Web Censorship on the University Campus?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on Thursday October 12, 2006 @06:56AM from the should-students-worry dept.

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?"

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Re:The good old days by DragonWriter · 2006-10-12 07:03 · Score: 5, Insightful

There was a time when information was distributed with books. Students would read them and learn... Too much to ask?

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...