Google Removes Ads Placed by Faculty Union in Dispute With British University.

Navigation: Main page

Author: Labi, Aisha

Dateline: London

"Staff are treated with contempt! Will students be treated better?"

"Contemplating Brunel? Brunel Uni axes teaching staff! Support the AUT greylist today."

For about two days, people who turned to Google to find information about Britain's Brunel University found their search results were topped by paid advertising messages that took potshots at the university.

The ads were the handiwork of the Association of University Teachers, which is known as the AUT and is Britain's largest faculty union, representing more than 50,000 higher-education professionals. The union and Brunel are locked in a dispute over the university's employment policies, and union officials decided they needed a new way to get their message out.

But the ads were short-lived. After they generated a fair amount of news coverage, Google removed them from its site, citing a policy that "Ad text advocating against any organization or person (public, private, or protected) is not permitted."

Because of the volume of ads Google receives, not every one can be checked before it is posted, said Greg Morrison, a Google press officer. He noted that every ad would eventually be checked and that any ad could be removed at any time at Google's discretion. "Basically, you can campaign for a cause, but you can't criticize using the ads," he said.

The ads were the latest development in a bitter disagreement between the union and the university, which has four campuses on the outskirts of London. A year ago, in an effort to become more research-focused, Brunel announced plans to reduce the number of staff members who were not actively involved in research. Research activity is the measure that determines how money is distributed to Britain's publicly financed universities.

More than 50 faculty members were selected for elimination because they were deemed not "research active." Most of the employees have accepted severance packages, said Jay O'Connor, a university spokeswoman. "To date," she said, "only two have been issued compulsory redundancy notices" â€" meaning they have been fired.

The faculty union, however, accuses Brunel of targeting union activists for elimination. "The way they've selected those people for redundancy has been nonconsistent and nontransparent, to say the least," said Matt Waddup, the faculty association's assistant general secretary for campaigns.

The union decided to "greylist" the university. In greylisting, a milder form of blacklisting that the union has used successfully before, the union calls for a boycott of an institution. "We ask our members, and also members of international committees, to write to Brunel and say that they will not be cooperating with the university," said Mr. Waddup. "We ask them to say that they will not get involved in any new joint research, they will not be cooperating in peer reviews, external examinations, or applying for jobs there."

To augment to what Mr. Waddup called a "conventional campaigning approach" against Brunel, which includes ads in trade journals and the news media, the faculty union wanted to broaden its target audience. Hence the Google ads.

"We decided to use the fact that what universities are most worried about is their reputation," he said. "It's their currency and capital. We wanted to try to put pressure on them by in essence publicizing as widely as we can their employment practices. Our experience is that most universities don't like bad publicity."

"These days most students are probably going to find out about their university of choice on the Internet, and for the most part from Google," he said. "One of our campaigners came up with clever idea of paying for pop-up adverts whenever anyone Googled Brunel, saying, in essence, Think twice before you decide to attend this university."

Mr. Waddup said that Google "agreed to the text of our ads, but in light of the subsequent publicity they reviewed our account and suddenly found that one or more of our ads didn't meet their guidelines."

Google apparently decided that the association's ads, which also featured a link to the campaign against Brunel, crossed the line separating opinion and criticism. Although the ads have been disabled, Mr. Waddup thinks they accomplished their purpose. "We would take the view that the damage is done and that was the major point," he said.

~~~~~~~~

By Aisha Labi