campusomniscience

One thing that I think will come of the massacre at Virginia Tech is probably increased surveillance of students, under the guise of “security” for our “children.”This ignores the fact that anyone over 18 technically isn’t a “child,” and that we tend to infantilize college students, even though others their age are on the front lines in Falluja or Baghdad, or out working. This, of course, will be in addition to the already excessive pseudo-parental oversight that most schools exercise, and which most students seem more or less content with. I’ve noticed that students of mine who grew up in the aftermath of 9-11 are largely content with trading off freedom or privacy for “security.” I know this not only by their actions, but by virtue of the fact that we’ve discussed it in class on occasion. Many of them have come right out and told me that their liberties don’t matter as much as their security. This is chilling not only for the immediate aspects of it, but also for the future of the US. If nothing else, it appears that the Bush administration has been successful in rearing a generation in the shadow of its ever-present war on terror, with its ever-present and elusive enemies.

As someone who has always been suspicious of authority and who has also always valued his privacy, I find the kinds of surveillance popular on college campuses now somewhat worrying, and the passive acceptance of it more than a little bit troubling. A colleague of mine told me that he’d visited a liberal arts college in the Northeast which requires their students to buy a particular kind of cellphone when they arrive on campus; with this cellphone, the students can then be tracked across the campus itself. The colleague even claims to have seen a map at the school’s security center, which geo-located the students via the phones. Similarly, the school I work at keeps track of card-key entries into buildings, so they can tell where a student last keyed in. This same system also notifies security when someone hasn’t keyed into their dorm in a certain number of days, after which time, security will begin investigating.

On top of this, I recently read that schools are instituting a program whereby they are tracking student use of exercise equipment to prevent “exercise addiction.” Now, not only does the school know when you eat, where you are, how many times you’ve keyed into various buildings, and what books you’ve checked out, they also know how long you’ve been on the treadmill for. If you’ve been on too much or too long, they’ll marshal the counselors to your cause to make sure you’re not overdoing it and jeopardizing your health.

All in all, I appreciate that administrators fear the worst, and want to protect their customersstudents. At the same time, though, there’s a lot to be said for growing up, taking responsibility for yourself and your actions, and living independently, not as a ward of some campus surveillance state. I suspect, though, that we’ll see even more surveillance, and an increasing preoccupation with “normalcy” in the months after this tragedy. I at least hope that students are awake enough to recognize that it is their own liberty and privacy at stake.