Thank god the administration has at least the sense to see problems with online surveillance technology. It’s astonishing that such tech is even being considered on our campus: is the Virus and Cheating such a threat to the integrity of society that we need to monitor our students’ eye movements? What’s next, facial recognition technology? Or are we already down with that too? Just as having a cop walk the beat is a far cry from having server farms process millions of points of facial data, so too is Proctorio a far cry from a prof and a TA walking the aisles of a lecture hall looking for crib sheets on the brims of baseball caps. I can’t help but feel a profound sense of déjà vu—as an American who watched the US pass the Patriot Act after 9-11, which “normalized” levels of surveillance and intrusion into American lives that were unthinkable on September 10, I can’t help but feel that the apparent “urgency” of our current moment leads us to adopt this kind of surveillance practice with barely any debate or even the slightest flutter of doubt. The crisis here is one of health, and we are permitting it to make us go nuts in the university. (As an aside: at this point, really, who cares if our students cheat? I worry for the honest amongst our students, but they will do well no matter what.) I can only imagine what will be coming in the months ahead. What will the Covid-19 pandemic be used to justify in the university, in higher education more broadly? Already some uni administrations are using the speed with which faculty have adapted to online teaching as a demonstration that it could be used more broadly. (Look what we did in 10 days! This ends the debate! Online is the way to go!) What will the financial urgencies of the coming months lead to? Will we accept all of that as easily as we seem to want to accept something like Proctorio? The name alone—it reminds me not only of proctors of exams, but also of intrusive physical examinations into our nether regions that are, of course, good for us. “You will feel some discomfort, but really, in the end, it is for your own good." Please. Don’t let a health emergency make us go crazy in realms that have nothing to do with protecting our health. God, I wish Foucault were here to say something about all this. One can only imagine what he’d have to say. Chris
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