By Professor Doom
Hey, remember when
universities were only about education and research? If you do, you must have
grey hair, because it’s surely been a while.
Hey, remember when
news came out, there was bad publicity for awhile, and that was it? Grey hair
is no longer so necessary to remember that, because that’s how things were
before the internet changed news, some 20ish years ago. Back then, if you
wanted to read old bad news, you had to go to a major library, and search the
newspaper stacks. Now, any black mark on an institution or person is truly
permanent, just a mouse click or two away, even if the incident was years ago.
Well, this is the
case for the little guy, but if you have a few hundred thousand bucks to spend,
you can hire firms to bury news articles, making them difficult to find via
common search engines.
A university
really should be led by leaders with spines. If something bad happens there, a
university should just own up to it, and then go back to the university
business of education and research. The last thing our “leaders” in higher
education should be doing is spending many thousands of dollars burying old bad
publicity…I mean, these guys are constantly telling us they need to raise
tuition because there’s just no money left for education, so surely there’s no
money available for burying old news.
Enough
generalities. Way back in 2011, a campus cop pepper sprayed a bunch of clearly
non-threatening students. It being the 21st century, it was filmed
and photographed, and became a meme for police behavior in the 21st
century (truth be told, I suspect this kind of behavior was quite common in
prior centuries, which merely lacked widespread handheld video technology).
This happened at UC Davis, a premier
university led by the very best (and very highly paid) leaders in higher
education. Wasting time and money burying this kind of story is beneath them,
right?
Har.
I’m so embarrassed
for UC Davis. There are so many horrible, horrible scandals in higher education
today, and this merits their notice?
I mean, if the cop was following orders from the Poo Bah, I could see it, but
this was just a cop being a jerk cop jerk. UC Davis was just as
much a bystander as the students, there’s no reason to cover anything up here.
Well, unless you
have a massive ego:
University
documents show that the school paid public relations firms at least $175,000 to
hide bad publicity on Google when people searched on the university name and
the name of its chancellor, Linda Katehi, according to The Sacramento Bee, which obtained the papers.
Isn’t it nuts the
kind of power our leaders in higher education wield? Adjuncts are paid
starvation wages to run courses bringing in huge amounts of money; our leaders
tell us it has to be that way, because there’s no money in education to pay the
adjuncts a living wage.
But when it comes
to ego, suddenly money is easily found, easily spent.
University PR
people (also paid way more than educators, for the same reasons) were quick to
spin this ridiculous behavior:
"Increased
investment in social media and communications strategy has heightened the
profile of the university to good effect," Topousis said. She added that
it's important that good news from the school "is not lost during a campus
crisis, including the crisis that ensued following the extremely regrettable
incident when police pepper-sprayed student protesters in 2011."
If this were the truth,
then why hire an outside PR firm? Surely over the course of years, all the good
things UC Davis does should overcome this unfortunate and not particularly
university-related incident?
That’s the thing
about these lies…they destroy the good faith respect I was willing to give UC
Davis earlier. How do these firms destroy news, anyway?
Such PR
services, often called reputation management, generally work by flooding the
Internet with positive or unrelated blog posts and other Web pages. As a result,
the controversial or negative stories get pushed down to the second or third
page of Google results.
So, these guys
spam the net with multiple stories, troll sites, bogus
blog posts, and the like, to make it difficult for the story of the police
pepper spraying students to be seen. I’ve seen similar before, but I’m still
fascinated they needed to hire an outside firm to help with this.
Oh wait. Not just
one firm, but two:
But
spending money on the service with two different companies led to a new
headache for the school. UC Davis is a public university, and that means it's
subject to California's Public Records Act transparency laws.
It must be nice to
have money for such frivolous things, I might well have to follow up on this
because some of my blog posts are getting buried…I’ll come back to this later.
Back to the point,
it sure looked like the chancellor wanted this story buried…but why? I mean,
it’s insulting that tax dollars were being used (in a vain attempt) to erase
history. The event itself isn’t nearly so interesting as the attempt at a
cover-up here.
$175,000 could
have been spent on scholarships, “full ride” scholarships for at least 10
students (about 90% of education costs are sucked up by admin, with the remainder
being spent on education), probably more like fifteen. This is, of course, just thinking like an educator, who focuses on using education's money for education. Instead, it was spent by
admin on a pointless attempt to cover up history.
Why bother with
all this? The article makes no effort to answer that question, but a helpful
commenter makes a credible suggestion:
“…She
betrayed the public trust and abdicated her role in protecting the students under
her care, allowing them (and let's face it, she gave the order to the police, I
don't care what lame excuse comes from her mouth ) to be molested by the
officers, fully armored, sworn to "serve and protect" them and hosed
down in pepper spray while they were helpless. This was all so representatives
from US bank and her little friends from Monsanto would not be bothered by the
sight of Occupy protesters at their publicly-funded research facility. Any
reasonable person would step down after what she has done, but she annoyingly
clings to her post like a nepotistic security blanket…”
I have to admit,
this goes a long way to explain the bizarre behavior. And if she hadn’t tried
to bury the story, this explanation would have never come up.
No comments:
Post a Comment