Sunday, October 23, 2005

Going to School With Big Brother

In order to keep America safe from College freshmen, the government is requiring hundreds of universities, cities, and internet companies to overhaul their computer networks to enable law enforcement officials to monitor emails and other online communications. Now, at last, the Department of Homeland Security will be privy to subversive student discussions like:

"Wen I saw hr, I was like R U 4 real?!" and
"Seriously dude, the girls hear R stukup byotches!"

No word as to why doing this is less offensive than, say, requiring schools to bug all the phones in the dorms. Do we just not care anymore about stuff like this? Will we get to the point that say, body cavity searches will just be accepted out of hand? Is there anything that we won't tolerate?

As for me, I'm pretty much reaching my breaking point with this idiotic idea, shared by many of the nation's fatheads, that universities are breeding grounds for terrorist activity. We can't get these kids to read ten pages- what makes these people think that Al-Quaida can get them to plan a terrorist overthrow of the government? This tiresome fantasy- essentially that you can't trust anyone who reads or writes for a living- just wastes so much time and money. Please set up your Centers to monitor professors and make sure that we don't disagree with your view of the world! Please warn your children that we want to convert them to Satanism, indoctrinate them into the Radical Communist Party and get them to pose for nude pictures! Please tell me what really goes on at my workplace even though I have no intention of telling you what goes on in the break room of the manure factory! Please, please, please, waste your own money and time on your project to eradicate windmills! Speaking as an academic, we spend our time reading obscure texts and writing about things that nobody in their right mind would care about; not planning revolutions. Academia is petty and political at times, but like it or not- it's also deeply bourgeois and traditional.

As for the university administrations themselves, well no surprises there, "The universities do not question the government's right to use wiretaps to monitor terrorism or criminal suspects on college campuses, Mr. Hartle said, only the order's rapid timetable for compliance and extraordinary cost."

1 comment:

Rufus said...

Oh, good!

Yeah, I can imagine my students...

"Dude, Osama keeps bugging me about waging jihad, but... pshaw! Whatever! I'm going to a kegger tonight!"