http://chronicle.com/weekly/v53/i04/04a03501.htm

From the issue dated September 15, 2006

By BROCK READ

At some point, almost every college president faces a nemesis — a trustee who is not happy with fund raising, say, or a department chairman who thinks his or her academic freedom is being trampled on. While she served as president of the State University of New York College of Technology at Alfred, Uma G. Gupta's foil was Brewster Pennybaker.

For about three months in the summer of 2005, Mr. Pennybaker was as dogged and acerbic as an administrator's archrival could be. He tracked Ms. Gupta's every move, repeatedly called her "abysmal" and "incompetent," and suggested that the president was suffering from a psychological disorder.

When Ms. Gupta took a long weekend, he accused her of laziness. When

she met with the presidents of local community colleges, he impugned her motives. And several professors cheered him on. Biting as he could be, those professors agreed with his critiques, particularly of Ms. Gupta's administrative appointments and management style.

Ms. Gupta might have knocked on Mr. Pennybaker's office door, or confronted him at a faculty meeting, but for one fact: She had no idea who he was. "Brewster Pennybaker" was the nom de plume — or, more accurately, the nom de blog — of the author of the Alfred State College Forum, a blistering blog whose sole purpose was to take the president to task.

The blog, which administrators including Ms. Gupta said they barely read, claimed that it was "a last-ditch effort to bring about a dialogue about the future of Alfred State College." And, according to many of the disgruntled employees who posted to the site, it did just that, raising a battle flag around which critics of the president rallied. Even though Brewster Pennybaker was active online for only about three months, the protests he began continued after he quit blogging, and with significant results.

Within a year, the institution's disgruntled professors threatened to vote on a measure saying they had no confidence in Ms. Gupta, prompting SUNY officials to conduct an unusual investigation of the college. Eventually Ms. Gupta resigned. Brewster Pennybaker's shot across the bow had become, in the eyes of some faculty members, a watershed moment in the recent history of Alfred State — even though Ms. Gupta, who accepted an administrative post at the university system's Brockport campus, still isn't sure who the mystery blogger was.

A small but growing number of colleges can point to similar moments of their own. In recent years, college presidents have learned that their decisions are now scrutinized not just in faculty-senate meetings and gatherings of trustees, but on completely public — and completely uncensored — blogs. And when rifts between administrators and faculty members are made public on the Web, the stakes for college presidents — and the reputations of the institutions they represent — can be high.

A 'Perfect Storm'

Spitfire bloggers have threatened the careers of other campus leaders, including Jane Fernandes, the president-designate of Gallaudet College. And they have accelerated the fall of several others, most famously Elizabeth Hoffman, the former president of the University of Colorado System.

Ms. Hoffman's tenure at the university would have been rocky in any case: She struggled with allegations of unsavory behavior by Colorado's football team — and, critics say, made a few verbal gaffes of her own. But she also found herself roasted regularly on Little Green Footballs — a right-wing blog known for its virulent criticism of Middle Eastern nations — for the university's defense of Ward Churchill, a controversial professor who likened some victims of the September 11, 2001, attacks to Nazi bureaucrats. (Colorado officials decided to try to dismiss Mr. Churchill in June, long after Ms. Hoffman had stepped down from the presidency.)

In her first public remarks after her March 2005 resignation, Ms. Hoffman argued that snowballing blog criticism created a "perfect storm" that made it virtually impossible for her administration to craft principled policies.

It is hard to measure the impact bloggers had on Ms. Hoffman's tenure at Colorado. At Alfred State, though, many professors and administrators believe that Ms. Gupta's resignation was a direct result of the efforts of Brewster Pennybaker.

What may trouble other college presidents — and excite frustrated faculty members — is the nature of the blog that helped do Ms. Gupta in. The Alfred State College Forum wasn't penned by an off-campus pundit with a point to make; it was created by a dissatisfied employee who frequently cited inside information about campus affairs and said he was "mad as hell" about Ms. Gupta's performance. Brewster Pennybaker tapped into a vein of unhappiness running through the SUNY college's faculty and staff, and he spurred previously apolitical professors to campus activism.

As the locus of a grass-roots movement, the college's blog is the spiritual heir of Truth at ULM, an anonymous Web site created in 2000. The site's creator was eventually revealed to be John L. Scott, who was then an associate professor of economics at the University of Louisiana at Monroe. Mr. Scott's Web site took frequent potshots at the institution's administrators until he was unmasked, and the site shut down.

Depending on whom you ask, the cases at SUNY-Alfred and the University of Louisiana at Monroe are either cause for deep concern or reason for celebration.

"In the hands of those who put their personal interests before the welfare of the institution," Ms. Gupta says of the blog medium, "at its best it is a bullying tool, and at its worst it is electronic terrorism."

But James Grillo, the president of Alfred State's Faculty Senate, takes a different view. "The blog was instrumental in her leaving the campus, along with the SUNY investigation," says Mr. Grillo, whose demotion from an administrative position was seen by many professors as a catalyst for the blog's formation.

"Both of those things were very positive for the college," says Mr. Grillo, who says that he is not Brewster Pennybaker.

Ms. Gupta is now at Brockport, where she leads an effort to recruit women and minorities to SUNY's science and mathematics programs. She says campus administrators need to come up with new strategies for dealing with disgruntled bloggers and Web posters — who can be feistier, and harder to reach, than faculty senates.

"Virulent blogs aren't just one person's problem; they're a problem for the whole institution," she says. "Key stakeholders — whether it's the board of trustees, the president and cabinet, or the senior leadership team — must find a way to address disenfranchised members who are ready and willing to damage the institutions."

Presidents have every right to take legal action against blogs that advance libelous claims, she says. But she declines to discuss whether she tried taking legal steps to shut down the Alfred State blog. Brewster Pennybaker, while he was still writing, claimed that administrators at the college made several attempts to cut the blog off using technology, rather than the law, but Ms. Gupta denies that.

More and more college presidents, she says, will likely find themselves in similarly uncomfortable positions.

This spring at Gallaudet University, an institution for deaf students, bloggers led the charge against Ms. Fernandes, who was chosen by the college's trustees to succeed the institution's first deaf president, I. King Jordan. Ms. Fernandes is still the president-designate, but the debate spawned by bloggers was fierce and divisive.

Within minutes of Ms. Fernandes's appointment, Ricky D. Taylor — a former Gallaudet student who bills himself as "arguably the most controversial deaf blogger in America" — had criticized the college's decision: "Mark my words, the Blighting of Gallaudet has begun," he wrote. And other students — drawing, perhaps, on Mr. Taylor's tactics — used their own blogs to unleash stronger attacks on Ms. Fernandes, and to keep copious notes on the student protests against her appointment.

Some bloggers attacked Ms. Fernandes's management style; others argued that the college did not give adequate consideration to minority candidates. And some criticized the college for choosing a president who did not learn sign language until she was 23.

By the time they knew the extent of the less-than-flattering Web commentary, Gallaudet officials say, it was too late for them to stem the tide. Locating influential bloggers on the sprawling, untamed Web is "sort of like nailing Jell-O to the wall," says Mercy Coogan, the college's director of public relations, but it is a task worth taking on.

After bloggers raked Ms. Fernandes over the coals, Ms. Coogan made a point of compiling a list of popular blogs and making sure that someone from her staff perused new posts every day. Campus officials try to "stay above the fray" by not responding to petty sniping or criticism of the university, Ms. Coogan says. But they do occasionally correct factual errors that pop up on blogs: After word spread online that Gallaudet was shutting down a popular mentoring program, a dean at the institution sent a campuswide e-mail message dispelling the rumor.

Ms. Coogan's comments echo those of Ms. Hoffman, formerly at Colorado, who has said she regrets not requiring an assistant to monitor blogs every morning.

Unlike officials at Colorado and Gallaudet, administrators at Alfred knew about Brewster Pennybaker's blog almost as soon as it was unveiled. But Ms. Gupta is skeptical that the situation at Alfred could have been resolved amicably, no matter what she did. As long as the blog could print whatever it wanted, she said, there was no incentive for Brewster Pennybaker to play nice.

A Troubled Tenure

Ms. Gupta's career at Alfred State was controversial even before the blog made its debut. Not long after taking office in 2003, she fired John Anderson, a long-serving vice president who had himself been considered for the college's presidency. By the time Ms. Gupta had been in office for a year, more than 20 college officials had quit or been fired. Some faculty and staff members at the college worried that the administrative turnover was hurting fund raising and enrollment, says Dexter Davis, the former coordinator of the college's sport-management program, who left for Niagara University last year.

Those concerns came to a head when the blog appeared — in May 2005, as many professors were packing up for the summer. The site opened with an ominous warning: "Word has it the current regime at Alfred State College has ordered monitoring of telephone calls." And it hit the ground running, offering pointed critiques of Ms. Gupta almost daily.

Some of the complaints were serious: Several posts argued that Ms. Gupta's selection for an open administrative position, Robert Albrecht, had an autocratic management style. Others were petty: One post lambasted the president for taking a four-day weekend around Memorial Day.

And some were highly personal. In a pair of posts titled "The Strange Behavior of Uma Gupta," the pseudonymous blogger dissected a speech that Ms. Gupta had delivered and suggested that she suffered from borderline personality disorder. "Gupta's temper tantrums, fits of anger and yelling have been witnessed by numerous people," wrote Brewster Pennybaker. "These have often occurred in settings and for reasons that are simply not appropriate."

Although the blog made a point of courting comments from its readers, its early posts attracted little in the way of discussion. But after Ms. Gupta appointed Mr. Albrecht, early in June 2005, commentators — nearly all of them posting anonymously — flocked to the site, and the invective against both administrators intensified. Ms. Gupta was assailed for "incompetence" in fund raising while Mr. Albrecht was called a "petty tyrant," a "windbag," and "corrupt."

Occasionally, dissenters popped up, arguing that the blog's criticisms were excessive or unfair. In fact, both Mr. Davis and Mr. Grillo believe that one of the most vociferous defenders of the administration was Ms. Gupta herself. Ms. Gupta dismisses those claims, and says that she did not consider posting on the site because it was so venomous.

In the meantime, Brewster Pennybaker began to accuse Ms. Gupta of trying to cut his blog off at the knees. In one post, he claimed that Ms. Gupta had temporarily shut down the campus e-mail service after he tried e-mailing articles from the blog to faculty members and employees. Later on he said that Deborah S. Putnam, the college's director of information technology, had blocked outgoing e-mail messages to the blog's e-mail address at Ms. Gupta's request.

Ms. Putnam did not respond to requests for comment. But Ms. Gupta strongly denied blocking professors' e-mail messages or monitoring their phone calls. "Think about it — tapping phones at a university," she says. "The FBI would have to be involved for us to do that."

In the meantime, the blog's readership swelled. The site started tracking hits in June 2005; shortly afterward, it announced triumphantly that it had well over a hundred visitors in a single day. The blog's hit count now stands at more than 13,000 — at an institution that boasts about 3,500 students and 160 full-time professors.

Buzz over the blog quickly reached statewide administrators. John R. Ryan, the chancellor of SUNY, visited Alfred State in July as part of a tour of SUNY campuses. During a speech at the college — an event that the blog had urged faculty members to boycott — he made a point to decry the site, calling it "unfair" and "hurtful."

By the time the mysterious blogger closed up shop — of his own accord, he wrote — in late July 2005, readers vowed to use the site's comments forum to continue discussing Ms. Gupta's presidency. The comment forum soon morphed into a separate discussion board. Tensions between Alfred State's faculty and the administration were nowhere more feverish than in the forum, where defenders of Ms. Gupta sparred with her sharpest critics.

Beginning in December, SUNY officials took an unusual step: They conducted an investigation of the tension between administrators and faculty members at the college. It had been more than a decade since statewide officials had so closely investigated an individual college or university.

The investigators found the blog to be symbolic of a troubled campus. Their report, released in February, said: "The presence of the campus Weblog is symptomatic of the fear and intimidation shadowing the campus." It added: "The blog appears to have become the only opportunity for open communication for interested parties." By the time the Web site made its debut, the president had stopped attending faculty meetings, according to several campus officials.

Shortly after the release of the report, Ms. Gupta resigned from Alfred State and moved to Brockport. She says she left because the Brockport position was "an exciting opportunity."

But professors like Mr. Davis, now at Niagara, say she was pushed out the door. The blog was only partly to blame, he says. "The blog was just a place where people could vent," he says. "It was a response to her presidency, but I wouldn't say that it killed her presidency."

Mr. Grillo, though, says the blog does deserve credit for spurring faculty members to realize just how bad the situation at Alfred State had become: Instead of whispering about indignations, professors saw them printed publicly.

But he is quick to argue that the administration's response to the blog was as damning as the site itself — if not more so. By dismissing the site's criticisms wholesale, and by creating the impression that she was trying to shut down the blog, Ms. Gupta cemented the administration's reputation for callousness and obstinacy, he says.

"They never should've ignored that blog," says Mr. Grillo, of Alfred State's administrators. "They said publicly that they didn't read it, but we knew they were lying."

A Veil of Anonymity

Ms. Gupta says it is hard to respond productively to something that amounts to little more than a broadside.

She says the blog wasn't a "blow for liberty," as one of its fans crowed in an e-mail message to the site; it was an echo chamber in which rumor and innuendo were used to tar her presidency. "This blog was not about issues," she says. It was "about personal vendettas, name-calling, slander, and libel."

The blog offered its contributors a veil of anonymity: Over the three months that it ran, only a few of the people who commented on the site ever revealed their names. That anonymity may have been appealing to the bloggers who thought they would otherwise have been silenced, but Ms. Gupta says it only emboldened disgruntled employees to make specious claims.

And Ms. Gupta disputes the SUNY investigators' finding that the blog was symptomatic of a tense and suspicious campus. In fact, she says, the site played a significant role in souring her relationship with the college's faculty. "The blog dampened morale," she says. "It was so vicious that it was affecting the morale not only of the people at Alfred but also of donors, students, and future employees."

Ms. Gupta describes the predicament she faced as a Hobson's choice: If she tried shutting down the blog, she would be "viciously attacked" for violating principles of academic freedom. But if she let the blog sit online, she would let unfounded allegations take hold and help dictate the future of her presidency. The atmosphere on campus was so toxic, she says, that she could barely speak with her harshest critics. Ms. Gupta blames the blog for the breakdown in communications, but professors like Mr. Grillo say the administration never seemed interested in communicating with the faculty.

Mr. Grillo says the incident at Alfred State should be a lesson to other colleges: Instead of fighting campus officials who use blogs, he argues, administrators should actually be using them to communicate. "If any teaching faculty starts a blog that's critical, the administration should participate in the damn thing," he says. "That's free speech and free communication."

And Daniel Barwick, an associate professor of English at Alfred State, has argued that colleges should create their own unregulated, intracampus forums, to give professors and staff a chance to voice concerns without airing dirty laundry in public. Blogs and forums, he has written, could extend campus conversations to "the vulnerable and the fearful."

Of course, administrators may be loath to encourage even that type of criticism. In the era of the blog, the words "vulnerable" and "fearful" may apply not just to untenured professors but to presidents as well.

HOW A BLOG HELPED SINK A COLLEGE PRESIDENCY

An anonymous professor at the State University of New York College of Technology at Alfred, also known as Alfred State College, used a blog to sling criticisms at the institution's then-president, Uma G. Gupta. She left the job after statewide officials investigated the tensions between the administration and faculty members there, and many professors say the blog helped speed Ms. Gupta's departure.

Among the comments posted to the blog:

"She has little understanding of what is happening at ASC."

"Gupta's favorites are rewarded and perceived enemies punished."

"Gupta's efforts... would be laughable if they weren't so sad."

"In recent months, Gupta has become increasingly insulated from the world around her."

"The woman is suffering from borderline personality disorder."

"The college will in essence be punished for Gupta's bizarre behavior."

"She has systematically destroyed the people and the institution through her incompetence, her unwillingness to compromise, and her inability to see any view but her own."

"Gupta's leadership of Alfred State has been poisonous."
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Section: Information Technology
Volume 53, Issue 4, Page A35
Copyright © 2006 by The Chronicle of Higher Education

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