On August 29, 2003, an open forum dealing with recent changes in the Academic Computer Use Policies was held in Bob's Underground. The forum featured four speakers: President Russell K. Osgood; Jim Swartz, Vice-President for Academic Affairs and Dean of the College; Bill Francis, Director of Information Technology Services; and me. I am indebted to Sechyi Laiu 2004 for organizing and staging this event.
Here is the prepared text on which I based my remarks.
Over the summer -- specifically, on July 21 -- the Director of ITS added two new sections to the Academic Computer Use Policies. I am concerned about the effects of the changes. I'm here to persuade you that you should be concerned, too.
The new sections constrain the formation of autonomous student groups that happen to communicate mainly by means of computers. They flatly prohibit the formation of such groups if they include alumni, students at other colleges and universities, local townspeople, or indeed anyone other than current Grinnell College students, faculty, staff, and trustees. They threaten the College's traditional commitment to student self-governance, shutting down the first major experiment in building a student-run on-line community and blocking future attempts.
My view is that it is imprudent, and reflects badly on the College, for ITS to regulate the membership of student organizations or to constrain their activities as the Academic Computer Use Policies currently do. In my opinion, the new sections are ill-considered, and I urge you students to work through the Student Academic Computing Committees to get them rescinded.
The new sections of the Academic Computer Use Policies impose the following constraints on students who wish to set up a student-run ``virtual community'':
The authors of the software that supports the community must review and follow the Association for Computing Machinery's ``Software engineering code of ethics and professional practice.''
The authors must ``ensure compliance with College policies regarding accepted student community standards'' and with the core values of Grinnell College, as stated in the catalog; specifically, they must ensure that their software encourages personal, egalitarian, and respectful interactions among members of the community.
They, or more likely the maintainers of the community, must publish clear and complete guidelines ``detailing acceptable behavior & membership policies'' for the community.
If they propose to penalize a member of the community for violating their guidelines, they must ensure due process for that member before applying the sanctions.
They must give appropriate Grinnell College staff members full administrative access to the software and and to the messages exchanged by members of the community.
They must ensure that the messages exchanged by members of the community are logged at least once a day, in case a College hearing board needs them as evidence of some violation of the guidelines.
The messages exchanged by members of the community may not be published to non-members, nor may they be accessible to Internet search engines.
As I mentioned, members of the community must be current students, faculty, staff, or trustees.
If even one faculty member is allowed to be a member of the community, then no faculty member may be excluded ``on an a priori basis''; similarly, if even one staff member is admitted, then no staff member may be excluded, and if even one trustee is admitted, then no trustee may be excluded.
Note the implication of conditions (5), (7), and (9): Since at least one Grinnell staff member must be given access to the messages exchanged by members of the community, and since these messages may not be published to non-members, at least one Grinnell College staff member must belong to every student-run on-line community. Hence no Grinnell College staff member may be excluded from any student-run on-line community.
These new sections clearly constrain student organizations that communicate through computer networks in many ways that do not apply to other student organizations. Under these constraints, it is not really plausible to say that they are autonomous: They don't control their own records or publications, they don't control their own membership, and since ITS staff members must be given ``full access,'' the student organizations don't even control the software that they themselves have created. The difference, presumably, is that students using computer networks somehow threaten the core values of the Colleg ein a way that students meeting face-to-face do not.
I don't see the connection between these constraints and the use of computer networks. On-line communities are simply communities. It makes sense to say that they must observe the rules in the Student Handbook that apply to student groups, and also that they must use computing resources in ways that are consistent with the educational goals of the College (as the existing section III.B.1 of the Academic Computer Use Policies requires in any case). But it does not make sense to abridge students' freedom of association and their freedom of speech just because the technological infrastructure on which they choose to build their communities includes computer networks.
So I don't agree with the objective of the new sections of the Academic Computer Use Policies: I believe that students should be encouraged to experiment with on-line communities, and in fact I see this as part of the educational mission of the College -- a part that I, as a computer scientist, am particularly concerned to advance. I feel strongly about these constraints because I see them not only as unjust interference with the freedom of students but also as impediments to their education.
If asked to justify the new sections, I imagine that the administrators here tonight would emphasize that their mission, their charge from the trustees, includes the establishment of a campus computing environment in which users treat one another fairly and respectfully. This is a worthwhile goal, and one to which students are, in my opinion, willing to contribute. I suggest, however, that the new constraints on the formation and development of on-line communities will only make it more difficult to achieve this goal.
First, the new language seems to transfer the responsibility for ensuring fairness and mutual respect from the members of the community themselves to the author of the software, who is told that he ``must ensure compliance'' with the College's core values. In my opinion, the obligation to be fair and respectful should continue to be imposed on the users of the software, not on its author.
Secondly, it is surely not obvious that the way to induce people to treat one another fairly and respectfully is to lay down guidelines for fairness and respectfulness and sanction persons who don't conform to them.
Thirdly, I think that the goal is just as likely to be achieved in a community that students administer for themselves as in one that is overseen by administrators. The record of the Plans community, as it existed before July 21, is actually a pretty good one. There were occasional, though rare, complaints about users who failed to treat one another respectfully -- who used Plans to abuse and harass other people. Early on, the Plans maintainer, sometimes in cooperation with the Office of Student Affairs, dealt with such failures in ad hoc ways that wereadapted to the circumstances of each case.
Although this procedure may seem disorderly, and although not everyone was equally pleased with the outcome, I think it's important to observe that no one ever brought a case against the maintainer of Plans to the Computer/Telephone Hearing Board, even when there were apparent violations of section III.B.3 of the old Academic Computer Use Policies (``Computing resources may not be used to intimidate, threaten or harass individuals''). I speculate that the Computer/Telephone Hearing Board would have found that the maintainer of Plans was taking appropriate action in every such case.
Even so, however, you may think that these early experiences with Plans show that some explicit and uniform guidelines are necessary. The maintainer of Plans, for instance, eventually agreed to formulate and display on the entry page a reminder to users of their responsibilities under the Academic Computer Use Policies, urging them not to abuse and harass one another.
It's still not clear to me how most of the particular constraints that are imposed in the new Academic Computer Use Policies would help. The rule that ``the content of any student or student group virtual community must not be viewable by non-members of that community,'' for instance, seems to me more likely to have the opposite effect, by making incivil speech less visible, more the ``property'' of the members of the community. Presumably, this constraint was added because some users, in some communities, expect the deliberations of the community to be private, and feel that their right to privacy has been violated if their contributions are made public; but surely this is an expectation that varies from one community to another. I find it obvious that each community should be allowed to decide this question for itself, instead of being subjected to a uniformly restrictive rule.
Finally, even if it were necessary to impose new constraints on the formation of autonomous student on-line communities, and even if those constraints were likely to achieve the desired goal of a more civil and respectful environment for users, ITS is not the right office to impose and administer these constraints. Unlike the Office of Student Affairs, ITS has no training or expertise in legislating for student communities, and there is no reason to expect that the laws it has produced are good ones, nor that ITS will enforce them fairly.
Indeed, the very first action it took under the new Academic Computer Use Policies was to shut down Plans, giving the Plans maintainer less than six hours to close up shop and get off the system. This act itself was profoundly unfair and disrespectful both to the maintainer of Plans and to the fifteen hundred Plans users. The order to shut down Plans was exactly simultaneous with the promulgation of the new Academic Computer Use Policies that supposedly provided the basis for it; indeed, the revised ACUP didn't even appear on the College's Web site until several hours after the order to shut down was given. The Instructional Support Committee of the faculty, which is supposed to ``assist in the development and review of policies regarding the use of computer software and hardware'' on campus, was not consulted. The Director of ITS explicitly takes the position that he can unilaterally revise the Academic Computer Use Policies and that conditions thus imposed are effective immediately.
The brutal and abrupt dismissal of Plans contrasts strangely with one of the requirements now imposed on Grinnell software authors -- that ``due process must be ensured before any sanctions of members are carried out.'' These circumstances make it evident that the new sections of the Academic Computer Use Policies were specifically targeted at Plans. Little thought was given to their effect on other on-line communities or on the College's educational mission -- the whole point was to get Plans out of the way and to prevent any similar student-run, student-maintained on-line community from arising on campus, ever again.
This expulsion is especially ironic in light of the fact that Rachel Heck developed the current version of Plans to meet a widely felt need that ITS itself created. When the academic VAX cluster was replaced by the Windows servers in 1999 and 2000, students complained loudly about the disappearance of the FINGER program that was the model and ancestor of Plans and pleaded with ITS to come up with a replacement. But at that time ITS had no interest in supporting an on-line community.
The Plans shutdown shows conclusively that ITS does not have the authority, and should not be given the power, to determine who can belong to an student on-line community, whether they can publish their communications, what records they must keep, or how they enforce compliance with community standards. What student communities need from ITS is reliable Internet services, not laws.
created August 30, 2003
last revised August 30, 2003