Cornell Blog: An unofficial blog about Cornell University

Probably at the behest of new president David J. Skorton, the Office of Web Communications has just launched their Student Blogging Project. What’s that, you ask? It’s part PR and part social media. In essence, they want quality student bloggers to write stories about their life at Cornell that they can syndicate for the home page, turning existing student blogs into a media stream for their use. For writing 2 posts a week, you will be compensated $12.50 in giftcards for your work. Over the course of the year, that would add up to about $400.

You might think that’s not a bad idea. I’d point you towards their requirements:

• You will be expected to be intelligent about both the approach to and the crafting of your posts with regard to subject matter, language, and tone
• The media [...] do not need to know about how much beer you drank on Slope Day or the sordid details of your Friday night hookup. We ask that you approach delicate topics, well, delicately.
• But you should be fully aware of the fact that your blogs will likely be visited by members of the Senior Administration at the university; all of whom are people not known for being shy when expressing their opinions. Rest assured that you will be spoken to if you stray across the line.
• Okay. Let’s be plain, here. If you think that you would get in trouble for saying something, you probably will. That’s the line, people. You’re smart. Use those Ivy League brains.

In other words, write what you want, so long as it doesn’t offend anyone. Unfortunately, some of the best writing I’ve done is also my most offensive. Under these guidlines, writing about Matt Pearlstone’s drinking habits, or the suicide of Ash Thotambilu ‘06 would probably get me “spoken to.”

In other words, what this program boils down to is a structured attempt to recruit student labour to be a carefully monitored PR voice for Cornell University. In politics, this technique is called astroturfing:

In American politics and advertising, the term astroturfing describes formal public relations projects which deliberately seek to engineer the impression of spontaneous, grassroots behavior. The goal is the appearance of independent public reaction to a politician, political group, product, service, event, or similar entities by centrally orchestrating the behavior of many diverse and geographically distributed individuals.

They already turned down one hot student blogger; you can be next! Just fill out the insanely long application form!

Check out this post by Julie Geng about Adrian Law, an architecture student who committed suicide over winter vacation 2004-2005. What’s interesting about this is the level of “coverup” that appears to have taken place:

I still remember how hard it was to get any kind of information. I approached friends and professors about Law with a simple and harmless question, “Tell me about what Adrian was like,” barely giving any thought to why the kid might have committed suicide. But even with an apparently harmless question as that, the people I approached were scared out of their wits. [...] Law’s professors in architecture refused to speak to me.

I wish I had heard about this last year–I would have been interested in finding out the truth of what happened.