UC Davis spent thousands to scrub pepper spray references from Internet
sacbee.comI'm surprised the chancellor hasn't been forced to resign yet. Beyond authorizing the pepper spray incident, she's made many more questionable decisions.
1. Serving on the DeVry board without permission from the UC President, and receiving a generous paycheck. All while DeVry is under federal investigation.
2. Serving on the board of a company selling textbooks to students and receiving stock-based compensation totaling half a million.
3. Apparently now spending tens of thousands of dollars to scrub her previous mistakes from the Internet.
I'm surprised that the chancellor wasn't forced to resign after the release of the Kroll and Reynoso reports about the pepper spray incident. The police action against the protestors was illegal and the police department knew it. They only went forward because of Katehi's mistaken insistence that the occupiers were not members of the campus community and needed to be removed before the weekend lest these outsiders rape students. Had the police department handled the situation the way they wanted to, they would have removed the tents at night (when the laws against camping were clearly being violated) and when there weren't large crowds around.
There's only one reason they ever remove a UC Chancellor: they stop raising money for the University. Donor cash is job one. Obviously, she's good at her job if she makes money, even if she moonlights in jobs that actively harm students.
The only solution is to stop donating to UC Davis -- and UC in general. If the Annual Fund calls you, ask them "Has Katehi resigned yet?" That's what I do. If you really want to help students at UCD, give to ASUCD or CalPIRG or something, not to a slush fund of a Chancellor who spends student fees on her own image.
Disclaimer: UCD alumnus here.
Edit: Although five lawmakers calling for her resignation might also decrease donations to the UC: http://www.sacbee.com/news/investigations/the-public-eye/art...
When students from my own alma mater call and ask for contributions, I have on occasion related how I was a student when the 2008 financial crisis happened, and that my school’s response was to charge every student an extra $500 a semester and call it an “economic recovery fee.” This from a state school where the state Constitution required education to be “as free or nearly free as possible”!
This might sound silly but why would an alumnus, who spent thousands for tuition already, donate money to his university in the first place?
Because University was the best time in your life, and every day now is a dreary slog of mediocrity. By giving money, you can reclaim a part of your glory days that won't come again. You can feel like giving to other students will help their lives, as a pale imitation of what it would be like to be with that group again, having fun and chasing girls instead of supporting a dead-end marriage with a mind-numbing job. If you have enough money, you can even inject your name into student life by getting a building named after you -- you can prove to everyone that you are a success, even if you're still unhappy and growing older by the day.
Or maybe you just believe in supporting higher education. Either way.
If you believed in "supporting higher education", there are probably better ways than supporting the one exclusive blue-blood institution you happened to attend ...
If you truly want to support higher education, your best bet is to refuse to donate until the colleges cut their wasteful spending and lower tuition. This is doubly true for private universities. When they call asking for money, tell them why they're not getting any. Nothing will change until the money stops flowing.
Your self interest lies in it making your resume better. If you and all your class gave say 10% of your income to your school, maybe new students would graduate knowing more and make you look good. Or maybe the school gets bigger TVs and a better football coach.
Or maybe the administrators give themselves a raise.
That's not how academia works, at least at a public school. Administrators rarely get raises, and get pay cuts whenever the economy gets bad. This is why administrators are frequently overpaid when first hired, because they know that it's close to their earnings ceiling. If you want to get more income as an administrator, you have to move to a new job.
No, that money is going to athletics for bigger telescreens and not for student athletes. Ever since the Larry Vanderhoef chancellery, Davis has been spending more and more on athletics, with little to show for it.
I just wish Emil Mrak was still around as chancellor -- that guy was awesome. He managed to keep students from massive protests at UCD during the free speech movement era by shipping them in free buses to protest at UCSB, and he introduced all of the bicycle infrastructure in Davis. Instead, we have a profiteer running the campus, in cahoots with the nation's former top cop.
The alumni who donate do so because they believe they got far more than their money's worth and they have enough money today to "pay it forward", so to speak. Because the return on investment for education is something that takes a non-deterministic amount of time to realize (both monetarily and in personal reflection), it's not coincidence that most most alumni donors do so decades after graduation.
Good idea, will ask that question next time when I get the "Annual Fund" call.
But she was a true benefactor for all these wonderful images, https://www.google.com/search?q=uc+davis+pepper+spray+meme&b...
Isn't active "cleaning up" of the internet by a government entity a violation of those people's free speech?
No. The cleaning up, though reprehensible, is not violating their free speech, because there's no prior restraint and no legal penalties. However, the Chancellor will hopefully have a significant amount of explaining to do as to why she is spending so much of the public's money on this whitewashing.
If someone uses public money to erase your words isn't that cenorship?
#2 is an unhealthy conflict of interest that saddens me. I remember buying $100 textbooks that were quickly out of date and too heavy to lug around.
Anyone in a senior position like this should have the interests of students and their education at heart and be doing everything they can to provide students with accurate and affordable learning materials. In fact, I don't see why their creation shouldn't be subsidised and so they can be freely provided in electronic format to students. The curriculum should be free of copyright.
I remember buying $200 textbooks that were absolutely terrible.
The professors I respected most were those that said either "none of the course materials will be taken directly from the book" or "there will be no book for this class, here are a number of texts that are good, get a used copy from Amazon."
PS: For anyone in undergrad, #1 question when you start a semester -- email professors and ask if the text is required, and if so, whether a previous version can be used. (I know publishers are getting worse and worse about one-time-use codes and "enhanced offerings" though)
I'll take this opportunity to plug my current employer, Verba Software. We work with college bookstores to make textbooks cheaper, from making it easy for professors to find cheaper alternatives when they are adopting textbooks, to helping the bookstore source cheap used textbooks, to helping students find the cheapest books through transparent comparison shopping.
I always thought crowd-sourced feedback on whether a class + instructor combination required the textbook would be incredibly useful.
A) There are 20+ students in typical undergraduate classes
B) Professors tend to teach undergraduate classes extremely similarly from year-to-year
So I imagine it wouldn't take long until I could plug in a school, class, and professor and get a list of impressions back. E.g. "Homework taken directly from book"
Second idea. OCR + diff would be incredibly valuable for version diffs of popular textbooks. How much was rewritten? Were the homework questions changed? If so, which ones?
Thanks for the good work though!
I have read about those shady techniques from publishers. Universities should refuse to deal with them and those proven to take favours for making these publishers required should be penalised.
Ultimately, students make a pretty poor voting demographic (especially in Republican state legislatures in the south).
So if a college earns some kind of financial benefit from choosing a particular text "solution", then that's money the state doesn't have to fund.
If students want this to change then they need to organize politically and make it a clear demand, as they're the only stakeholders impacted by higher priced textbooks.
Apparently now spending tens of thousands of dollars to scrub her previous mistakes from the Internet.
Upwards of $175,000, according to the Sacramento Bee article.
lets see
$500,000 + generous salary
$10,000 for perception management
easy bet for me too
Well, few things give more attention to something than attempts to bury it.
I believe the Streisand effect is usually false. 99% of the time censorship works, and you only hear about the rare 1% of times when the public found out.
Particularly I'm familiar with moderating a large subreddit. It's amazing what mods can get away with, and users have no clue. Since all removals are silent. So many people shadowbanned and have no idea and just keep commenting like normal.
A search with bing for 'uc davis' highlights three recent articles written about their coverup. Streisand's effect indeed!
...with Bing?
The article describes how the SEO firm specifically targeted Google search results, so yes, I'd run that search with Bing too.
Yeah come on get with the program. The consultants told us we have to use Google services so their search engine will like us.
why would you mention a specific search engine?
If a tester entered a bug and you can't repro because the bug doesn't specify the environment, you'd rip 'em a new one. But someone uses two measly words to describe their test environment in this case, and now you question them about their eloquence?
Or maybe I have you wrong, so I'll ask: why would you ask why someone mentioned a specific search engine?
In case someone searched "UC Davis" and didn't find 3 articles in the results on Google or DuckDuckGo or some other search engine.
I didn't find that specification particularly odd, personally.
It wouldn't be weird if the specific search engine mentioned was Google.
I wonder how many more years until large bodies (used in a company/regulatory sense) understand this.
Unless their attempt is to gain coverage on something - trying to hide it is going to have the opposite effect due to social media...it seems like so many people are aware of the Streisand effect except everyone in a PR position.
On the other hand, if there are companies that have succeeded in quietly optimizing away their critics, then we wouldn't know.
Yes, you're right on that. A form of survivorship bias - as it isn't really possible to know all the big happenings that have gone unknown.
They've got no obligation to tell their clients about it. If it all blows up the client is only going to need more PR work.
White did not respond to messages left for her last month or Wednesday, but a résumé posted for her on LinkedIn cites her experience handling “a successful 6 month long strategic SEO (search engine optimization) and online reputation management campaign for the University of California, Davis, and Chancellor Linda Katehi.”
Culminating with a lengthy feature in the Sacramento Bee. Mission accomplished.
So ... do they get a refund? I'm guessing the consultants' contract covered them here, as they can't do much about a legit info request.
Right. They probably executed the original contract well enough, but you can't game Google to prevent future news stories from appearing.
That's the nature of the game. These companies just flood the internet with innocuous data about the client in a way that's carefully aimed at pushing "bad stuff" down in the rankings. This works for a number of reasons, but a major one is that search engines prefer recency. Searching "Kobe Bryant" today is going to find way more articles about him scoring 60 in his final game than about him being accused of sexual assault in 2003.
If you keep making the news for doing bad things, that same tendency works against you. It's not like these firms can make Google ignore all the articles about you that haven't been written yet. Success is predicated on the idea that you'll stop doing stupid shit after whatever initial event required the service.
Right, but it's also kind of a special case in that your "future stupid stuff" must include the hiring of the very service that's going to clean up your previous stupid stuff -- so long as the public regards such hiring as stupid.
I guess this is one case where it's especially true that "if you want to do something right, you have to do it yourself" :-p
Yes, this is why this kind of thing probably only really works for individuals. There's too much public interest in a university or a large corporation, and so the act of covering your tracks is itself noteworthy.
It's been a while since I've looked into these "reputation" services. Do they actually work, when not hit by the Streisand effect, or is it just snake oil?
The reputation services are actually rather entertaining to watch. I write a lot online, and a couple years ago, my older posts started attracting dozens of comments from a couple people who seemed to be in a frenzied hurry to get visible.
At first I couldn't figure out what was going on. Why would someone be writing "Great post!" on 20 of my stories at 11:30 p.m.? Then I did a little checking on the names of the posters. Turns out they all had some "incident" in their pasts. Now they or their consultants were pumping out huge amounts of bland, benign content from all sorts of accounts (news sites, Tumblr, etc.) in their real names. The net result: these new accounts and the resulting content swamped Google, becoming the top 50 or so search results. The bad stuff didn't totally vanish, but it now was relegated to much lower placement.
In terms of whether this stuff works, that's a tricky call. I think it all depends on what the nature of the client's problems are ... and how much the world can/should care about some past mistake as life plays out. Sometimes it's hard to argue with the desire for a fresh start. In other case, it's hopeless.
And you didn't reply to their comments with, "Thanks for the compliment. Oh, BTW, that doesn't mean I've forgotten about http://newsite.com/StoryAboutBadThingsYouDid.html" to skew the Google stats?
Of course you didn't, because that would be mean, yet oddly satisfying.
> Why would someone be writing "Great post!" on 20 of my stories at 11:30 p.m?
I always thought these were linkspam bots, hoping to get a little pagerank from the url they submit with their name
Them, too. The amount of false flattery in the world is really getting out of control.
My impression is that the more "reputable" such services have a series of steps that they take that could plausibly affect reputation. (E.g. "We monitor these sites for mentions of your firm; when negative reviews show up we work with you to overwhelm those with positive reviews.") It isn't clear that those steps do actually improve anything we could classify as "online reputation".
Anecdotal but from the various policies I've observed on my sites, a shill DMCA-like notice to remove content is often enough to get that content removed. A service that does nothing but send thousands of these to all top google searches would seem feasible and somewhat effective. Again the internet is not free if we use it as a collection of walled gardens.
But that would be a criminal offence, right?
Filing a false DMCA claim is perjury. However, not a single person has ever been prosecuted for this.
Criminal offense in that it's perjury, but you could also be required to pay the other side's legal fees.
As far as I know, punishment for the perjury has never happened. The only case I know of where legal fees were paid is Automattic vs Steiner.
Judging by all the other spam I get I think no. Especially if it's just a notice that they have no intention of actually following up on.
There's a good Reply All podcast episode about this. They do work. https://gimletmedia.com/episode/18-silence-and-respect/
I recommend "So You've Been Publicly Shamed" by Jon Ronson. He had the opportunity to work fairly closely with one of these companies as they did some work for one of the people you likely remember making the social media crucifixion circuit a few years back for making a stupid joke at the wrong time.
As someone who works on conflict of interest problems on Wikipedia, coverups don't work if the incident got substantial press coverage or involved jail time. Small embarrassing problems can sometimes be pushed to the background.
There are at least four rich convicted felons who have Wikipedia articles and paid editors trying to whitewash them. They haven't succeeded.
As a Wikipedia reader, my favorite variation of that is when a nobody, some years before, has paid a firm to build up a Wikipedia biography, full of fluff accomplishments so-obscure-that-they're-probably-true, such as "Smith was nominated as Tuscon's Top 100 entrepreneurs Under 100 by TusconEntrepreneurXClub.com in 2012", and perfectly formatted and sourced in such a way that it can escape easy killing by a Wikipedia editor.
Years later, that obscure person gets caught up in an Internet-(infamous) scandal...and instead of just a bunch of self-made pages via LinkedIn, About.me, etc., that they can delete, they now have a suspiciously-seeming astroturfed Wikipedia entry with a prominent "Scandals/Controversy" subhead. And Wikipedia's pagerank being what it is...virtually no reputation-astroturf effort will overtake it.
Doesn't seem to be working - top google results are about them trying to erase it now...
I wonder how they decided spending money on this would be a good investment.
They must know how the internet works.
What specifically were they paying for that made it worth it? Keeping references to the incident away from their Facebook page?
Who HASN'T seen that image by now?
What a misguided allocation of funds.
>I wonder how they decided spending money on this would be a good investment.
Its not their money and they have no shareholders. They don't care if works or not. These PR people cashing the checks are probably friends of friends of the Chancellor.
Things like this is why I consider the PR people to be the worst of the worst scum.
Hmm, should have paid that money directly to US News & World Report. Not sure how tear-gassing sophomores affects the ranking but I'm guessing low six figures can get you spot #3 on the liberal arts list.
Comment I saw on Reddit:
"Right before these conflicts of interest came out, the Sac Bee did a fluff piece about Katehi without any mention of the pepper spray incident. It was a female writer talking about how wonderful it was for Katehi to break the glass ceiling."
It seems there is some conflict of interest here, as the article seems to attempt to shift blame from the Chancellor to the university. Would it be unreasonable to assume there is a special relationship between her and someone at the newspaper?
"Have you tried just... not pepper spraying peaceful people in the face?"
No sir, I didn't like it. I didn't like it at all.
The reference is narrowly escaping me. Help?
edit in reply: Haha, no, not Green Eggs & Ham
another edit: I thought the parent & grandparent posts might belong together, but apparently not. I think GP is simply using this trope: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HaveYouTriedNotBe... — or perhaps this recent Dilbert strip http://dilbert.com/strip/2016-03-08
Mister Horse from Ren and Stimpy.
Mister Horse is correct!
Dr Seuss?
This is one of the few areas where the EU is better in protecting the rich and/or corporations. In the EU you can force Google to remove stuff like this from the index. I always wondered why the US is lagging behind on this.
Am I evil if I vote up this post so it counteracts the consultant job of hiding the pepper spray event from the internet?
No, you're a good citizen. When I saw the story hit facebook, it got reshared faster than anything else today.
"UC Davis spent thousands...". Shades of Dr Evil.
If you've got nothing to hide..