On Poison Pen letters

[rev ronin]

About once or twice a year, we go through this as site admins:

1) Someone anonymously posts a "poison pen" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poison_pen_letter) letter stating that such-and-such PA school is cruel, mean, heartless, and probably steals Girl Scout cookies.  They usually claim to be a current or former student at the PA school in question. Sometimes, sound files or social media posts are linked to.

2) The administration of the school find out about this, and email us asking for us to take down the slanderous content. Sometimes, they send us legal correspondence.

3) Current students and alumni pile on the post stating that everything is entirely untrue, the poster is obviously bitter and warped.

So, here's a guide to the three stages, how moderators deal with this, and why it's really not that big a deal.

First, on the Internet, no one knows you're a dog. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_you're_a_dog) That means we don't know who the author of the original gripe really is, nor who the school's defenders are.  I mean, sure, we can find their IP address from the logs, but that really just narrows them down to an ISP and region of the country unless we were an ISP or a three-letter agency, of which we are neither.  We can usually tell who the outraged faculty are, because they have email addresses corresponding to the school in question, but that is the least important part of the identity here.

So who could the original complainant be? They could be exactly who they say.  They could be a disgruntled applicant. They could be the clinical coordinator from a competing PA school who's trying to ruin the other school's reputation so they can get more rotation sites.

How much truth are they telling? Your guess is as good as mine, because neither of us were there.  How about the school's defenders? Same basic issue: we don't know who they really are.  They could be exactly who they say they are, or they could be the accused school's clinical coordinator trying to astroturf so they don't lose rotation sites: Again, we simply don't know.

All this to say, remember that poison pen postings on PA schools may or may not be accurate, but they are absolutely intended to hurt the school subject to one.

So why don't the moderators take them all down? First, we could be stomping a troll, or we could be quashing a real grievance--how are we really to know, given all of the above?

Second, we have made an intentional choice to be a free and open community, which means that yes, trolls can troll pseudonymously, and this is one of the issues with having these forums as open and available. If you want a very sanitized forum, Huddle is open to AAPA members who promise to not say things that a bunch of hyper-sensitive moderators think might be mean.  If that is a formal dinner party, this is a loud, open-air market filled with great deals, junk, pickpockets, and the occasional street brawl. We're ad supported, which pays the server.  None of the mods are paid, we just do this for the good of our profession.

And that leads us to #3, we don't want to. I didn't sign up to deal with competitive urination matches between schools and posters who claim to be their students. Having been on the Internet longer than MOST of you have been alive (1986, and it was BITNET then), I was sick of flame wars decades ago.

So, if you want to read the character assassination threads posted anonymously? Go for it. If you want to make career decisions on that basis? I mean, I suppose that's your right, but I don't take stock market tips from the graffiti in public bathrooms, so if you want to make career and educational decisions based on the Internet equivalent, knock yourself out.

[PACShrink]

This is interesting. I stumbled on this post during my research on the topic of 'Poison pen letters' One of our faculty received an accusation of assault in an evaluation submitted by a student. We as the entire faculty were concerned for several reasons, primarily being that the faculty is not able to defend themselves against this accusation, secondly that for a student to put this in an anonymous evaluation, it speaks on their idea of professional behavior.

The administration for the school did not respond to inquiries and we, as the faculty were not as concerned with discovering who wrote the evaluation. Our request was that the school deal with the accusation directly with the student, we were not asking to be involved unless requested. As the evaluation was internal and generated by the schools evaluation system, we speculated that they could find the author if they chose to.

 As I said, there was no response from the administration of the university.

My advice to students following this indecent were to use the faculty evaluation/course evaluation to provide a path for faculty to follow to improve courses, learn, become better faculty members. I would much prefer a specific example of a concern from a student than a thoughtless comment, based on anger over a grade etc.

 I personally read all of my evaluations and try to listen to all of the concerns as I would hope all faculty would.