I have an easy suggestion for anyone that wants to take two minutes to "do something." I know this is anathema to the general tone of this blog and the law school scam movement, such as it is. I know that most people feel that the moneyed interests are too powerful to oppose, and so we should just keep the word alive about the law school scam through comments and blogs. Fair enough.
I have a suggestion that is pretty much in line with that stated purpose.
As someone who works on search engine optimization in other contexts, I have noticed that if you enter certain phrases relating to deans or law schools, a scamblog will appear as a top result along with its takedown of whatever bullshit that dean, professor, administrator, or institution might be trying to advance. It is the long-term benefit of writing these blogs and having regular internet traffic and comments. It drives the non-T14 law schools crazy.
How do I know? I decided over the past few months to try to insert a standardized paragraph into the Wikipedia articles of a few of the law schools involved in the scam-suits. The template paragraph merely notes that X number of students sued the law school because of misrepresentations over employment and salary data. I noted that other lower-ranked law schools defended against similar lawsuits. I noted the law school's pre-lawsuit employment/salary claims, the current employment/salary claims, and the fate of the lawsuit if known. Very straightforward reporting.
My small experiment proved that these law schools have media lackeys that try to screen for these types of things, and most of these paragraphs on websites like Wikipedia ended up deleted within a few weeks! Of course, I would just repost, which has worked so far. But a few schools deleted the information repeatedly.
In my experience, this is unusual. If a person inserts a fact or a series of facts with reasonable citations, it is unusual for someone to come along rather quickly and just hit the delete button (usually, if a disagreement arises about a controversial topic, the writers will edit one another's information until a happy medium is reached or a "moderator" may help to sort things out). In posts about lawsuits, political issues, and media stories, I have never seen a serial deletion of information -- usually, the Wiki-Peer-Editing works well. The implication is obvious: the law schools know that their reputations on the internet are shot, and they put regular effort into damage control.
If the law schools are paying media lackeys to help mitigate their declining reputations, we should make them earn their living. Whether the law school lied about median LSAT numbers, lied about employment statistics, or ended up in a lawsuit relating to fraudulent data, this information should be up for all to see! Our blog gets a lot of traffic compared to many other websites dealing with the scam-schools, giving us a good spot in search engines. So does Wikipedia! Take a few minutes to post information about your law school on another website (even TLS if you dare). If you post on Wikipedia, cite your sources, whether it be Law School Transparency or news articles, and your information can help to expose these scams to the uninitiated.
Right now, most Wikipedia pages about law schools function as mirror images of the law school marketing materials! Fortunately, the scamdeans do not control Wikipedia or any other popular website with information about the law schools. They cannot control the realm of online information...and deep down they know it.
Unperson, who authored one of the early scamblogs named "Exposing the Law School Scam," mentioned that Wikipedia tends to edit those additions, a while back. Apparently, they have been doing this for years now. A couple of years ago, according to unperson and L4L, the updated info would be deleted within hours - a day, at the most.
ReplyDeleteIt is obvious that the law school pigs scan critical entries passionately. I noticed this when I first started highlighting each ABA-accredited commode. On the first day, I would see dozens of visits from the particular school, due to the .edu or law.(garbagelawschoolX).ed address. This is still the case today.
The swine subscribe to internet alert services. They know as soon as an entry mentions their trash pit.
Here is one of my favorite stories relayed to me by a reader:
"I was at a function at my old law school. I asked the dean if he had ever heard of the scamblogs or Third Tier Reality. He paused for a second and said "No!" But it was obvious from the angry look on his face and white knuckles that he heard of them. When I went on to explain what the blogs do, he walked off in the middle of the explanation."
http://washingtondc.craigslist.org/doc/lgl/4010136572.html
ReplyDeleteCheck out the great Washington DC document-review gig listed above, relief for unemployed lawyers!
I saw your post on the Hofstra wikipedia article. There was nothing incorrect in it, but they took it down real fast. Same thing with Nora Demlitner and Washington and Lee; they edited wiki to make it look like an ad for Demleitner and W & L. Wikipedia is not there to promote law schools. Its there to give truthful information even if it is bad.
ReplyDeleteActually, I do not recall posting about Hofstra, but I have no doubt that they patrol the internet daily. If I was more tech-savvy and had more time, I would love to pull some Nando Net Sleuthing and find out identities. Do the schools pay a handful of companies or services? Is this a whole underground business? How much does it cost each month for these scrubbing services?
DeleteScrub-a-dub-dub.
DeleteThree Deans in a tub.
And who do you think they would be?
A Butcher,
a Baker,
and a Job-Outcome Faker.
Turn 'em out, knaves all three.
ya very good
Deletekeep em scrubbing
Read the revision history of the seton hall law toilets wiki page. they absolutely devote reaources to monitoring the site and crafting Orwellian changes to legitimate criticisms based on verified sources.
ReplyDeleteI remember trying to edit the wiki page for Illinois (or whichever the school was that had Paul whatshisname admitting to fudging the stats). Just one sentence, adding the news story and how the stats were massaged. Deleted twice in a row.
ReplyDeleteThese schools are watching their wiki pages like hawks, and I'm convinced that there must be PR companies out there who have staff whose job it is to re-edit stuff to remove the bad.
But this article begs the question, which retards are using wiki as their source for info about a school?
And it also highlights the importance of blogs like this one. We need to develop a web presence on our own that has the correct info, not rely on some turd websites that the money machine law schools can afford to twist.
Why don't we just do omnibus posts showing Wikipedia edits to the pages for the most offensively bad schools?
DeleteThis is called "wiki-lawyering", using the sometime arcane rules of wikipedia to manipulate or delete content one does not like. But the question remains, is wiki-lawyering considered a job according to NALP and ABA guidelines?
ReplyDeleteI remember a few years ago, Scott Bullock edited Seton Hall Law School's entry on wikipedia. The Seton Hall Law School scam references in the WSJ article in 2007 and the 2010 Star Ledger were "sanitized" by IT people employed by the school. The ironic part is that the same IT people failed to notice that Dean Patrick Hobbs was referred to as the Valvoline Dean. The reference to the Valvoline Dean remained on wikipedia for months until someone caught it.
ReplyDeletehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Campos
ReplyDeleteHEH, TLS!?
ReplyDeleteI started posting true, ABA employment stats and other published stats about my school on the TLS admitted students page to prospective students when I was a mere 2L. Needless to say, the prospective students were very concerned.
Enter stage left a profile of a woman with over 4k posts in under 2 years who spouts talking points straight out the Dean's office. I do not know any law students who sit on TLS all damn day long and regurgitate memorized talking points, do you?
I called her out. She freaked. The mod entered to say, I couldn't post true information on TLS. :)
These law schools best watch their asses. One of the sticking points in litigation so far has been proving that fraudulent statements induced attendance - were relied upon. I'm 100% sure my law school had employees posing as students doing just that. And I'm fairly sure TLS knew of it.
Wikipedia lacks, and needs, an entry for "Third Tier Toilet."
ReplyDeleteIn fact, the rich, descriptive vocabulary of Scamblogging warrants inclusion:
But I Did Everything Right (BIDER)
Fourth Tier Toilet (TTTT)
JD Junkyard
Indiana Tech
Inside the Law School Scam
Mr. Infinity
Outside the Law School Scam
Scam-dean
Third Tier Toilet (TTT)
Third Tier Reality
Toileteer
T-14
US "News" & World Report law school rankings
Valvoline Dean
Versatility Myth
"Yale or Fail"
and so on.
Also:
Delete"Network"
"Hi, Joan King!"
Somebody who is experienced at this should go help clean up the Campos page. If Brian Leiter is behind it, it might be a lost cause, as I'm sure he'll stop at nothing to have the last word (he heavily edits and controls his own Wikipedia page, under a fake name). But the last few paragraphs were clearly written by Leiter or Steve Diamond. The paragraphs contain what seem like true statements, but the tone is clearly biased and the statements don't seem appropriate for the Paul Campos page, specifically statements made by Deborah Merrit and Brian Tamanaha.
ReplyDeleteOn second thought, it probably isn't Brian Leiter making these edits, because he wouldn't mistake the Ohio State University with the nonexistent "University of Ohio", as was done in the article.
Don't you think Leiter would put in such a red herring to throw people off the scent?
DeleteWhat's hilarious (if not just plain sad) is that Leiter thinks that these red herrings actually fool people. The comments in Campos' article "Brian Leiter's Slow Motion Car Crash" make it very clear that everyone knows that Leiter is an obsessive internet troll, and that no one is fooled by any of his ridiculous red herrings or pseudonyms. Still he keeps trying.
DeleteI suspect that all these toilets have corporate accounts at reputation.com, the "online reputation management" company.
ReplyDeleteReputation.com advertises widely here in Silicon Valley.
"In a nutshell, online reputation management, or ORM as it’s known, is the practice of making people and businesses look their best on the Internet. To accomplish that, people need to control their online search results because they frequently contain inaccurate, misleading or outdated material which can adversely influence how web searchers view them."
One of their specialties is "Bad content suppression - Negative search results can affect you and your livelihood. Suppress them." In other words - censorship.
All of us should chip in and buy an account to defend Nando and Third Tier Toilet. But it would probably prohibitively expensive - there is so much disgusting, slimy pro-law school propaganda that you would need an army of bulldozers and excrement tankers to get rid of it.
Besides, Nando has a very simple and elegant tool already -- the truth.
" ... pepole need to control their online search results because they frequently contain inaccurate, misleading or outdated material which can adversely influence how web searchers view them."
DeleteOh, dear. The law schools have long favored the dissemination of 'inaccurate, misleading and outdated' employment statistics. Do they now propose to go silent?