Excuse me? Is this the right place to put this video of Chancellor Katehi’s Walk of Shame? I really, really want her to get her money’s worth out of the $175,000 spent.
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Chancellors come and go. My current employer is on its 9th since I started working here. While Katehi seems to be genuinely afraid of students the way some people are afraid of dogs, and has apparently been exploiting her employer’s reputation for personal profit in this moonlighting stuff, she has also been a good enough administrator that many faculty were willing to overlook the pepper spray incident and oppose her firing even while they supported the right of the students to have their demonstrations.
As a would-be grad student, your primary concern w/r to administration is that the program will not crumble before you get your degree. The is a genuine concern in many places today, starting with Wisconsin where they have just effectively eliminated tenure and many faculty are looking to leave.
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Just curious …
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what exactly do these firms do to “scrub”? (break into web servers?, put out bogus news releases about peppers and spray?)
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why would someone think “scrubbing” would work? (lol)
Cheers …
@figital
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Well, for small things reputation management companies of dubious ethics may do what these ethically challenged lawyers seem to have done.
Where the MO for a Bad Company to have its image scrubbed seemed to be:
- Bad Company hires Ethically Challenged Lawyers to scrub negative posts from the web any way possible
- Ethically Challenged Lawyers select random, anonymously authored negative post about Bad Company on Ripoff Report
- Ethically Challenged Lawyers pay random stranger to claim to have written post, agree to be sued, and then take a dive
- Ethically Challenged Lawyers win court order, show the order to Google and have Ripoff Report subdomain with all negative reports about Bad Company delisted.
“Reputable” reputation management firms may spam successful blogs with good search engine ranking offering to write “guest posts” that just happen to say nice things about one of their clients. And open multiple websites all praising their client, all linked to by link farms all to increase the SEO of the PR to push the real incidents off the first page of google. Co-opting likely search terms is helpful. So if you are a fraud, you’d want to have plenty of articles pretending to investigate whether you are a fraud and coming to the totally impartial conclusion that you are not. That way when someone searches for “Bad Company Fraud Ripoff” seeking to find out if you are a fraud, they’ll get pages and pages of how great you are.
“Reputable” firms also send out letters asking to have content removed. Sometimes politely, with the “won’t you just help out a friend” kind of vibe, and other times with legally dubious heart attack letters demanding material be removed - all without being specific about what, if anything, is actually actionblely false and defamatory.
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In the original story,
The objectives Nevins outlined for the contract included “eradication of references to the pepper spray incident in search results on Google for the university and the Chancellor.”
That is, these Repairers of Reputations were not actually promising to “scrub unfavorable online items” and make a myriad of unfavourable third-party websites go away, but simply to hide them behind a squid-ink cloud of astroturfed positive references… to pollute the Intertubes until all information is lost and nothing can be seen.
So they are still sh1tweasels, but they are merely taking $175,000 to deliver the impossible, rather than to deliver the absurdly impossible.
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And then all this became public knowledge and now it’s become ludicrously impossible.
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The story finally made it to NPR today. It’s everywhere. How delightful 
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