Mark Spitzer

Associate Writing Professor

Holy NSA, Batman, UCA is Big Brothering our emails. Never mind that GroupWise is a technologically lousy system that faculty and students can’t even count on as a reliable tool, but now we have to deal with some disturbing issues of academic freedom. 

Here’s what I’m talking about: There are people who’ve tried to contact professors (including me) through their UCA email addresses, but the Novell force field refused to let them through because they wrote from a Yahoo account. So I asked IT what’s up with that. They told me they can’t handle the spam, which is why certain servers get filtered out. “Sorry,” was their basic message, “there’s nothing we can do.”

Add to this the fact that GroupWise blocks important correspondence without our consent. I recently tried to communicate with colleagues through my UCA email regarding a local environmental concern, but their responses got bounced back due to a certain word in the text. It isn’t a word that anyone should fear, and it isn’t a word that automatically signals porn; it’s a common word in the English language that educators employ in the language arts where linguistic syntax is studied and applied. For the university to shut down a professional dialogue is indeed a form of censorship that infringes on our First Amendment Rights.

Hence, it’s a scurvy day for UCA, who is in effect reading our emails and making moral judgments about what we should receive. And it’s not enough to blame the Novell system. As members of the UCA community and citizens of the United States, we should demand a system that supports freedom of speech and allows us, as individuals, to choose what we screen. Otherwise, we deserve what we’re settling for.