Giving new meaning to the time-honored tradition of “leaking” on the John Harvard statue
If Facebook launched a new era of over-sharing on college campuses, UniLeaks, a leak site aimed at institutions of higher learning, brings it all full circle. And it already has an “overwhelming” amount of correspondence from Britain-based students and academics, including an “entire e-mail repository” of a “large prominent university in the United Kingdom,” a database that seems to be limited to senior management at the institution. Schools in the U.S., says the site’s administrator, could well be next. Reports the Chronicle:
The Australian activists who run UniLeaks are pushing for openness in the face of what they see as the corporatization of higher education. They complain of unprofitable courses abolished, employees made less secure, and students reduced “to mere customers or clients of the university.”
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“Universities are unique in that they generally receive quite a deal of public funding,” says the administrator, a former student at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. “We feel that the general public has a right to have universities act very transparently, in a way that is accountable.”…
There are existing places to spread anonymous online gossip about universities—places like CollegeACB, a site similar to the now-defunct Juicy Campus. UniLeaks professes to be different. It filters content, rather than allowing users to post directly. It accepts only material that is in the public interest, says the administrator. “We don’t accept rumor,” says the administrator.
But the rumors are pouring in anyway.
It’s been “fascinating” to wade through the tips that have arrived about low-level personal issues in various university departments, says the administrator. (Sample reaction: “I can’t believe he’s having sex with both of them. Wow!”) But the administrator deletes them: “Just because Professor What’s-His-Name is having sex, that’s not something we can actually put all over the Web site.”
As tantalizing as that is – isn’t that what Facebook is for? – it will be more fascinating to see just what kind of data they do manage to pull up in the public interest. The Wikileaks idea clearly has legs – or at least unstoppable momentum – and if not significant hurdles, it’s got plenty of enemies. But how will institutions that triumph openness and transparency and democracy respond to the implementations of those ideals when those implementations are not in their self interest?
Actually, I think we’re learning the answer to that one right now.
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