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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...
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.
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.
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.
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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