Whut!? UC Davis thinks it can scrub away all those pictures of Master Sergeant Schultz spray-painting those kids?
Good ol’ Linda “Peanut Butter” Katehi, I wonder if she got the idea to contract SEO firms from her psychic?
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Uh, maybe not: http://observer.com/2012/06/10-bizarre-geocities-pages-that-still-exist/. Also, Internet Archive have, er, archived some stuff from there.
Also: http://www.geocities.ws/
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That’s some super weird inflammatory language being used here.
First, let’s start with scandal. Note that we’re not talking about the actual pepper spraying incident when you use words like scandal, you’re referring to them purchasing the expertise of consultants specifically paid to do this work, who are not prostitutes or any other sort of illegal job. They hired consultants, not hitmen. Moving on.
The work itself? Let’s be clear on what the work was, and I’ll quote from the article:
Online reputation management is a growing field in which companies offer to improve Google and other search engine results by churning out positive news stories, press releases and announcements to minimize previous negative results. Some schools also use them to help students clean up their online presence before graduation.
So the term ‘removing’ or ‘scrubbing’ implies that they went on some sort of censorship spree, DMCA’ing websites and spraying crazy glue all over everyone.
I don’t think that this school is doing the right thing, but it’s certainly not a scandal, and the budget for this came out of the correct department even, from what I can tell. A school with a recent problematic event paying for someone to help fix it’s reputation? Gee golly, say it ain’t so!
But what should they fire him out of?
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Why would anyone ever want to forget this moment?
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When I type “UC Davis” into the search bar at Youtube, the first automatic suggestion is “UC Davis campus tour,” followed by “UC Davis pepper spray.” When I search duckduckgo for “uc davis pepper spray,” most of the results are about how UC Davis paid for the web “scrubbing.” They should ask for their money back…
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You would have thought that “don’t pepper-spray the students” would be an easier and cheaper option, but evidently not.
Generalising from a sample of n=1, there is a strong correlation between “eating magic beans” and “backfiring”.
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Tomato, tomayto.
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Now who would have imagined what the costs of all those militarised police actions against anti-war demos on US campuses in the late 60s and early 70s would have engendered?
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Interesting the issue of UC Davis chancellor Katehi’s reputation should come up just now, because she also features prominently in this Inside Higher Ed article on public university officials personally making big money from institutions that exist to exploit students. Katehi is on the board of DeVry University, a for-profit organization that is accused of failing to educate its students and of defrauding them about its graduates’ job placement rates and earnings. For serving on DeVry’s board Katehi got $170K/year in cash and stock, 40% as much as she does from her full-time job at UC Davis.
And that’s not all; as is alluded to in that article, from 2012-2014 Katehi pocketed another $140k/year for being on the board of the textbook publisher John Wiley and sons. Again, this is a huge conflict of interest: textbook publishers aren’t as cartoonishly evil as fraudulent quondam universities, but they gouge university students for ridiculous sums. Any leading university official ought to be demanding more affordable textbooks and promoting Open Access Textbooks (some serious efforts exist!), not taking almost half again their annual salary to “advise” a company that does exactly the opposite.
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Students at UCD have been demanding Katehi’s resignation for at least a month now; this included a lengthy sit-in of her office. Her moonlighting for these organizations that exist as parasites on poor students was evidently the trigger.
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Objection: I’ve known plenty of decent people who paid the bills with sex work.
PR Consultants, OTOH, are indefensible scum.
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So… incidentally, I had forgotten about this and was looking at grad schools in CA. (I think my Google search was too specific to pull it up.) So I can scratch that one off the list. I wasn’t sure it was worth looking into anyway.
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If it is good in your field, don’t scratch it off just because their chancellor is a jerk. Many university chancellors are jerks. UCD is a solid university with many excellent departments, and Davis is a pretty decent place to spend a few years.
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Meh, a scandal can be morally or legally wrong (or both we presume) and as a result causes public outrage. So yeah it’s a scandal.
As for removing or scrubbing, that is what these companies do regularly, we know that even if we don’t know if they specifically did so in this instance. When there can be no more removing or scrubbing they rely on burying.
So what you have here is not a [quote=“falcon2001, post:24, topic:76607”]
school with a recent problematic event paying for someone to help fix it’s reputation?
[/quote]
what we have is a school trying to bury information that affects it’s reputation i.e. denying a truth of it’s history.
That’s scandalous, particularly when so much is spent, even more so when so much is spent and the school gets so little in the exchange.
Now, if the school had tried to fix it’s reputation, that’d not be scandalous at all. That would involve acknowledging it’s history both good and bad, and resolving in policy to avoid those portions which fall in the “bad” category in it’s future.
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Depends on how much they want to improve their reputation.
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Most post secondary institutions barely conceal their for-profit motivation.
Quite a few don’t even bother trying to hide it.
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The “Streisand Effect” could also be called the “Nixon Effect”-- because the crime is the crime, but the cover-up just makes it worse.
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True, which is why I can cross it off the list. It’s not like there aren’t a bajillion and a half grad departments of equal value to me (I have other schools I’m more keen on). I have to spend money just to apply (ideally, I’d visit the campus in person- which presents its own costs), and so it’s easy to decide not to spend that money on a place where the chancellor’s sole known quantity is a high level of jerkitude.
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From the article:
“…the UC Davis strategic communications office, … has seen its budget
rise substantially since Katehi took the chancellor’s post in 2009.
Figures released by UC Davis show the strategic communications budget
increased from $2.93 million in 2009 to $5.47 million in 2015.”
The $2.5M increase in the annual budget would pay for a $25000 scholarship for 100 bright-but-impoverished students. Every year. I have no idea what tuition costs at UC Davis, so adjust the numbers as you wish. To me, that’s a more “correct” use for the money.
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