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?"

Shrug

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a private university. They can do what they want. Try surfing Fark at Bob Jones University and see how well that goes over...

Proxy avoidance category

[Anonymous Coward]

Do they block the "proxy avoidance" category? That is, can you get to Tor and download it? Or, run an ironic tor server behind the filter.

It strikes me as odd...

[susano_otter]

... that in a facility full of teachers and information, students would still have to make network connections to outside sources, in order to learn. ... that in an environment in which huge amounts of learning occurred for over hundreds of years before the Internet was even invented, it only takes one generation for people to become convinced that learning is impossible without the Internet.

Re:Sounds Like...

[rundgren]

RTFS! How is the Village Voice and anatomy sites high bandwidth?

Re:Sounds Like...

[Anonymous Coward]

If your school's primary interest is to serve HTML & e-mail to the students, then can you really blame them for blocking high bandwidth items?

If their concern is high bandwidth items, then they can institute bandwidth throttles, instead of blocking data completely. If you really want to wait forever for your large file to transfer, you should be able to get it.

Re:The good old days

[DragonWriter]

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...

Re:Narrow thinking

[daveschroeder]

I should note that I agree with the sentiments in your post. At the University of Wisconsin, we also do not censor or block any traffic, and only use traffic shaping and bandwidth limits in the residence halls, because it was deemed a necessity in terms of the way the housing division here manages bandwidth and usage; still, nothing is blocked.

I would like to say that QuickTime, while proprietary, is often a reasonable tool to use to generate and view content that utilizes open international standards (such as MPEG-4 and H.264). Part of that thinking went into this IP video delivery project [wisc.edu] for us (more reasoning in a recent presentation here [wisc.edu]), and ultimately, QuickTime allowed us to do things with open standards and protocols that Windows Media, Real, and VideoFurnace simply couldn't, and at a cost that was (and still is) much, much less than dedicated industrial video encoders and other equipment.

Re:has this universityh eard fo "academic freedom"

[antifoidulus]

Way to turn your anecdote into a culture war! This is a small, PRIVATE college in San Antonio. I don't really think it is part of a larger trend. The OP didn't mention it, but for all we know it could be a religious institution. How many small private colleges are you talking about in Canada?


Oh shit, I forgot where I am! I meant to say "Americans are fat dumb sheep!"

Bandwidth limits make sense

[davidwr]

Give students in on-campus housing the same speed they would get in off-campus housing for the same price, with maybe a minumum speed, say, 1.5-down/384-up built into the rent. If your equipment permits it, don't count on-campus traffic towards that total.
If someone wants to pay $30/month for 6-down/1-up or more for even higher bandwidth, they should have that option, assuming your equipment allows for it.

After all, if they lived off-campus that's what they would have to do.

Re:Narrow thinking

[BWJones]

Regarding Quicktime. I fully agree with you and that is why I noted it as a media tool. I just felt it was appropriate to note that it was proprietary for full disclosure.

As an aside, some of the new imaging code coming out in 10.5 is also really going to enhance the ability to extend Quicktime in some new and exciting ways, not just for video or sound either. :-)

Re:Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.

[abscissa]

If anything, Universities (and libraries) should at least be the ONE place on earth where the Internet should never be censored under any, any any any circumstances!!

Although your suggestion that there is a 19-24 age group that is super-responsible is kind of funny :-)

Re:It strikes me as odd...

[CorSci81]

You seem to be conflating two issues. No one argues that "learning" becomes impossible without the internet, the real issue is one of content. It's a question of what you're learning. While some areas of research and learning are perfectly suited to learning from books, others clearly are not. Universities are not static entities, they try to stay current and relevant. This means areas of study have appeared that no one imagined even a half century ago, and sometimes unfiltered access to the outside world is critical. Imagine trying to study digital media/art if your university blocks you from going to websites which host such content.

Re:Narrow thinking

[TopShelf]

I wonder if this CIO came from a corporate background, and is unfamiliar with collegiate ways. Long ago when I used to work in a university environment, we had an IT manager come in from the outside world, and he wanted to start maintaining web traffic logs by employee, snoop email, etc. A buddy of mine who was a network administrator underneath him told me about the meeting they had with the university's personnel department to review the new policy.

He said the personnel director basically went white when he read the proposal, and dismissed it with a simple, "you can't do that here..."

Re:Sounds Like...

[RAMMS+EIN]

``If your school's primary interest is to serve HTML & e-mail to the students, then can you really blame them for blocking high bandwidth items?''

If conserving bandwidth is their concern, why don't they just do that? Throttling connections would _actually_ solve the problem, without imposing censorship.

Re:Sounds Like...

[HappySqurriel]

If this is a trend, the only thing disturbing is that a new football stadium is probably a higher priority for a University than better network equipment and bandwidth. My undergrad was at the U of MN and they constantly wanted their own football stadium--they would spend any amount of money and create any parking problems necessary to get it.

Well, from the University's perspective a football stadium is probably a better "investment" then better bandwidth. Having a good football program probably does more to attract good students to your campus then good parking, bandwith, and competent instuctors combined.

Re:Shrug

[UbuntuDupe]

Well, what's different about this is it's not even accomplishing any particular goal. Is it keeping out "naughty" sites? Er, some yes, and some no. Is it keeping out newspaper sites? Er, some yes, some no. Is it keeping out bandwidth hogs? Er, kinda in the sense that it makes internet use a nightmare. But it prohibits an itty bitty mp3 clip of of the wumpasaurus's mating call for my zoology class (hypothetical, people!) just as much as a 14 Mb mp3 at PIRATEYOURMP3SHERE.COM. Plus, it seems to clip out vital parts of websites that *are* acceptable. Kinda like what happens when you do javascript block + ad-related url-block, except that you can't turn it off by changing settings on your software!

So, it's more imcompetence than malice.

At University, you jump through hoops.

[Lazerf4rt]

My impression is that computing resources at universities have always sucked. When I was in a computer graphics course at a school that was very reputable for Comp Sci, back in 1997, the SGI machines available to us in the lab were nearly unusable. I don't completely remember the deal, but they were slow-ass X terminals, and there weren't many of them available. My friends and I were more productive programming at home, on our Windows machines using Voodoo graphics cards, and porting our work back to the school machines using GLUT. We weren't leaving campus to learn, but we were definitely leaving campus a lot to complete our coursework.

I'm sure it's like that at nearly every school, at least for Comp Sci programs. You pay huge bucks for tuition, and use your own home resources anyway. I'm sure the off-campus students at the submitter's school have cable/DSL, and their on-campus friends just come over to use it when they need to. It's cheap, no big deal.

Anyway, you're at University to prove you can achieve your goals. You jump through whatever hoops you need to, in order to get that piece of paper. Cynical, I know. :-)

Re:The good old days

[kalidasa]

The problem isn't the technology, it's the way it has been used. The expense of printing made it necessary for publishers to maintain some minimum level of quality (sometimes very minimum) if they expected to make enough sales to remain solvent. Nowadays, everyone can "publish" - so one needs to be very well trained to know how to perform research on the internet properly (which most teachers do not know how to do and so cannot teach their students how to do, which ultimately means they discourage it out of a certain level of ignorance).

Re:Sounds Like...

[jythie]

It does more to attract paying students, but not nessesarily 'good' students.

I would be very surprised if 'foodball stadium' listed high on the reasons for attending among the students who go on to do well in ways that reflect on the university.

Re:Sounds Like...

[rolfwind]

This is censorship. The college I go to blocks all the slashdot articles pertaining to games for some reason, even though there is a Video Games degree in this very school.

I often find that useful articles with algorithms or techniques get blocked this way.

One would think that the obnoxious handholding stops after highschool......

Re:Sounds Like...

[walt-sjc]

Having a good football program probably does more to attract good students to your campus then good parking, bandwith, and competent instuctors combined.

Actually, the "good football team" is all about alumni dollars and administration prestige and NOT about students.

Re:Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.

[RexRhino]

What is funny is that people still think universities are the last bastions of free-expression or critical thought. Universities are one of the most censorship prone, controlling, paternalistic, politically correct restrictive institutions around. Usually, censorship or other forms of social control are pioneered in universities, before they move out into the public at large.

Re:Complain, complain, complain!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

They might, if every single book in the world was available in the library, and they had no choice about it.

They don't put *everything* into the library - they choose what goes on the shelves. Would it be considered censorship because the university librarian decided not to stock the shelves with porn?

Re:It's only censorship if...

[geekoid]

" 1) the students are prevented from leaving campus to search for information ..."

Safety, weather, amd transportation are ways someone is prevented from leaving campus.

"2) you as a teacher are prevented from bringing in outside material for your classes. "

"I can't speak for every university, but the private university I attended never had a hard copy version of the Village Voice or other such material on campus (my college years were pre-internet). If I wanted such material, I had to go off-campus to get it. I knew where to find it, but I had to go off-campus."

so did I, but the world these students live in is a lot different then the one we lived in pre internet. You will be expected to use the internet effectivly in the work place.

This new medium is how research is done, and quite frankly, it can be a lot better way to get information then the olden days.

Keeping bandwidth at 256 is fine for research, but there is no reason to block news sites.

Re:Shrug

[AxelBoldt]

It's a private university. They can do what they want.

True and completely besides the point. The first question is "Should an institution dedicated to higher learning engage in censorship?" and the answer is "No"; the second question is "Do many institutions dedicated to higher learning engage in censorship?" and the answer is "No."

Re:Sounds Like...

[cyber-dragon.net]

When I was looking at schools I actually took this into consideration. A schools focus on sports VS academics was a major deciding factor actually. The more interest in and money spent on sports the less interested I was in that campus. It showed a distinct flaw in the thinking of the administration that I knew, even at 16, would perpetuate into the rest of the campus. Are MIT and CalTech known for football? Nope. Do they even have teams? Who knows and who cares. That is not why one goes to college. Either of those schools on your resume and no one will care if you went to a football game or not. Sports programs should be required to live and die on their own, with NO school funding coming out of my tuition I was working two jobs to pay.

Before you think this perspective is born out of being a "geek" who never played sports etc, I was on the varsity swim team starting freshman year and JV football team for two.

Re:Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.

[FreeIX]

At some universities, perhaps what you say is true. But it's certainly not the majority. I don't know about "bastion", but there is a LOT more free-expression and critical thought going on in universities than in most other places. Political correctness is another matter, and not really relevant to this discussion.

Re:Sounds Like...

[xappax]

Furthermore, many things that would be considered pornography are the subject of legitimate study in the arts, social sciences, and media studies. Hell, there are social psych courses that have involved the use of deliberately explicit pornography to produce "shock reactions". There's really very little you can get away with censoring at a university, because almost any information in the world is being researched about and analyzed by someone.

Re:Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.

[Flounder]

Political correctness is another matter, and not really relevant to this discussion.

Please explain how political correctness is NOT censorship??

Re:Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.

[RexRhino]

Political correctness IS relevant to the discussion. Political Correctness is a form of censorship. The premise of political censorship it that it is "good" censorship. That is is promoting "correct" ideals politically, and so it isn't bad like the other kinds of censorship. But the whole point of "Political Correctness" is to ban or supress "bad" ideas, and only let people express "good" ideas.

Re:Sounds Like...

[DJDilicious]

Censorship at work is completely different from censorship at a university. It is beneficial to disallow websites that would distract employees and therefore decrease productivity. However, censoring websites that a student requires for research severely diminishes that student's productivity.

This is not a matter of the difference between school and the so-called "real world". Universities are institutions of learning. If they give higher priority to an overly-protective sense of morality, they have failed to fulfill their basic purpose.