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Putting the loco in parentis - June 6, 2007

Fred von Lohmann of EFF has an interesting op-ed in today’s Washington Post calling for an end to the record industry’s efforts to force colleges and universities to aggressively police illegal downloading by students.

The piece criticizes two House subcommittees for a letter sent recently to the presidents of 19 major universities, including Columbia, Vanderbilt, Duke, Howard and UCLA, scolding them for not expelling more students for illegally swapping movies and music.

“Artists deserve to be fairly compensated, but are we really prepared to sue and expel every college student whom has made an illegal copy?” von Lohmann asks. “Our universities have far better things to spend money on than bullying students.”

Whether Fred’s proposed solution would actually work—a blanket license for unlimited downloading in exchange for a fee tacked on to existing student admissions fees—I don’t really know, though I don’t know that I have any better ideas either.

But there’s another question that von Lohmann doesn’t ask (although I know he’s thought about it because I’ve discussed it with him) that ought to be: why are any universities expelling students over what is essentially a commercial dispute?

I arrived at Columbia as an undergrad 10 years after the famous student protests there during the height of the Vietnam War that included a takeover of the campus administration building and the temporary confinement of the dean of students in his office.

Mark Rudd and the Students for a Democratic Society were long gone by the time I got to campus, but the scars from those days, both physical and psychic, were still visible, from the fading slogans still spray painted on the walls to the decline in applications for admission (and thank God for that or I never would have gotten in).

Yet as David Weigel noted in this 2004 article surveying the history of in loco parentis at American colleges and universities (basically the idea that colleges can and should act “in the place of the parent” in regulating student behavior) the university was initially reluctant to call in the police to break up the demonstrations (it later did, with unfortunate results).

The mayor of New York City at the time, John Lindsay, even showed up on campus to address the students, and praise the “authentically revolutionary work of this generation.”

Ultimately, all of the students involved were allowed to graduate, despite several having compiled police records. None were expelled.

Students in 1968, of course, did not have the technological means to download music from the Internet, so we can’t know for certain how Columbia officials would have responded to demands for mass expulsions. But it seems unlikely that they would have been hectored by Congress in any case.

Clearly, attitudes have changed regarding universities’ obligation to police private student behavior. And from the point of view of their primary educational mission, in my judgment, not for the better.

Weigel traces the gradual rise of the “nanny university” to several factors, including the increase in the legal drinking age from 18 to 21 (forcing colleges to ban drinking on campus), creeping political correctness (which justified regulating speech) and the country’s general conservative turn.

But at least in the case of the drinking age there was a criminal statute at issue.

The downloading controversy is essentially a private commercial dispute, to which the university is not a part and which is irrelevant to its mission.

Let me say at this point that I am not without sympathy for the record companies, and especially the artists, who deserve the fruits of their labor.

But the commercial interests of the labels and artists are not the only interests at stake here. Society, and especially universities, have an equally compelling interest in the education of students.

Any solution to the problem of free file-trading on network campuses—particularly any one that Congress might get involved in—needs to take account of that larger context.

A company’s job is to pursue profit. A university’s job is education.

Forcing (or allowing) one to act in the interests of the other isn’t a matter of in loco parentis, it’s just plain loco.

Ok. Off the soapbox. Now back to our regular programming...

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