Well, what it was is I had a good friend and colleague, Jennifer, and the two of us, we would, after every episode on Wednesday night, Thursday morning, we'd meet, you know, around the coffee machine, the water cooler, and we're talking about, what did you think about the show?

What did you see in the show?

And one of the things we noticed is as we were breaking down and analyzing the show is that what we were seeing on our TV screens were also behaviors that we were seeing in our university classrooms.

And so one day as a thought experiment, we started thinking about what could we put into a course outline?

If we did design a course on Survivor, what would that actually look like?

What do we see in our students that we could put that would be interesting for them to explore?

In our classes, we talk a lot about leadership, group process, how to make decisions as a group to make sure everyone is involved.

And that's what happens on the show.

And when we sat down and put together some ideas in terms of disciplines, conversations, we actually looked at the course outline and thought, this...

Pretty decent.

This could be a course.