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UCSD Squabbles with Student Website
bunnie writes "Can publicly funded government organizations defend and prosecute their namespace? According to the University of California, yes. A student run website used as a public forum and text book exchange, ironically named ucsduncensored.com, was shut down under Education Code Section 92000. A nastygram from the university reflects the hard-line that UCSD is taking on this subject. Perhaps the UC Regents should trim some bored administrators from their payroll to help address the California budget crunch..." "UCSD" is clearly not an abbreviation of "University of California", so what's the problem?
From a UCSD graduate student in Electrical and computer engineering:
I think the real problem isn't the phrase "UCSD"; it is apparent what the phrase means. The real problem is the overwhelming bureaucracy in the UC schools, and in the case of the UCSD admininstration the problem is their ability to destroy any sense of campus community. The school is boring. The administration is ineffective; they can't build a useful campus-forum website on their own. However, as soon as someone else does build such a website, and the administration can't control it, the administration shuts it down. They have done similar things in the past. Clearly, students demand such useful websites; a better solution would have been to incorporate the student's innovative solution into the institution instead of rejecting it outright.
Secondary to this problem, is the fact that the Administrators are notorious for handling students poorly and in an unprofessional manner. In fact, it is to the point where most of my friends have resorted to bringing publicly disclosed video cameras or tape recorders with them whenever dealing with the administrators. Otherwise, the administrators feel no accountability or reason to keep their promises to students. It may not be this way at every UC school, but there is a real problem here.
Whether or not enforcement of the usage of the school name (and abbreviation) is written in the lawbooks, doesn't mean that it is constitutional. This law (92000.a.3) conflicts with the first amendment, or at least comes too close for comfort. Perhaps similar laws have meaning for branded corporations, but this is a public institution for learning! The school is being incredibly harsh by threating to charge the starters of the website with a misdemeanor, and isn't acting in a way becoming of a publicly funded institution with the goal of education.
At the same time, the school blatantly funds special interests aligned with the campus administration's political views; for example, in the last california election, a number of student groups were using university funds to print flyers saying no to prop 54, and even professors were openly staging walk-outs from lectures to influence their students. This is clearly a violation of similar UC-neutrality codes, yet these people were not reprimanded since their intersets were in line with the administration's.
justis@ucsd.edu