An Inch and a Mile

One of the things that I worry will be the result of today's Virginia Tech shootings (besides copy-cat shootings at other schools) will be a new round of freaked-out parents and legislators proposing new security precautions at schools--in the case universities. The Columbine shooting 8 years ago transformed many schools into virtual prisons; I don't want to see the same thing happen to colleges and universities.

One reason is because new security steps would diminish the openness of colleges--which is one of their greatest strengths. Setting up security checkpoints around a campus would create an obstacle that should not exist between the public and the resources of higher education. Secondly, new precautions would be ineffective. Most college campuses are large, sprawling places with multiple points of entry. Building fences and gates would be costly and probably wouldn't work anyway, since the perpetrators of these crimes are often students themselves--people who are already on campus. Third, such precautions would be unnecessary. There may be a few copy-cat shootings in the next few months, but shootings such as today's shooting are so rare, so extraordinary, that any sort of precaution taken by any school would be an over-reaction.

In this case, no new policies of any sort would be the best policy to adopt.

Big Machine

It's that time of the semester: when my classes are working on their research papers. Since so many students rely so heavily on the internet for research, I always spend at least a day giving them tips on how to find quality websites rather than letting them rely on Google or Wikipedia. One exercise that I have found useful is to give them a list of URLs and ask them to visit those websites and determine whether they would be useful sites for a college-level research paper--a sort of internet scavenger hunt. This semester, I have added a couple of new sites to my list of websites. One of them is Ray Beckerman's blog. Beckerman is the attorney defending a number of clients against the RIAA in some high profile cases. On the one hand, Beckerman's blog is just that--a blog, and blogging inhabits a sort of uncertain space between legitimacy and illegitimacy with respect to blogs' usefulness for college level research. On the other hand, Beckerman is as familiar with the legal issues surrounding the digital music as anyone else, so he is clearly an expert.

Anyway, I posted a link to his blog in my course wiki last week and asked my students to visit it. On Monday, I was surprised to receive a short email from the man himself--Mr. Beckerman--letting me know that he noticed I had linked to him and asking me to let him know how my class goes tonight. I'll send him an email tomorrow morning.

It's pretty cool hearing from "famous" people like that. I've had a couple such contacts in the past. I guess it's another example of how much easier it is to get in touch with people online--people that one wouldn't ordinarily have any contact with otherwise.

Same Time, Same Place

Since the traffic to this blog has suddenly picked up in the last few weeks, I've installed StatCounter to help me find out just exactly how many people are visiting and where they are coming from. All are welcome, of course (except perhaps for a few certain individuals from Minneapolis--you know who you are!).

Say Anything

The captured British soldiers were released from Iranian custody today. One of the big stories surrounding their capture has been their videotaped "confessions" in which they supposedly admitted that they had violated Iranian borders. Obviously, such confessions were a result of threats, whether implicit or explicit, from their Iranian captors. Even if they were never harmed physically, just the threat that they might placed on trial and face punishment according to Iranian law might well have been enough to compel them to cooperate in producing what were essentially propaganda videos.

This incident, though, raises interesting questions that we as Americans ought to be asking about the supposed "confessions" that have recently been made by al Qaeda prisoners currently held in Guantanamo Bay. Those prisoners have faced threats of harsh punishments, humiliating situations, and probably even torture. If we are so willing to excuse the "confessions" of the British soldiers, then how can we possibly accept any similar confession made by a prisoner of the US military?