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College Papers Won't Rewrite History For Alumni
Hugh Pickens writes "The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that as college papers have begun digitizing their back issues, their Web sites have become the latest front in the battle over online identities. Youthful activities like underage drinking that once would have disappeared into the recesses of a campus library are now preserved on the public record, and alumni are contacting newspapers with requests for redaction. Unlike with Facebook profiles, that other notable source of young-adult embarrassment, the affected parties can't remove or edit questionable content. In 2007, a Cornell University alum sued the Cornell Chronicle over a newly digitized article from 1983 that reported he had been charged with burglary while a student at Cornell. The alum found the article after Googling his name and claimed that its new presence online was causing him 'mental anguish' and 'loss of reputation.' But a California judge threw out the case after determining the report to be accurate. Some student papers, like The University Daily Kansan, have found a middle ground by adding the noindex meta tag so that the documents stay online, but search engines such as Google do not index them. 'I thought that would be better than kind of like sticking it to [the alum] and saying the paper is always right and we can publish anything on the Web we want,' says the paper's editor."
Thanks for the advice, Mr. Perfect. Unfortunately, that superficially perfect suggestion is actually rather stupid.
Young people need to be able to do stupid things within a context of safety and forgetting in order to learn about themselves and the world. If someone's every action will be on record for the rest of their life, then they will feel unnecessary pressure to stay neatly within the lines and remain naive and unworldly for fear of the consequences. It would stifle their creativity, their adventurousness, and consequently their outlook on the world and everything affected by that.
Don't want your stupid college actions preserved forever? Don't do stupid things!
Thanks for your "insightful" words (great job, mods)! I'll be sure to relay that information to myself as a 19 year old the next time I'm twelve years in the past.
"Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand" - Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
In some Native American cultures, you have one name before you are an adult, and another after.
Name your kid "John Smith" while in College, and legally change his name to something unique right before graduation.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
A print of this has been taped to my wall.
Everything we have done has been done because it seemed good at the time for the motives we had at the time and to those personalities we were then.
If I ever meet a company that chooses not to hire me because they can google my political/religious/ideological views, find out that I partied a lot in college or something like that, it isn't a good company to work for anyways. I am sure that even the folks in HR realize that people change over time and them being able to find my LiveJournal account from my teen years doesn't mean that I am still that angsty. But I also see no reason to be embarrassed that I was like that at the time.