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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?"
I was in charge of writing a policy for web usage and censorship at a small private university. The policy that was decided on was to charge each student a $20 annual internet usage fee, in exchange for which we provided uncensored internet access to them while on campus. We chose to be their "ISP" so we could wash our hands of responsibility for whatever they would choose to do with it.
It was our opinion that by choosing to actually censor internet access, a college could become responsible for the actions of its students on the net, because it shows that they are monitoring the students' behavior and choosing to intervene. Failure to "correctly" intervene could make a school liable. Establishing a policy that the school is an ISP and provides uncensored access to students who are responsible for their own actions could prevent liability for the school.
Back when I was an undergraduate, I worked in the university's admissions office helping with paperwork and gathering statistics. One of the things they did was to survey incoming students (and students who chose not to attend) and find out what influenced their decision to apply and attend/not attend. Surprisingly the top factors were mostly non-academic. As I recall campus appearance and the social scene were the top two factors. Most had decided to apply based on the recommendations of friends and guidance counselors followed by the performance of the school's sports teams. This was at an upper middle-tier university and the applicants were all well qualified academically. For the two years I helped with this, the results were consistent. For me it was an eye opener to find that most people made a major life decision based on 'shallow' considerations rather than the 'socially correct' reasons that everyone states publicly. Later I realized this is actually more the norm - the real reasons we choose other people for dating/mating or hiring are often far different than what we tell others or even ourselves.
I once ran a small computer lab at a university. One night a girl came in and told me she needed to look at porn for a research project - I had her sit in a corner so other customers wouldn't be uncomfortable and she spent about an hour taking notes and printing stuff out. So scratch porn from the list of sites a university would legitimately want to block. I'm sure students and professors need to do research on piracy, viruses, and all the other badness on teh intarweb as well.