The Chronicle released a very interesting article (sub. req.) on how an anonymous faculty member’s blog contributed to the downfall of the President of SUNY College of Technology at Alfred.

The blog, which administrators including Ms. Gupta said they barely read, claimed that it was “a last-ditch effort to bring about a dialogue about the future of Alfred State College.” And, according to many of the disgruntled employees who posted to the site, it did just that, raising a battle flag around which critics of the president rallied. Even though Brewster Pennybaker was active online for only about three months, the protests he began continued after he quit blogging, and with significant results.

Within a year, the institution’s disgruntled professors threatened to vote on a measure saying they had no confidence in Ms. Gupta, prompting SUNY officials to conduct an unusual investigation of the college. Eventually Ms. Gupta resigned. Brewster Pennybaker’s shot across the bow had become, in the eyes of some faculty members, a watershed moment in the recent history of Alfred State — even though Ms. Gupta, who accepted an administrative post at the university system’s Brockport campus, still isn’t sure who the mystery blogger was.

A small but growing number of colleges can point to similar moments of their own. In recent years, college presidents have learned that their decisions are now scrutinized not just in faculty-senate meetings and gatherings of trustees, but on completely public — and completely uncensored — blogs. And when rifts between administrators and faculty members are made public on the Web, the stakes for college presidents — and the reputations of the institutions they represent — can be high.

The article goes on to suggest that college administrators should prepare strategies for the possibility that they could be publicly and anonymously attacked from the internet. One commentator quoted suggests that the best thing an administrator can do is participate in the medium and communicate with critical bloggers. Sounds like a good strategy for dealing with any tense situation.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 13th, 2006 at 5:20 pm and is filed under Higher Education. It has been viewed 1350 times. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

From ‘A Softer World’

There is an argument made against privacy that says someone who isn’t engaged in criminal behavior has nothing to hide. This method of thinking allowed the US government to slowly sap away our civil liberties in the wake of the 9/11 attacks–many have just accepted that trading privacy for security is acceptable and used the “nothing to hide” argument to rationalize what was, essentially, a decision based on fear. However, limiting the government’s ability to intrude in our private lives is easy compared with attempting to control how personal information spreads on the internet via gossip. Rather than spies or wiretaps, gossip is often gathered by those we trust and spread online by people who don’t understand or appreciate the potential for the damage it can do. In reality, privacy is about much more than concealing wrongdoing.

Internet-based abuse (‘cyberbullying’) and privacy / relationship issues are still massively misunderstood. The complexities of online sociality are probably the biggest ‘generational divide’ between modern teens and adults. To help put it in perspective a bit, here are some numbers…

I HAVE A MYSPACE ACCOUNT!!1!