Bobbleheads, buttons, and buttonholing reporters

David's and Charles' posts are insightful. Distraction has gone on here at SCSU for a long time, including a button offered one year at convocation by President Roy Saigo that read"We're All In This Together", except of course for all the administrators he's fired. Our interim dean upped the ante to t-shirts with a college logo -- this while we had no equipment budget.

One point I made in my crosspost to SCSU Scholars is that academics concerned about their university's administration need to reach out to the local newspaper themselves. Reporters find the ivory tower to have few entry points, and leaving that to your school's public relations people is not going to help get out stories of ineptitude or malfeasance by their bosses. Indeed, in the case of the firing of a dean here at SCSU, even the campus paper printed a story it had to retract which looks to all the world like a story planted by somebody outside the newspaper. And now that the university is being sued for libel over the article, it is engaging in more distraction in part by using a different reporter than the usual higher education reporter, who knows who to call for more information.