College presidents used to be safely insulated from unpleasantness and angry attacks by protestors, but thanks to e-mail, those days seem to have gone the way of the dinosaur. Now when students have take issue with administration, presidents can expect a flood of messages to appear in their in-boxes.
In the old days, protests on campus were mentioned after the fact in the college newspaper, but today bloggers pick up on stories as well as e-mail addresses of presidents. News spreads well beyond the confines of the institution bringing issues into public scrutiny. College presidents’ staffers are left to sort through the emails to avoid issues with wealth donors and prominent politicians. Because there may be hundreds of bloggers, institutions can not address the source of the information to repudiate inaccuracies spread by bloggers.
Being a former community newspaper writer, I find this situation interesting. I think more good comes from blogs than bad—at least they are being read and I can’t say they same about newspapers. Blogging challenges the status quo by bringing newsworthy topics out from under the shadows of academia. On the other hand, the quality of blogs is not always stellar. Unsubstantiated rumors may appear as fact in a blog.
Furthermore, institutions do need to keep their donors happy to ensure survival. College and universities can handle the pressure; it’s just that they are used to controlling the media. Instead of hiring more PR types to do damage control, higher education institutions should encourage donors to report disturbingly controversial rumors to the PR office.
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