Inside Higher Ed :: Lèse-Majesté

Columbia College Chicago, my employer, finds itself in the news again. A satirical website called "Wacky Warrick" that pokes fun at the College president may have been "popular with students" but as a faculty, I had never bothered to look at it. No student nor other faculty had bothered to discuss it that I know of. Yet the administration with its keen sense of Public Relations (that is a an ironic remark which you might not "get" in an email if I didn't tell you) apparently organized a clandestine raid on the Science Institute computer lab to track down one of the website creators.Inside Higher Ed :: Lèse-Majesté Here is Wacky Warrick itself which ironically, I never bothered to check out until action by the administration itself drew attention to the site. Student satire transformed to national news -- by the site creators? No, by administrators whose sense of how to deal with the public may leave something lacking. I did not exhaustively study the site, but the parts I watched were pretty sophomoric. Why bother to bring this site to the attention of the world through clandestine and secret spy-like moves escapes me. But then I am in the Journalism department, not the P.R. department. It brings to mind an incident from the past. When Columbia College was just getting connected to the internet back in the early 1990s, I worked in Academic Computing. At Columbia, Academic Computing was not really an academic computing center, it was the Computer Science or in our case, Computer Art dept. While most colleges have separate IT and academic computing, Columbia has never really gotten this straight. We had a server that was the only one on campus not controlled by the IT folks. One day we were hacked by "warez" -- but so was DePaul and the University of Heidlberg. The IEEE and software associations say when you are hacked like this (our servers had been loaded with illegal software for downloads by pirates) the thing to do is immediately delete all the contraband, make sure you secure the system, and go on with your daily life. At Columbia the person in charge of this was an art professor who liked the internet. He got our head of security and they literally came to "arrest" the server. Yes, a person armed with a gun and accompanied by a team including a strong-arm guy, arrived and proceeded to actually take the SERVER into custody on a wheeled cart. Then they made an attempt to report themselves to the software piracy association. Finally they realized that what those of us who considered IT a profession and who had studied it or understood that it had codes of ethics were telling them -- just delete and secure the server-- was the right thing to do. We got our server back, but we laughed for weeks at the thought of our server being arrested by armed guards. Oh Columbia College Chicago, longing for greatness but suffering fools all too gladly... And just to have some fun, here is a link to a google search for "wacky warrick" and "chicago." At 7:30 AM it had 8 links, including one to an internet site in Germany. When will these folks get on the cluetrain?