This is actually a very familiar theme to me, since UCB was almost exactly that during the WMD age of big physics in the 50-60s, and which of course led to a whole series of radicalizations for me. Well, like the idea that the university wasn't there to provide an education, but rather an indoctrination. That much of the faculty as well as the students didn't see this aspect, even if it was sitting there in plain daylight. That the university was not your friend and had no interests in common with me, at all. In fact we were enemies. And my job was to forcibly extract an appropriate education for myself and screw the university administrations demands for degree requirements. That cheating, fraud, lying, and most of all violence against such a state institution were not evidence of criminal or moral decrepitude but actually the opposite, some kind of strange moral high ground when compared to the vast killing machines, paid for and managed by complete moral voids called administrators where what these places really were about. I could go on and on. It was like I imagine vegetarians might feel when they discover they have been living on human brain tissue, sold to them by perfectly respectible `green' grocery stores as tofu.
Whoever is interested should follow the link to read the rest of the article. The most interesting material is on later pages, where Gould-Wartofsky unveils various research grants to develop all these measures further and polish their effectiveness.
Paul Rosenberg on openleft.com writes an astute take on these developments, characterizing them as aclimatizing academia to the garrision state, where it is just business as usual to install surveilliance cameras, monitor students off campus lives, data mine all their academic records, their employment, their social circles, etc. Rosenberg writes,``There are no civilians anymore. Just pre-enlistees and pre-detainees. Which are you?'' And the corollary, you're either a threat or an asset, which is it? See his blog here:
http://www.openleft.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=3443
Rosenberg also has a fine analysis of what's wrong with Obama. It comes down to his experience and understanding of what has been going in the US polity for the last forty years, and the relationship of this era to eariler periods. Pretty good stuff:
http://www.openleft.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=3458
I think the only point Rosenberg might have missed is that most of Obama's generation and younger are essentially too young to have ever experienced any different sort of US polity. In other words there are a lot people out there, possibly now a majority who have no memory of the fifties and sixities. Which in turn means they don't possess the intellectual tools necessary to see what's so very wrong about today's world. Reading about events and history, having developed a certain critical political view, calibrating one's own moral compass, knowing and interacting with lots of different kinds of people only go so far toward understanding and insight into society. Having a living memory and trying to keep a deep sort of continuity of mind together help a great deal more than these are given credit for.
CG
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The Nation Repress U, Michael Gould-Wartofsky
Free-speech zones. Taser guns. Hidden cameras. Data mining. A new security curriculum. Private security contractors. Welcome to the homeland security campus.
>From Harvard to UCLA, the ivory tower is fast becoming the latest
watchtower in Fortress America. The terror warriors, having turned
their attention to "violent radicalization and homegrown terrorism
prevention"--as it was recently dubbed in a House of Representatives
bill of the same name--have set out to reconquer that traditional
hotbed of radicalization, the university.
Building a homeland security campus and bringing the university to heel is a seven-step mission:
1. Target dissidents. As the warfare state has triggered dissent, the
campus has attracted increasing scrutiny--with student protesters
in the cross hairs. The government's number-one target? Peace and
justice organizations.
>From 2003 to 2007 an unknown number of them made it into the
Pentagon's Threat and Local Observation Notice system (TALON), a
secretive domestic spying program ostensibly designed to track direct
"potential terrorist threats" to the Defense Department itself. In
2006 the ACLU uncovered, via Freedom of Information Act requests, at
least 186 specific TALON reports on "anti-military protests" in the
United States--some listed as "credible threats"--from student groups
at the University of California, Santa Cruz; State University of New
York, Albany; Georgia State University; and New Mexico State
University, among other campuses.
At more than a dozen universities and colleges, police officers now double as full-time FBI agents, and according to the Campus Law Enforcement Journal, they serve on many of the nation's 100 Joint Terrorism Task Forces. These dual-purpose officer-agents have knocked on student activists' doors from North Carolina State to the University of Colorado and, in one case, interrogated an Iraqi-born professor at the University of Massachusetts about his antiwar views.
FBI agents, or their campus stand-ins, don't have to do all the work. Administrators often do it for them, setting up "free-speech zones," which actually constrain speech, and punishing those who step outside them. Protests were typically forced into "free-assembly areas" at the University of Central Florida and Clemson University, while students at Hampton and Pace universities faced expulsion for handing out antiwar fliers, aka "unauthorized materials."
2. Lock and load. Many campus police departments are morphing into
heavily armed garrisons, equipped with a wide array of weaponry,
from Taser stun guns and pepper guns to shotguns and semiautomatic
rifles. Lock-and-load policies that began in the 1990s under the
rubric of the "war on crime" only escalated with the President's
"war on terror." Each school shooting--most recently the massacre
at Virginia Tech--adds fuel to the armament flames.
Two-thirds of universities arm their police, according to the Justice Department. Many of the guns being purchased were previously in the province of military units and SWAT teams: for instance, AR-15 rifles (similar to M-16s) are in the arsenals of the University of Texas campus police. Last April City University of New York bought dozens of semiautomatic handguns. Some states, like Nevada, are even considering plans to allow university staff to pack heat in a "special reserve officer corps."
Most of the force used on campuses these days, though, comes in less lethal form, such as the rubber bullets and pepper pellets increasingly used to contain student demonstrations. Then there is the ubiquitous Taser, the electroshock weapon recently ruled a "form of torture" by the United Nations. A Taser was used by UCLA police in November 2006 to deliver shock after shock to an Iranian-American student for failing to produce his ID at the Powell Library. A University of Florida student was Tased last September after asking pointed questions of Senator John Kerry at a public forum, his plea "Don't Tase me, bro!" becoming the stuff of pop folklore....
From:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080128/gould-wartofsky