Sunday, December 12, 2010

Video Surveillance on Campus

Only recently we heard the news that a couple of administrators who descended upon our campus straight out of some corporate hell-hole are planning to introduce a dress code for professors at our university. Now we are being told that these new policies are not to stop there. These corporate idiots now are planning to institute a policy that (and I quote) "video surveillance may be used if done correctly." As you can see, the language here is appropriately vague. "May be used" by whom? For what purposes? What does "done correctly" mean in this context? Who will judge the correctness?

I once saw a documentary about companies in Japan that force their employees to wear headbands with video cameras. This allows the management to track whether the employee spends too much time in the bathroom or at the water cooler, what the employee does every single second of their time, etc. I'm surprised that our university decided to go the antiquated way of video cameras installed in classrooms instead of proceeding directly to hand out such headbands to its teaching faculty.

The college administrators who come to us from the corporate world are usually the most stupid, brainless, intellectually castrated idiots you can possibly imagine. They know nothing but the cannibalistic practices of the companies where they worked and they proceed to institute those inane practices on college campuses with anencephalic earnestness. In this, they get wholehearted support from the spousal hire administrators who hate academics for snubbing them and would do anything to make the lives of the teaching faculty miserable.

The saddest thing, though, isn't the advent of stupid corporate robots and vapid spouses on campuses. It's the ease with which we, the academics, have given our world away to these viciously brainless individuals to do whatever thay want to with it.

7 comments:

Lindsay said...

Oh no!

I'm really sorry to see that --- it *is* an assault on y'all's academic freedom.

:(

Pagan Topologist said...

Well, you know that universities have way too much cash on hand (a phenomenon called hyperpecuniation) so they have to find something constructive to do with it.

Pagan Topologist said...

I hope the bitter sarcasm of my last post here came through.

Tom Carter said...

I hadn't heard about the headband video cameras in Japan. I wonder if they get to take them off when they go to the bathroom? Or maybe they just have to be careful where they look when they're doing their business....

Anonymous said...

"The saddest thing, though, isn't the advent of stupid corporate robots and vapid spouses on campuses. It's the ease with which we, the academics, have given our world away to these viciously brainless individuals to do whatever thay want to with it."

This is unfortunately true. We teach our students to think and to hone their critical skills, but we are unable to apply our own teachings.

Ol.

eric said...

Unionize!

Pagan Topologist said...

Unionizing does help, no doubt about it. My faculty has been union (AAUP) since 1972. But, a union is only as strong as its members.