The Good, The Bad, The Spin

Hurricane Katrina fucked up a lot of things for a lot of people. Its resonance is still being felt and today it was reported that a slew of universities were hit with censure by the American Association of University Professors, the organization that protects the rights of faculty in higher education. (Disclosure: I was a member of the AAUP when I was an administrative faculty member at the University of Nevada, Reno.)

Censure is significant. Today’s news is fallout from Katrina, which essentially forced Louisiana universities to make tough decisions about keeping on faculty in light of dire financial situations. The positions of tenured faculty were preciously watched over by the AAUP, especially as firings had to occur, and today’s decision to place six colleges and universities on the organization’s censure list for “a pervasive disregard for faculty governance,” as reported by Inside Higher Ed, is, like Katrina, unprecedented. (more…)

It’s an elixir of journalism that is being used more and more to sell newspapers and newspaper ads online. The Fourth Estate’s First Amendment rights in practice guarantee that essentially anything can be said about anybody if attached to one magic word: allege.

He said, she said. Truth and facts be damned. Public pissing matches sell. Provide appropriate attribution, continue with referencing situations as having been alleged to have occurred and the public indubitably makes up its own mind, usually believing the allegation especially if it’s negative and involves people with power and money. (more…)

Bob Sutton’s The No Asshole Rule has gained a lot of traction lately no doubt for two main reasons: the stickiness of the title and the fact that most can probably relate to book’s subject—assholes in the workplace. Most attractive for readers is that Sutton bases his views on academic research, particularly from the fields of social psychology (Bob Cialdini), organizational psychology and primate studies by Robert Sapolsky. Sapolski, Sutton tells us, noticed how monkeys over generations became nicer after old-guard monkeys—assholes in question—were wiped out by eating diseased meat from a garbage dump. Their greed did them in, and the less aggressive—those who were denied choice morsals from the dump by their asshole kin—survived, ulitmately changing the monkey culture to shun asshole behavior. (Reminds me of our own asshole ancestors.) Worthy adjuncts to Sutton’s book are a couple of my favorites: Franz de Waal’s Chimpanzee Politics and Peacemaking Among Primates.

Implications for public relations are numerous in Sutton’s book, particularly for internal communications, understanding organizational culture and overall organizational success and functioning.