🚀 go-pugleaf

kadie@eff.org (Carl M. Kadie) writes:

>Banned Computer Material 1992

>Inspired by Banned Book Week '92, this is a list of computer material
>banned or challenged in academia in 1992. Iowa State University has
>the dubious distinction of being listed most often (three times).

Ummm, the word "dubious" would seem to suggest that the enforcement
of *any* local restriction against *any* action or speech in *any*
academic computing environment, world-wide, is in violation of some
"universal principle" that supercedes any locally-conceived ideas
about how the owners wish to dispose the assets they are paying for.

What a strange idea.

Are you suggesting that some Spanish Jesuit seminary (which just
happens to have a computer network) must conform in its decisions
with the minimum standards of behavior and speech found tolerable
*anywhere* else on the face of the planet? Is Southern California
that society which models such (doubtful) world standard? Who sez?

Are you under the misapprehension that the Germans are -- as a
society -- any more likely to adopt all our (read USA) standards
of behavior any more readily than adopting our (perhaps equally
indefinite) standards for building automobiles. Surely you jest.

There is a clear distinction between absolute academic freedom (as
an abstract notion) and absolute personal license (manifest in
actual and specific behaviors).

A limitation upon the latter does not, a priori, constitute an
assault upon the former. Defending the latter as an inseperable
*subset* of the former (if that is what this list implies) would
be a simple, specious nonsense.

I might also add that this looks remarkably like an "Enemies List",
which device typically sets academics to howling wildly at the
moon -- but perhaps only when aimed at their *own* several and
peculiar sensibilities.

'Hardly classical liberal thought, which did not assume the pillory
to be the solitary universal response appropriate for conflicting
values and judgements. Quite the contrary.

If such liberal ideals are the foundation of "academic freedom",
then what to conclude but that such freedom may have quietly died,
obscured from notice because the embalmed cadaver continues to be
loudly heralded from the parapets, its health to be roundly toasted
in the local watering holes, and its dry remains to be enthusias-
tically bounced up and down the street on a plush litter with great
rejoicing under a heavily armed honor guard.

Yet be quite thoroughly dead, for all that.
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