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Web Censorship on the University Campus?
Censored Prof asks: "I teach at a private university in San Antonio, TX. Besides some horrendous bandwidth issues, we have lately been subjected to Lightspeed and/or Websense blocking. This means that suddenly, university students are unable to see content that the rest of the (free) world sees; and more importantly are often blocked from very legitimate information crucial to their area of study. Papers like Village Voice are blocked. Anatomy sites are blocked. Electronic Art sites are blocked. Anything with ".mp3" is blocked. Our CIO has assured us that this is not uncommon and that there are good reasons to do this on a university campus. It strikes me as odd that students must leave campus to learn, and smacks of censorship in horrible ways. So my question: Is this unique to our university? Who else at what other universities are subject to similar web-content blocking? Are we alone, or part of a disturbing trend?"
It's a private university. They can do what they want. Try surfing Fark at Bob Jones University and see how well that goes over...
RTFS! How is the Village Voice and anatomy sites high bandwidth?
Yeah, and I supposed if you lived before computers and heard of a university prohibiting students access to books that most people had access to and that would be educationally useful, you'd dismiss it with comment about how people used to get their knowledge transmitted orally from the elders, and would it be too much to ask if students just went back to doing that...
I should note that I agree with the sentiments in your post. At the University of Wisconsin, we also do not censor or block any traffic, and only use traffic shaping and bandwidth limits in the residence halls, because it was deemed a necessity in terms of the way the housing division here manages bandwidth and usage; still, nothing is blocked.
I would like to say that QuickTime, while proprietary, is often a reasonable tool to use to generate and view content that utilizes open international standards (such as MPEG-4 and H.264). Part of that thinking went into this IP video delivery project for us (more reasoning in a recent presentation here), and ultimately, QuickTime allowed us to do things with open standards and protocols that Windows Media, Real, and VideoFurnace simply couldn't, and at a cost that was (and still is) much, much less than dedicated industrial video encoders and other equipment.
Way to turn your anecdote into a culture war! This is a small, PRIVATE college in San Antonio. I don't really think it is part of a larger trend. The OP didn't mention it, but for all we know it could be a religious institution. How many small private colleges are you talking about in Canada?
Oh shit, I forgot where I am! I meant to say "Americans are fat dumb sheep!"
Monstar L
Regarding Quicktime. I fully agree with you and that is why I noted it as a media tool. I just felt it was appropriate to note that it was proprietary for full disclosure.
:-)
As an aside, some of the new imaging code coming out in 10.5 is also really going to enhance the ability to extend Quicktime in some new and exciting ways, not just for video or sound either.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
If anything, Universities (and libraries) should at least be the ONE place on earth where the Internet should never be censored under any, any any any circumstances!!
:-)
Although your suggestion that there is a 19-24 age group that is super-responsible is kind of funny
``If your school's primary interest is to serve HTML & e-mail to the students, then can you really blame them for blocking high bandwidth items?''
If conserving bandwidth is their concern, why don't they just do that? Throttling connections would _actually_ solve the problem, without imposing censorship.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
The problem isn't the technology, it's the way it has been used. The expense of printing made it necessary for publishers to maintain some minimum level of quality (sometimes very minimum) if they expected to make enough sales to remain solvent. Nowadays, everyone can "publish" - so one needs to be very well trained to know how to perform research on the internet properly (which most teachers do not know how to do and so cannot teach their students how to do, which ultimately means they discourage it out of a certain level of ignorance).
It does more to attract paying students, but not nessesarily 'good' students.
I would be very surprised if 'foodball stadium' listed high on the reasons for attending among the students who go on to do well in ways that reflect on the university.
This is censorship. The college I go to blocks all the slashdot articles pertaining to games for some reason, even though there is a Video Games degree in this very school.
I often find that useful articles with algorithms or techniques get blocked this way.
One would think that the obnoxious handholding stops after highschool......
Having a good football program probably does more to attract good students to your campus then good parking, bandwith, and competent instuctors combined.
Actually, the "good football team" is all about alumni dollars and administration prestige and NOT about students.
What is funny is that people still think universities are the last bastions of free-expression or critical thought. Universities are one of the most censorship prone, controlling, paternalistic, politically correct restrictive institutions around. Usually, censorship or other forms of social control are pioneered in universities, before they move out into the public at large.
When I was looking at schools I actually took this into consideration. A schools focus on sports VS academics was a major deciding factor actually. The more interest in and money spent on sports the less interested I was in that campus. It showed a distinct flaw in the thinking of the administration that I knew, even at 16, would perpetuate into the rest of the campus. Are MIT and CalTech known for football? Nope. Do they even have teams? Who knows and who cares. That is not why one goes to college. Either of those schools on your resume and no one will care if you went to a football game or not. Sports programs should be required to live and die on their own, with NO school funding coming out of my tuition I was working two jobs to pay.
Before you think this perspective is born out of being a "geek" who never played sports etc, I was on the varsity swim team starting freshman year and JV football team for two.
Political correctness is another matter, and not really relevant to this discussion.
Please explain how political correctness is NOT censorship??
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