BY STEVEN LUBET It probably should have occurred to me sooner that my university filters outgoing email for various terms of service violations such as catfishing and pornography. Never could I have imagined, however, that a third-party vendor had been empowered to “quarantine” outgoing faculty email based on its content, without ever informing the sender.…
BY STEVEN LUBET Steven Lubet is Williams Memorial Professor and Director of the Bartlit Center for Trial Advocacy at Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law. A version of this post appeared at The Faculty Lounge on October 28. It was deeply objectionable when Zoom and other networking platforms blocked Leila Khaled’s webinars at San Francisco…
BY THE NYU-AAUP EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE 10/23/2020 Today, Zoom unilaterally shut down a webinar hosted by the NYU chapter of the AAUP, and co-sponsored by several NYU departments and institutes. The webinar was scheduled to discuss the censorship, by Zoom and other big tech platforms, of an open classroom session last month at SFSU, featuring the…
BY HANK REICHMAN If you weren’t familiar with Zoom before the COVID-19 pandemic, you must be now. Everyone is using it — for faculty and staff meetings, seminar talks and panels, political and union organizing, socializing with friends and family, holding remote weddings and Bar Mitzvahs, and, of course, teaching online classes. And, yes, we’re…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN Earlier this week John Wilson posted on this blog a piece about how “an event at San Francisco State University was banned by leading tech giants after a campaign to censor it.” If you have not read John’s post, please do so now; this is an incredibly important issue. As John…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Earlier today, an event at San Francisco State University was banned by leading tech giants after a campaign to censor it was led by a large number of pro-Israel groups. It is an example of the growing power of conservative cancel culture, and this censorship reveals the threat to academic freedom…
BY DAVID EIFLER AND MARGARET PHILLIPS When universities abruptly shut down in-person instruction in the spring, academic libraries followed suit. Librarians and other university front line workers applauded these decisions that prioritized the health and safety of staff during this unprecedented public health crisis. And libraries continued to fulfill many of their service missions in…
BY HANK REICHMAN Regular readers of this blog may recall that on March 14 I posted an entry entitled “Online Proctoring and Student Privacy Rights at UCSB.” That post reproduced a letter from the University of California at Santa Barbara Faculty Association (UCSBFA) to campus administrators raising concerns that ProctorU, an online test monitoring service…
BY AARON BARLOW When I told my students on Wednesday that we would indeed be moving all of our activities online for the rest of the semester, they groaned. I was a little surprised. I thought they would like the idea that they could finish their classes from home. I believed that they would imagine…