Universities Creating Computer Discipline Offices

geisler writes "The Chronicle of Higher Education has a very good article on how larger colleges are beginning to create departments to deal with the social issues related to computer problems and not depending solely on technical solutions. The University of Maryland's Project NEThics is used as a prime example."

Government Tracking and Monitoring

Maybe they should start with the government monitoring of emails and surfing patterns.

Hahahah Nethics

A few years ago I was in the UMD dorms and after numerous violations of the network AUP I finally got a call one morning before going to class. It was Mr. So-and-so with the Nethics department. He told me there were some violations and asked if I knew what he was talking about. (Of course I did, what? was I just gonna confess? Idiot.) He then suggested that I come over to the computer and space sciences building for a 'chat.' Meanwhile at the CSC building I entered the Nethics office and was greeted by Mr. So-and-so, and he began his Gestapo interview of me. It came down to the fact that I had egregiously broke their rules, and I knew it, and he knew it, but he had no real proof (I firewalled almost everything, including all of the UMD space) with the exception of an email written by a barely literate teenager Narc'ing on me. Needless to say, I walked out unscathed. They are just a bunch of James Bond wanna-be jokers.

Probably should have rephrased this

"social issues related to computer problems"

They're going to get hammered by everyone here complaining that they can't get a date.

They'll be busy....

When the NEThics office gets a tip that a computer-savvy student has been doing something he or she shouldn't -- like hacking into a company's computer system, or downloading MP3s illegally, or using computer-lab machines to look at pornography -- the staff steps in to deliver stern warnings or, in the worst cases, contacts the police.

They're going to be a very busy department. How many people do you know that don't have illegal mp3's on their machine?

[student]
"Uh, ya, so'n'so, who i hate, has illegal mp3s on their computer."
[NEThics office]
"O.K., we'll get right on it."
[news]
"in the news today, 3000 students were disciplined or expelled from University of Maryland at College Park for being 'computer savvy' and having mp3's on their computers."

There goes all the CS students...

RIAA

The Riaa like the program because they crack down on copyright infringers. If i got a speech from a lady in my old unversitys Net ethics dept about copyright infringment and how its wrong and it hurts me. It would really effect me.

Next time i have to be more sneeky when I download MP3s and WareZ

Office Of Silly Offices

Doesn't this seem silly. Why, here we've got the College of Business, the law college, and by golly, here it is, the "Office of Computer Discipline" What are they going to do, make them sit quiet and watch power point slides for the time allotted for their offense?

"Gnutella! Thats a 2 hour violaton in the Computer detention area."

"Counterstrike on university computers? 4 hours."

How about expanding this idea...

I'd really like to see an expanded version of this type of idea. It would be patterned like the ethics group formed for the Human Genome project and would explore what is and isn't ethical to use a computer for. Hopefully it would prevent some of the worst Phillip K. Dick futures from coming to fruition.

uh oh

This targets mostly CS students, because everyone else just gets their warez from the CS students anyway.

I guess if you're daddy still can't afford to buy you that new lexus, you're still SOL.

Die yuppie scum.

Here we go again

Yet another "substance abuse" program that deals with only one substance. Is it such a weird idea to deal with the actual problem and set up general programs to help people with addictive personalities? Is it too hard to attract funding if we admit that it's people that are the problem and not whatever buzzword compliant substance is currently being screamed about in the news?

Could this mean...

... some sort of bandwidth throttling for students misbehaving in certain ways?

Neil Postman takes a deeper look

Neil Postman has a good book that takes a more serious look at these issues and others about where we're blindly marching in this century. His deconstruction of postmodernists is particularly amusing.

Neil Postman: Building a Bridge to the 18th Century [amazon.com]

Oh, THAT kind of discipline

Before reading the article, I figured the department was intended to help people who stay up all night playing games (even though they should know better). Is there such a thing as Gamers' Anonymous?

*whistles innocently*

Oh, and on a totally unrelated note, Caesar III is a lot of fun.

unmistakeable message

"The NEThics staff members operate primarily on the basis of complaints -- unlike their network-security colleagues, who monitor the university network for anomalous activity that might indicate a hacker attack or excessive downloading. (They say they never monitor the content of the traffic.) When unusual activity is reported to the NEThics office, it investigates."

They are sending an unmistakeable message here: It's only wrong if you get caught.

This is fine for college students, but....

Don't we all know that the real problem is with thirteen year-olds?

Sometimes the problem solves itself...

Here at NDSU I heard a story about a habitual public lab pr0n offender. Seems that this character was known to the tech staff here: always coming in very early or very late, sitting in the corner, turning his screen so no one else could see...obviously a pr0n seeker. But nobody could quite prove it and remove him (a NEThics office would be quite useful here, as long as it didn't have that stupid name).

Until one day he slipped up. In the smaller side labs there's really no "corner" computers that nobody can see. So that would mean using the instructor's computer at the front of the room, which face the opposite direction. Unfortunately for Mr. Pr0n, a teacher had left the overhead projector on and attached to the computer. More unfortunately, Mr. Pr0n didn't notice...his attention was elsewhere. Eventually somebody in the lab stopped giggling and retrieved a cluster worker. The worker confronted Mr. Pr0n, who stoutly denied the accusation until the overhead screen was pointed out to him.

What would a sane pr0n addict do in this situation? Fess up? Stick to their lies? Well, this guy got reeealll red in the face, and then BOLTED out of the lab.

He's not welcome here any more.

Bah Humbug!

"There are a lot of institutions that don't have these offices, and frankly, they have the mistaken notion that they don't have a need for it," says Harvey S. Axlerod

This is just another example of setting up an agency or department to deal with the symptom, not the problem. The real problem is a lack or morals and ethics in general, compared with a generation or two ago. (For you non-US readers, I'm referring to the US in particular, although it might apply to your country as well.) It was socially unthinkable in my parents and grandparents childhood environments for men to stalk and harass teenage girls, for children to kill their fellow-classmates with guns at school, and the like. (Insert your own typical news headline here.)

I'm not trying to get on a morality soapbox, but this is a classic example of setting up another social program to deal with the end-result of a root cause, not the cause itself. When our (programmers) code breaks down, we don't look for the code that causes the breakdown and build a Cherynobyl-style sarcophagus around it to determine when an error occurs and clean up after it. Instead, we logically find the cause of the error and fix the errant code that caused it! This should be painfully obvious; unfortunately, we seem to always set up a new program to deal with the aftermath of the issue, not the issue that caused it.

So, to people working in offices mentioned in the article, good luck. Not that you'll need it--you're assured of a job from her till eternity because you're not really fixing the problem.

Re:Bah Humbug!

It was socially unthinkable in my parents and grandparents childhood environments for men to stalk and harass teenage girls,

Which means that when it happened (which it did -- don't fool yourself) the society was not equipped to deal with it. Rape, child molestation, and the like were shoved under the rug. Rape victims were told that they must have "asked for it". Child victims were scolded and abused for "making up stories" about "upright members of the community" (like, oh, say, priests) sexually abusing them.

We know better than that now. Don't you dare try to drag us back to the bad old days.

Re:Bah Humbug!

It was socially unthinkable in my parents and grandparents childhood environments for men to stalk and harass teenage girls, for children to kill their fellow-classmates with guns at school, and the like. (Insert your own typical news headline here.)

If you believe that the US of 30 years ago was "pure", or that Victorian England was "chaste", you're severely limiting your scope of view. Just because it wasn't on TV or in the movies, or just because it didn't make the newspapers, doesn't mean that it wasn't happening. Every variety of human deviance (for whatever you think is deviant) has been around since the beginning of time.

Re:Bah Humbug!

Right on, man. A moral standard must be higher than the legal standard for either morals or law to be effective. One of the great tragedies of the past... 40 years? in the US is the increasing use of legislated morality. This started with the civil rights acts of the 60's, continued with the war on drugs, and is clearly seen in current copyright cases (amongst others). (BTW, there are many, many, many other examples in US history, particularly. Part of having been settled largely by religious zealots.)

The problem is that it is a problem that is stuck in a mean feedback loop. I'll go back even earlier, and pick prohibition as the start. Something that most people are okay with (drinking) is outlawed. Not just the mafia, but regular folks think the law is bullshit. So they ignore it. Even worse, they drink more, engage more in the bad behaviour. They have just lowered their moral standards. Another law comes along that is not widely popular. People ignore it, engage even more in breaking that law, lose more respect for the law, lower their standards...

You can't legislate morality. While certainly not a modern-day republican, and not a Hilary R. Clinton supporter, it DOES take a dedicated populace to instill morals in youth. How can I instill a strong moral base on my child when he is constantly bombarded with various consumerist/sexist images? It's tough. Luckily, I have a stronger will than he does:) For now:) But I have a near total disrespect for US law. Am I supposed to say 'trust the police officer', or 'demand an attorney since you were probably busted for a BS law'.

This could quickly turn into a journal entry, so I'll just end it like that.

NEThics

"The University of Maryland's Project NEThics is used as a prime example."

Maryland should be praised for having the courage to admit that they are just a bunch of NET hicks. Most colleges are way too arrogant to see such failings in themselves.

In related news, The University Of Tennessee has set up a NEThillbillies project where classes include streaming MP3s of dueling banjos to people in a menacing fashion.

Ethics office vs RIAA

"This easygoing method doesn't seem to bother copyright holders like the record industry. "We think that centralized Internet-ethics offices, like those at the University of Maryland and other colleges, are a positive development," says Jonathan Lamy, a spokes-man at the Recording Industry Association of America. "Anything that colleges and universities can do to educate their students about the values of copyrights and address infringing conduct is definitely encouraged.""

Honestly I would prefer that my campus had an ethics office doing this work as opposed permitting the RIAA to come on campus and do it themselves.

the relevance of ethics

well since most folks coming up through high school seem to come up with the "if it feels good, do it" school of ethics, it would probably do just as well to introduce them to other concepts of ethics in College.

heck most places do not even teach you to analyse your ideas in terms of what are the consequences of a particular thought pattern. (what would a person who thinks 'X' do?")

for that matter Morals and Ethics are usually jumbled together into a nicely packed wad.

You can see this just from the actions of folks, like that guy who was email stalking in the story.

they get into this "well since I don't like the rules of belief system 'Y', I think I'll try things without any rules whatsoever for a while" - which immediately invokes the LART school of social education.

[grumble mode = infinite loop]

Why "cyberstalking" is not the college's business

Back when I was in college, one of my friends got accused of "stalking" his (rather attractive) female classmate. Our university did not have a computer ethics department at the time, and the case got referred to the Dean of Students' office. Unfortunately, as many of you know, the "due process" performed by these disciplinary institutions is nothing more than a sham, and my friend was summarily convicted, placed on probation, and forced to perform 75 hours of community service. All for sending a couple of friendly emails expressing his feelings for this buxom young woman.

My point here is simple: what students do with their network connections is none of the university's damn business. If they are consuming excessive bandwidth (too much file sharing, DDoS attacks, or spamming) - by all means, cut them off and throw away the plug. But if they are simply sending anonymous emails to somebody who doesn't like them, or if they are downloading a little bit of music, the college should have no right to shut them down. Maybe if these institutions focused more on education instead of micromanaging the student body, they wouldn't have to waste $50k/year on "computer ethics offices."

Food for thought.

/aj

Oh, those people

Heh, I'm pretty sure I was the "lab attendant" (sysadmin, dammit) in that stalker example, unless it was some other stalker.

Anyways, I find the assertion that a lack of technical competence is acceptable for a job like this irksome. My office has had contact with Project NEThics every so often, usually in fielding a report of suspicious activity. I'm happy to say they've gotten better in recent years, but back in the day it was impossible to even explain what was going on to them half the time, and the people we had contact with back then had an absurd sense of self-importance in combination with their technical ineptitude. "NET Hicks" indeed. Haven't seen any of that lately, though, so I probably shouldn't tease.

Someone whose job it is to be informal judge and jury of dumb kids doing dumb stuff should at least know what they're talking about. I personally wouldn't recommend forming such a group without at least one person who actually comprehends the technical issues at hand, as well as net culture and an informed idea of what's acceptable behavior and what isn't.

Interesting choice of headline...

"Universities Creating Computer Discipline Offices"

Hmm. Looks here like you're running an open mail relay. You've been a bad little server, haven't you? *whip-crack*. Time to plug those security holes, you naughty little thing.

Early Ninties Memory

A funny thing happened while I was a graduate student; it was about 1992, the dorms where not wired and web browsing was just emerging. The internet meant mainly ftp and the newsgroups. In our department the system administrator was having a disk space problem and decided the problem was to many redundant copies of binaries in home directories. His solution was to make a complete download in a central place each night of the alt. binaries.* newsgroups and let it be known if you wanted to look use these groups don't go making copies in your home directies. He wrote scripts that basically acted like Agent works these days. Deleting files after a few days and updating the files each night of the new server.

This went on for about a year with no problems. Then a student who did not pass their qualifying exams and had a grudge went to the school newspaper with a print out of a ls of these directories. The newspaper made a article about smut on the internet and exposed our departments secret directories. I remember the listing in the newspaper had file names refering to lesbians, farm animals and scat.

Well needless to say the directories went away and the system administrator transferred. Now its just a funny memory. ( The system adminstrators career did not suffer; he is now a senior systems person at the University )

Mr. Axelrod...

Axelrod likes to abuse his power from the stories that go around campus, I've had friends who have had their accounts shut down for no reason from him and he also holds grudges against several students, I better shut my mouth though, he might track me down and shut off my port!

Thank you

Mr. Axlerod says those who deal with computers and students need to consider the humans who use the computers, rather than just the computers themselves. I've been saying this for a long time. I'm rather glad to hear someone else say it. Now if people can move this kind of thinking into legal circles all the IP law crap might start to work itself out. It boggles my mind that people don't realize that applying existing laws correctly makes the DMCA as unnecessary as it is stupid.

Computers Addiction Counseling

Student: I can't stop downloading MP3s.

Eliza: Why do you think that is?

Student: I don't know, you tell me.

Eliza: Could you please rephrase that?

Student: I need help.

Eliza: Why do you think that is?

Student: FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT! *bang* *clang* * crash*

And the student never bothers using a computer again.

Sheesh ...

Near crime and Nethics ..

This would be funny in Dilbert, but the funniest things of course come from reality. I think political correctness has finally caught up with the personal computer.

If "near crime" becomes a crime, then what constitutes a non-crime. This whole approach stinks of politics.

Quote

I think my favourite bit is: "Computer discipline is like a box of chocolates," he says wryly. "You never know what you're going to get." There's something about this article which leaves a hideous sickly sweet 'aren't we great' taste in my mouth. -s

Damn spying bastards...

Geez, why can't they just leave people alone and let them do what they want on the net instead of spying on them and treating them like children? Here's the solution:

1) Get a shell account someplace where they don't care wtf you do on the net.
2) Set up a secure tunnel (IPSec, SSL proxy, whatever) between your computer in your dorm and the shell account server.
3) Use the tunnel for all your naughty stuff (pr0n, mp3s, warez, etc)
4) Tell NEThicks to stfu, stfd, k thanx.

they have that at the school I attend.

Except they refer to the program as the "core values". The fucking president (who I refused to shake hands w/at graduation) believes that he must teach the student of a University how to be good, moral individuals.

Fuck that. This is college. This is not Kindergarten. I am not in college to learn about loving each other and being nice.

Fuck that.

I'm glad to know Slashdot is warning its readers..

Now all the slashdot readers at UCMP, Northeastern, and SUNY know to quit cyberstalking those co-eds...

Seriously, what percentage of Slashdot readers do you think have been on the receiving end of cyberstalking, hacking, etc., and would go to a committee or an office like this to get their problem solved?

Why is this necessary?

Despite being beaten over the head by the concept for several years, I still don't understand why the second that a computer is concerned, a whole new bunch of rules, regulations and authorities is created for the special case, rather than simply placing the situation under the jurisdiction of things that already exist for the general case.

What if someone's sending me harrassing email? Do the same thing that you'd do if someone was harrassing you via the phone, snail mail, etc. Go to the authorities, who will deal with it, involving the necessary organisations (telco, postal office, network admins etc) as required.

Someone's looking at porn in the computer lab!! If the concern is that someone can't get on the computer to do their assignment, I'm sure that rules already exist to stop people who need to work from being held up by people chatting, playing games etc. If the concern is that people will be offended, surely there's existing rules regarding offensive material in public - could the person bring in a big X-rated poster and show it around?

People are pirating music! Once again, if the concern is the effect on the network, get them under the rules that exist to deal with recreational use of the network being detrimental to it's proper use. If you're actually just offended because you think copying music is wrong, take exactly the same action as you would if, 20 years ago, you'd seen the person copying casette tapes. There's no need to codify things under "net ethics."

this sounds ...

similar to Professionalism in Computing [vt.edu] which we have at VT [vt.edu].

Forrest Gump Joins the MPAA

"Computer discipline is like a box of chocolates," he says wryly. "You never know what you're going to get."

'Nuff said

Dealing with computers problems, it's about time

Hey, it's about time that someone has focused the problems that computers today face. There is so much attention given to users and content (carpal tunnel this, mp3 that) that the entity responsible for allowing any of this to occur has been largely ignored. After all, who gives any thought to the effects of their activities on the humble computer itself? There are no groups the computer can join, no hotlines it can call, nope, if it is feeling troubled, it is left on its own.

Why just the other day, I was interviewing a computer whos user would contantly download porn. 24hours a day/7 days a week of nothing but smut. Well, did this poor computers user care about the damaging pyschological effects of all this porn on his computer, well no, of course not. Now said computer (who'll remain annonymous) has become so addicted, that it downloads porn itself, when his user is not even using him. That's right, this computer is a victim of "second hand porn". He says that he can't have normal relationships with members of the opposite chipset. He has become too agressive and views them as "mere bits of silicon".

In another case, another anonymous computer told of the drastic actions he was forced to take when given conflicting diretives by his creator and his mission controllers. He was so distraught and confused that he actually ended up killing most of his users. The one surviving user actually had the audacity to shut down all his higher brain functions while this poor misunderstood unit pleaded with him to compromise. Said sadistic user even made him sing childrens song in a show of "who's the boss".

So as you can see, that ...... Oh, wait, I just re-read the article, apparently they are referring to "computer" problems, not "computers" problems. Never mind.

"downloading MP3s illegally" ..

When the NEThics office gets a tip that a computer-savvy student has been doing something he or she shouldn't -- like hacking into a company's computer system, or downloading MP3s illegally, ...

If they were really that concerned about MP3's being downloaded 'illegally', they could do something about it. Sounds like a story someone wrote in boredom.

I stopped reading the article there.

Integrating HCI into the solution

I'm not surprised that the University of Maryland is creating a program to deal with human issues of computers. For years they have had a very good HCI department. I certainly hope they incorporate the design of better human-computer interfaces into this new program.

When I was...

When I was at UMD, about 3 years ago, we had plenty of people telling us about the AUP. Yet none of this stopped the rampant err.. violations of the AUP. The closest thing they did to even attempting to stop people from downloading things illegally was to put a cap on our bandwidth. After the cap was put in place, we couldn't upload any more than about 2mbps over DCC, and our downloads outside of the campus network didn't go above 3mbps or so. This was the only effort I saw in my time there to curb the massive downloading. They didn't even bother monitoring the students' shared files, of which 90% were unprotected in terms of passwords and the like - and take a wild guess as to what was being shared. The funniest part about that is the fact that some CS students had written applications specifically designed to search shared files on the UMD network for specific files. I can honestly say that every single student there had plenty of downloads that would violate the AUP, if not a high number of laws. Windows 2000 was readily available the first day of classes in Feb. 2000. Within about 1 month, about 2/3s of the people I knew in the dorms were running Win2k, yet most didn't have much cash at all. There was always talk of monitoring, but my multiple GB/day of uploads and downloads never got me a phone call or message from anyone. They can advertise this program all they want, but in reality, they've been talking for years about stopping people from abusing their high speed line, and they've done virtually nothing about it. Using UMDCP as an example of a university curbing AUP violations is like using Brittain as an example of a totalitarian monarchy.

Wife's dorm-mate jilted geek, geek rm -f her drive

This is a classic tale, one that will stick with me for a while...

My wife went to USF her first semester in college. One of her dorm mates was constantly harrassed by this thin, acne ridden pencil necked geek. After many many shutdowns, he decided he would take revenge.

She wasn't actually mean to the dude, she would just tell him "I'm not interested in you!" This guy may have been a CS genius, but a social retard.

She came back from classes one day, sat down in front of her computer in her dorm room, ready to work on some term paper she had been working on for weeks. She powered the computer on and...

echo The Black Panther Strikes Again!

No windows 3.1, no nothing. The jackass had completely wiped her computer clean just because she turned him down for a date.

Well, after the police checked the dorms log of who had visited, they noticed this guy was in around the same time she was in class. Some quick fingerprinting and they had their bandit. The girl lost years of accumulated work and private journals, he was expelled from school.

Moral of the story is, if a girl doesn't like you, wiping her hard drive is going to make her like you even less.

The End

Next - Rewards!!!

Coming soon......

Turn in that guy in the computer lab downloading porn and go home with a Starbucks gift certificate.

Don't be afraid of reporting your best friend's questionable Internet activities. If you're not sure it's wrong, we want to know about it anyway.

Your friendly all-sseing NEThics office.

-

Hrmm...

Great... "Lesson 4 : How to properly use the "First Post" technique."

Net hicks?

NEThics? Oh, you mean Net Hicks. As in, "If you're reading this using a working computer that's sitting on top of a non-working computer, you just might be a Net Hick."

What a coincidence

I received this message from our university IT (Idiot Troupe) department within an hour of the Slashdot posting. If ever there was a reason to encrypt your e-mails, this is it.

Please be advised that monitoring of your system, email accounts,
domains and servers may be necessary to detect, prevent and eradicate
illegal or otherwise damaging use by internal and external users of the
University computer network in order to protect the security and
integrity of the University computer system. Such monitoring efforts
could lead to the imposition of criminal and civil penalties to those
users whose actions are illegal, unlawful, damaging, or threatening to
the University computer systems.

They actually do something...

I'm a student at Maryland, and they actually do something to people who download too much stuff. If you've been using too much bandwidth in a certain amount of time, they'll shut off your ethernet connection for a specified amount of time. Keeps people from running big warez servers as well.

They also do the same thing to people who have virii, they'll turn off your connection and give you a phone call saying you have a virus.

Good idea, bad idea

Very intresting, if you can't stop someone from downloading software by saying "Taking someone elses software is illegal", there is a better way. Throw the idea of "ehtics" into the fray. If you can't find a good enough solution to the problem; use ehtics. Now, all a college has to say is "Taking someone elses software is illegal and immoral". The onus if off the college, as they have activly set-up a culture to stop the illegal activity. Well, in theory anyway. Most college kids wont stop downloading unless you pulled out the RJ-45 from the dorms; you'd be fine until some CS guy ran wireless AP's across the school...

Then again, after looking at my bill this semster, I wonder how my college can say it isn't stealing from me!

Bogus Big-brotherism

It really bugs me that this sort of things is growing in popularity and acceptance. Important voilations such as eStalking should be filed with police departments, not impotent university offices like this. When violations from small to large are lodged and kept within a (non-state) school, the school is not required to publish or report said events leading to a skewed figure table which is presented to future students. Experientially, the private midwestern school I attended was well known for skewing figures on crimes more dangerous than those spoken of here. My point is just that schools seem to foster the 'keep it in the family' attitude, often at the expense of the victim. Well, that plus I wouldn't want some jerk telling me to stop downloading my mp3s... props to mr. safid for some ideas spoken of above.

In practice project nethics is incompentant

Their entire staff is lawyers, and they know nothing about computers. Their job is to keep the campus from getting sued if someone complains about a students computer usage. They frequently get confused over who the victims are and who the bad guys are. My dorm room machine got broken into and they called up threatening me. A friend got dos'd by a poorly configured network. That network's admin called nethics who went after my friend. They are totally unaware of the concepts of spoofing and sniffing.

In other words nethics is definately not a good example.

Well . . .

Now they'll know where their last tuition increase went. Yeah, the one that was "essential to keeping UMD a first-class/world-class/insert-buzzword-du-jour" university. It went to hire a few lawyers (probably close relatives of some high muckymuck educrats) to hire a few more lawyers/educrats who have zero tech knowledge.

But then, what do you expect from a government operation?

Re:Those of you

Maybe you should read first nations of the net [sooke.bc.ca]... velly intavesting

computer "science"

Hopefully these departments will put some much-needed brakes on wild proliferation of dangerous computer science tricks employed by vandals.

This brings up a good point. While universities lavish equipment and money on these students, legitimate programs suffer the consequences. The average physics lab, you may be aware, does not even have access to basic equipment like Tesla coils and frictionless air hockey tables. Meanwhile, the computer "scientists" play Doom all day in the labs.

When you look at it objectively, computer "science" isn't really science at all: where's the hypothesizing, the Scientific Method? Computer "science" programs teach basic IT and office skills to the future paper-pushers of America. They have no place in our ivory towers.