Uni’s Need to Get Used to Blogs, FB

Times Higher Education ran a long piece about the use by students of blogs, Facebook and YouTube to air grievances about their lecturers, their departments and their uni’s. Focusing mostly on efforts to stomp out libelous material and to manage PR in the face of online complaints, the article is rather interesting, but at the end of the day it shows that uni’s still don’t get it.

So a student creates a Facebook group slagging off the LSE, so what? Should the school freak out and call up Facebook to ask them to remove the group? It doesn’t take a degree from our fine institution to know that such an action would have exactly the opposite effect – probably increasing membership in said group. The LSE already learned the hard way when it drew attention to former LSE professor Erik Ringmar’s blog after he posted a contentious lecture cajoling the school to improve teaching standards. Ringmar’s blog, which no doubt had a modest readership at the time he posted the offending lecture, was suddenly inundated with thousands of pageviews following coverage of the fracas – not exactly quietly sweeping the issue under the rug, is it?

What is most interesting about the THE article is that it appears to reveal that what most bothers the uni’s is that they have lost the near-total control they have been used to exercising over their own appearance. Effectively, this means that the school can be held to account by external agents. So your teacher is crap? Write them up on ratemyprofessor.com. Your lecturer fell asleep during a student presentation? Post the pictures on Flickr. You received a rude email from your course convener? Post it on Facebook. The point is, these things that the schools would prefer to hide behind their slickly produced catalogs, are finding their way into the light of public scrutiny. This is a good thing!

In the article, the author writes “damaging messages about academics’ abilities and institutions’ performance circulate [online] as fast as the positive ones. If left unchecked, they could have a damning effect on student recruitment.” So is the alternative that unfortunate students accept offers from less-than-honest schools without being aware of the grievances that existing students have? What about the reverse – unrealistic promises of school recruitment catalogs have a damning effect on students’ minds when their expectations and reality clash? This desire to prevent the dissemination of information seems rather at odds with what most would imagine is the role of an institution of higher education.

The most level-headed comment in regards to the way students use the web comes from Dean Russell, of the branding agency Precedent: “Just because somebody is saying something negative doesn’t necessarily mean that everybody believes them.” He adds that uni’s, along with whatever other organization or brand, can potentially dig their own grave by overreacting to marginal or isolated complaints online, thus drawing far more attention to them than would otherwise have ever been brought on its own.

The point of all this babbling? Let students criticize. If their complaints are legitimate, then try to address them and fix the problem. If they are illegitimate, then ignore them – that’s probably what everybody else is doing, too.

No Sudden Death at the Beaver

Caught red handed! The Beaver, in a raft of apologies printed in yesterdays edition, admitted that its office was not, in fact, a death trap. Saying that it would like to apologize for “any alarm caused” by the comment in an article in the previous edition that stated that staffers in the Beaver’s office “face imminent death every time we work here”, the editors acknowledged that this was, in fact, an exaggeration. Tongue-in-cheek, the kids call it these days.

Additionally, I have to admire the choice of a editorial cartoon featuring a student reading the Beaver on the loo. I’ve always said that the Beaver is a useful toilet paper.