Facing Down the E-Maelstrom

When every campus dispute has the potential to explode -- thanks to e-mail and blogs -- presidents are never off the hot seat

Read the transcript of a live, online discussion with Christopher Simpson, president of a public-relations firm recently hired by the University of Colorado System to repair its public image, about damage control in the age of the Internet. Printer friendly E-mail article Subscribe Order reprints

By JEFFREY SELINGO

By San Francisco State University standards, it was a small protest. Early last month some 100 students turned out at a campus career fair to demonstrate against the presence of military recruiters. A few protesters were removed by university police officers for allegedly violating the student-conduct code on rallies.

Ten years ago such an incident might have received a mention in the student newspaper, and that would have been that. But times have changed. Within hours of the protest, the university's president, Robert A. Corrigan, had received two dozen e-mail messages, mostly from people off the campus, criticizing the administration for allowing students to march against the military. Then, about a week later, while Mr. Corrigan was traveling, his in-box was flooded with about 200 more messages, many from out of state, demanding that he not censure the students involved.

The deluge of messages left Mr. Corrigan wondering how so many people had found out about such a small skirmish on his campus. So his assistant poked around on the Web and discovered that six days after the protest, a liberal blog (http://sf.indymedia.org) run by the San Francisco Independent Media Center had posted an article headlined "Defend Free Speech Rights at San Francisco State University" that included Mr. Corrigan's e-mail address.

It was not the first time that Mr. Corrigan has been electronically inundated after a campus incident. Three years ago he received 3,000 e-mail messages after a pro-Israel rally was held at the university.

"Every time something happens on campus, an organized group goes after you," he says. "The president becomes the conduit for all this hate stuff, for the political polarization in this country, and electronic communication spreads it everywhere."

Among college leaders, Mr. Corrigan is hardly alone in his frustration. It used to take days or weeks, if ever, for an incident simmering on a campus to ignite into a full-fledged controversy. But now, thanks to e-mail -- and, more recently, blogs -- news about even minor campus dust-ups is disseminated much more quickly, and well beyond the bounds of the college or local community. The president, as the institution's public face, must deal with the resulting flood of interest in his campus's doings.

Compounding the problem of dealing with the sheer volume of responses is the fact that the e-mail or blog reports of the initial clash are frequently taken out of context or just plain wrong -- often purposely so, to advance political agendas.

"Campuses are no longer places for civil public discourse," says Robert Zemsky, chairman of the Learning Alliance for Higher Education, a think tank at the University of Pennsylvania that advises college leaders on management issues. "They've become places for political campaigns that are getting sourer and sourer. People are no longer willing to fight their battles without trying to muster allies outside of campus."

For campus CEO's accustomed to responding to nearly everything that happens at their institutions, this new environment has left them not only fatigued, but also wondering how best to handle a situation before they become the next Lawrence H. Summers or Elizabeth Hoffman.

Few campus leaders have figured out how to manage the huge volume of e-mail they receive when their campuses are thrust into the spotlight. Presidents who pick and choose which messages to respond to know that they do so at their own peril, since they never can be sure which dispute will draw the attention of well-to-do donors or influential politicians.

And the many leaders who have just given up and pushed the situation off on assistants face another danger: "There is something about having as many tentacles out there as possible," says Mr. Corrigan, of San Francisco State. "The notion that you are available to lots of people can help you manage the enterprise better. It's too bad if we're forced to cut ourselves off."

Everyone Has a Beef

Conflicts on campuses are nothing new, of course. But colleges today are no longer viewed as ivory towers. Institutions of all sizes and types are under greater scrutiny than ever before from lawmakers, parents, taxpayers, students, alumni, and especially political partisans. Empowered by their position or by the fact that they sign the tuition checks, they do not hesitate to use any available forum to complain about what is happening at a particular institution.

In this Internet age, information travels quickly and easily, and colleges have become more transparent, says Collin G. Brooke, an assistant professor of writing at Syracuse University, who studies the intersection between rhetoric and technology. Many universities' Web sites list the e-mail addresses of every employee, from the president on down, enabling unencumbered access to all of them.

"That was not possible 10 years ago," Mr. Brooke says. "Maybe I'd go to a library, find a college catalog, and get an address. Then I'd have to write a letter. Now it's easy to whip off a couple of sentences in an e-mail when it takes only a few seconds to find that person's address."

And no subject is off limits. Last year the Board of Trustees of Rice University was blitzed with hundreds of e-mail messages by alumni and others as it weighed a decision on downgrading its athletics program from the National Collegiate Athletic Association's top tier, Division I-A. The messages flooded in even though the university had set up a Web site for just such input. The volume of e-mail was such that the trustees did not even attempt to respond (most of the messages were against the move, and the trustees eventually decided to stay put).

E-mail is just one part of the growing communications nightmare facing presidents. In the past year or so, a new electronic tool has accelerated the flow of information from campuses: blogs. There are now an estimated 10 million Web logs in cyberspace, many with loyal followings and widespread readership. E-mail messages about campus contretemps that once got forwarded to maybe a dozen people now get posted on blogs for anyone to see. Blogs link to other blogs and get picked up by popular group blogs like Metafilter. In the blogosphere "there is no gatekeeper," says Barry Toiv, director of communications and public affairs at the Association of American Universities.

"Now everybody and anybody with a keyboard in front of them has the ability to have his reporting or his views or some combination heard or read," says Mr. Toiv, who worked in the White House press office during the Clinton administration. "As soon as higher education became a vehicle for partisan politics, this became inevitable. Nonevents become problems, and problems become crises."

A Hate-Mail Folder

Take an incident at Tufts University in October 2001, less than a month after the September 11 terrorist attacks. Editors of a conservative campus magazine decided to paint an American flag on a cannon in the middle of the campus. (It is a Tufts tradition for students to redecorate the cannon, often nightly, with birthday wishes, promotions for sporting events, or political statements.) One of the editors ended up getting into a tussle with three peace activists. The editor filed a complaint with the judicial-affairs office at Tufts, and the three pacifists were eventually sentenced to probation by a student judicial board.

The university's president, Lawrence S. Bacow, says the panel's decision should have been the end of the story. But one of the magazine editors wrote an article about the confrontation, saying conservative students at Tufts were under assault. It was posted on a conservative Web site (http://www.frontpagemag.com) run by David Horowitz, president of the Los Angeles-based Center for the Study of Popular Culture.

Almost immediately, Mr. Bacow's e-mail box started filling up with messages from off-campus sources attacking him for the light sentence given to the three peace activists. Liberals also weighed in. Over the course of the next few weeks, the president says he received hundreds of e-mail messages. He saved some of them in a file called "hate mail."

The subject lines include "American Flag disgraced," "What Kind of Left Wing Show Are You People Running," and "The endless and continuing sixties -- another bubba legacy." One message promised that Republicans would "cut off all tax money to leftist universities like yours." Another wondered when Tufts would be moving to another country, "more friendly to its 'America is always wrong' viewpoint." Some writers were personal, calling Mr. Bacow a "coward" with "no common sense."

In the end, the e-mail barrage did nothing to change the outcome of the judicial hearing. But Mr. Bacow says the constant flow of messages was disruptive: "It makes it all that much more difficult to pay attention to legitimate events." The president eventually answered the most thoughtful and courteous messages, he says, although he never received any responses in return. (He objects to form responses because, he says, they tend to stimulate yet another round of e-mail.)

Like a Never-Ending Campaign

The conservatives, liberals, and activists of every kind who publicize political controversies like those at Tufts and San Francisco State rarely do so because they have any affinity for the institution in question. More often they do it for their own purposes, particularly fund raising. The result, college administrators say, is that the ideological and scholarly debates that were once a mainstay of campus classrooms and academic quads have largely turned into a partisan free-for-all that at times feels like a grueling election-year campaign. When yet another issue on another campus pops up, the outsiders move on.

"The others who enter the fray have absolutely no interest long term in the civility of the debate," Mr. Bacow says. "We are a community, and what kind of community we are when this is done depends on how we treat this issue and each other. People on campus understand that. Those from the outside have no such interest."

One of those outsiders is Mr. Horowitz, who is leading a national campaign to get state legislatures and Congress to adopt an "academic bill of rights." It enumerates several principles that colleges should follow in making tenure decisions, developing course curricula, and selecting campus speakers in order to foster a variety of political and religious beliefs.

While Mr. Horowitz laughs at the suggestion that he is the root cause of the e-mail traffic to college administrators in response to postings on his Web site, he says that if presidents are complaining, then those who write to them are indeed making a difference. "They deserve all the criticism they can get," he says. "These people are not hired to disrespect their conservative students. They pay $40,000 a year at some of these universities, and they are second-class citizens."

How much longer people either off campus or on will be able to quickly reach a college's president by e-mail, though, is unclear. While some presidents, like Mr. Bacow and Mr. Corrigan, still have just one e-mail address, many others have added a second address that is not publicly available. It wasn't just the political e-mail that was getting out of hand. Presidents were fielding suggestions from boosters about how to improve the football team, complaints from students about tuition increases, and pleas from parents for more financial aid. At many of those colleges, messages now sent to the president's public e-mail address are read by an assistant or the public-affairs office.

Since 2001 Graham B. Spanier, president of Pennsylvania State University, has had his public-affairs staff send him summaries of the e-mail in his public in-box (occasionally he asks to see certain messages). The change was prompted by a surge of messages, up to 500 on some days. "We'd have thousands of people writing telling him how to change the BCS formula," says Stephen J. MacCarthy, vice president for university relations. (Mr. Spanier is a conference representative in college football's Bowl Championship Series.)

No Single Strategy

In an era when news of campus incidents spreads so quickly that another dispute may erupt before campus leaders have had a chance to respond to the first, there seems to be no single, agreed-upon strategy for helping presidents cope.

For years, college leaders dealing with a crisis have followed a script borrowed from their days as academics: Examine the incident, talk to all sides, develop a response, and then vet that statement with other administrators. Such an approach would sometimes take days or even weeks. Now a response from the university is needed immediately, says Christopher Simpson, president of Simpson Communications, a public-relations firm in Williamsburg, Va., that works with colleges.

"If you subscribe to the theory that you can wait to gather all the facts, the opposition will eat your lunch," says Mr. Simpson, who was recently hired by the University of Colorado System to repair its public image in the wake of recent scandals. "You need to be able to work in minutes and hours, not in days and weeks, to resolve these issues."

But speed should not always be the first priority in putting out a response, says Terry Shepard, vice president for public affairs at Rice University. It's more important, he says, to get the facts right. "Given that the folks attacking you can say what they want, the only thing we have is our credibility," he says. "If your credibility starts crumbling under your desire to act quickly, then you lose the higher ground."

A response is sometimes necessary even if the issue at hand seems too ridiculous to warrant one, public-relations experts say. San Francisco State, for example, sent form responses to many of the people who e-mailed the president after the military-recruiting protest.

One reason to respond is that college officials never know which cyberspace rumor will gain traction. Last fall, using blogs and e-mail, conservative groups took aim at universities that offered speaking engagements to the controversial filmmaker Michael Moore. At Penn State, Mr. Moore was invited by the College Democrats, who also paid for his appearance, but the story making the rounds over the Internet was that the university was sponsoring the event. Penn State officials acted quickly to refute that account; Mr. MacCarthy says he spent three weeks doing little else but replying to e-mail messages about Michael Moore. "If we didn't address the facts in the minds of angry alumni," he says, "conservative donors would walk away from the university, and we can't let that happen."

Correcting such inaccuracies, however, is usually difficult because the source of the information is so often unknown, he adds. "In the days when you got your news from three networks, if something was wrong, you could go to the source and get it fixed quickly," he says. "Now there are thousands of sources."

And with advances in technology, campus officials fear that the problems they face today are only going to get worse.

"If there is a saturation point," says Mr. Toiv, of the Association of American Universities, "we haven't reached it yet."