[Higher Education] US Education Funding Bill Contains Crappy Copyright Clause

Found at Slashdot, but the main points are covered best at EFF:

Last November, we reported on H.R. 4137, the College Opportunity and Affordability Act of 2007, which includes misguided anti-piracy requirements for universities. For the most part, the massive, nearly 800-page bill refreshes existing legislation about federal financial aid. But the bill also includes a section with a title that sounds as if it were dreamt up by an entertainment industry lobbyist: "Campus-based Digital Theft Prevention." Specifically, the bill says:

Each eligible institution participating in any program under this title shall to the extent practicable—

[...]

(2) develop a plan for offering alternatives to illegal downloading or peer-to-peer distribution of intellectual property as well as a plan to explore technology-based deterrents to prevent such illegal activity.
To those unfamiliar with this particular sort of DC double-speak, "alternatives to illegal downloading" means industry-sanctioned download services; and existing "technology-based deterrents" means network filters and other tools.

These congressional requirements will turn out to be expensive dead-ends -- the industry-sanctioned online music services are laden with DRM, and network detection/filtering programs present privacy risks and are inevitably rendered obsolete by technological countermeasures.

Advocates of the bill stress that the language stops short of demanding implementation -- that it only requires universities to "plan" -- but this argument misses the point entirely. The passage of this bill will unambiguously lead universities down the wrong path. For the sake of artists, administrators, students, and consumers better approaches exist.

The bill also would hang an unspoken threat over the heads of university administrators. In response to concerns that potential penalties for universities could include a loss of federal student aid funding, the MPAA's top lawyer in Washington said that federal funds should be at risk when copyright infringement happens on campus networks. Moreover, earlier versions of "Campus-based Digital Theft Prevention" proposals nakedly sought to make schools that received numerous copyright infringement notices subject to review by the US Secretary of Education.

This is bad.

The cynic in me thinks that passage of this (and the subsequent trend of universities coming down hard on 'piracy') would actually get students to pay attention and collectively raise their voice in protest.

...

Nah, never mind. There might be a few, but students who enter college under such conditions would just accept it as the status quo.

One last note, from a link found at the EFF story:

"When the government is subsidizing universities...and it discovers that those universities are spending a lot of taxpayers' money to build digital networks that are being used primarily to allow college students to traffic in infringing content, I think it's perfectly legitimate for Congress to say, wait a minute, if we're giving you money, we don't want it to be used to help college kids infringe copyright," [MPAA Washington General Counsel Fritz] Attaway said during a panel discussion here Monday that was organized by the Federal Communications Bar Association.

I'm going to treat his statement with a seriousness it really doesn't deserve and suggest that he gets it wrong when he says university networks are "primarily" for illegal file-sharing. Remove that clause, and you're left with policing departmental email for folks who want to sell used toasters.

Affirmative Action For White People!

Via lots of places, this Boston Globe story on some rather interesting characteristics of incoming or first-year college students. (I try to avoid using the term "freshmen" since I think saying "men" and meaning "people" is stupid and sexist.)

From the story:

Surf the websites of such institutions and you will find press releases boasting that they have increased their black and Hispanic enrollments, admitted bumper crops of National Merit scholars or became the destination of choice for hordes of high school valedictorians...

What they almost never say is that many of the applicants who were rejected were far more qualified than those accepted. Moreover, contrary to popular belief, it was not the black and Hispanic beneficiaries of affirmative action, but the rich white kids with cash and connections who elbowed most of the worthier applicants aside.

Researchers with access to closely guarded college admissions data have found that, on the whole, about 15 percent of freshmen enrolled at America's highly selective colleges are white teens who failed to meet their institutions' minimum admissions standards.

Oops.

The story is full of interesting information about the college admissions process. For example:

Except perhaps at the very summit of the applicant pile - that lofty place occupied by young people too brilliant for anyone in their right mind to turn down - colleges routinely favor those who have connections over those who don't. While some applicants gain admission by legitimately beating out their peers, many others get into exclusive colleges the same way people get into trendy night clubs, by knowing the management or flashing cash at the person manning the velvet rope.

Historically, that meant white people (and often white men), since conscious and overt racism kept people of color out of college for a long time. Now, since white people have the advantage of legacy and historical presence, connections-based admittance means that more white folks get admitted in this fashion. This is one more example of how racism that happened in the past can still effect the world today.

Another great point:

Just 40 percent of the financial aid money being distributed by public colleges is going to students with documented financial need. Most such money is being used to offer merit-based scholarships or tuition discounts to potential recruits who can enhance a college's reputation, or appear likely to cover the rest of their tuition tab and to donate down the road.

An old friend of mine, once the student body president at her university, told me she thinks that merit-based aid needs to be completely abolished and replaced solely with need-based aid. I suspect this is one reason why. (The larger argument is simply that folks who can get to college on merit are more likely to have the means to pay for it themselves; those who qualify for both merit- and need-based aid can still qualify for need-based aid, and would not require the merit-based stuff.)

I hope this goes a long way towards pointing out the reason that affirmative action is still necessary.

Other folks are talking about this too: Jack and Jill Politics, TAPPED, and Atrios.

One More Difference Between the "Left" and the "Right"

From a book review by Robert Farley over at LGM (the book is God's Harvard):

Patrick Henry was established explicitly to counter what its founder believed was leftist bias in the mainstream university community. Patrick Henry isn't so much a college for evangelicals as it is a college for extremely conservative evangelicals directly interested in working for the Republican party. As such, it's founded on a profound misconception about the left and the mainstream American university. While it's true that a large majority of faculty (especially in the liberal arts) are on the left politically, and also true that there is, as Michael Berube argues, something specifically liberal about the liberal arts, there is in my experience simply no counter-part to the Republican political machine that exists at Patrick Henry. Anyone who has spent five minutes on college campus should realize that, whatever may be going on, political action in service of the Democratic Party isn't it. For a time at the University of Oregon, one of the most leftist campuses in the country, there was no Democratic Party organization on campus at all. The Democrats had disintegrated as a result of vicious infighting between various of their elements, for reasons so arcane that the terms "moderate" and "radical" don't supply an accurate description. Even if, as David Horowitz would have it, lefty college professors were trying to recruit soldiers for the coming revolution, that project does not manifest itself in terms of institutional support for the Democratic Party. Patrick Henry, conversely, is directly tied in to conservative think tanks, NGOs, and Republican elected officials.

Those last few sentences are pretty key, I think. As "liberal" as universities are (and I would dispute that claim, even), I think Farley is right in noting that how it plays out is specifically not institutional support for a political party that's almost as beholden to big money as the Republican Party. I wonder why.

I also consider it evidence for my hypothesis that young, bright, motivated folks with views that are at all to the "left" don't, as a generalization, seek out the Democratic Party as their measure of success. They seek out nonprofits, NGOs, and other social and social justice work, often for the aforementioned reason (but certainly there are others).

Conservatives, on the other hand, tend to view the Republican Party as an ultimate goal. I think this actually has explanatory power when it comes to explaining why the Democratic Party is full of idiots is being outmaneuvered on both politics and policy in the last decade or so.

Who's the Enemy, Again?

Via Slashdot, I came across this Boston Globe story: FBI warns colleges of terror threat.

The story goes on to explain how some FBI officials are worried that "terrorists" are going to try and use universities as a way to gather information or intelligence, or possibly conduct espionage.

Personally, I'm not seeing the threat here, for two reasons.

First, I don't really trust the FBI's warnings anymore, especially those directed at universities. There's too much of a history of mistakenly (to put it charitably) viewing universities and university students/staff/faculty as 'dangerous' (read: not conservative or authoritarian enough) for some reason, and this whole "the terrorists are coming" crap sounds like a cover to combat the 'real' threat - the (relatively) open spread of information.

Second, I'm not sure that this would even be much of a problem if it were true. In the first place, existing security procedures, if rational, should take care of 99% or more of the problem. Second, I have to admit I'm in favor of some publicity when it comes to the amount of research done on university campuses in the name of 'national security' or 'national defense.' At least at the college I attended, I know that the U.S. Department of Defense dumps millions of dollars into the school for research. A friend of mine once said the only project he could work on without using DoD dollars was one in which he figured out how to more effectively crush bones. The entire rest of the research in his department (which was an engineering department, by the way), he said, was funded by DoD.

So if there was some shadowy group of folks angling to pierce the veil of secrecy that's been laid over lots and lots of university work, I wouldn't necessarily be opposed to it, depending on the context. I'm pretty sure most college students don't know how much research is done at their schools on subjects they really want nothing to do with.