Academia: Surveillance and In Loco Parentis

Thursday's Child Has Far to Go

When colleges and universities took the first steps towards building extensive systems of surveillance using both technologies and administrative personnel in the early 2010s, it was very hard to get most students to pay attention to the potential implications.

Part of the reason was that many of them had experienced surveillance in their homes and had seen that surveillance extend into their time in school. Around 2010 was when the public conversation about “helicopter parents” and the consequences of the loss of “free-range parenting” was in full swing. Before kids were being tracked by cellphones, they were accustomed to the watchful eyes of parents who drove them everywhere, remained present during playdates, and kept them from anything that might be dangerous or unexpected. Public space had just as many watchful eyes: children who did not seem closely monitored by an adult in everything they did outside the home increasingly triggered calls to civil authorities. New modes of technological surveillance slotted neatly into that mode of parental and adult observation. Parents who had grown up when the lives of children and adults were substantially separated and who had been considerably unmonitored had transitioned into an adulthood where they felt comprehensively responsible for every moment of the lives of their children, where they felt stricken at the mere idea that something might happen to their child because they did not have up-to-the-minute knowledge of where the child was and what the child was doing.

I don’t know if even now we have a very good understanding of what exactly triggered that change. It can’t be entirely a matter of moral panic or groupthink. I was a “free-range child” and I was absolutely satisfied with that state of affairs as I looked back on it, but I found you couldn’t easily choose to reproduce that approach as a parent in the early 21st Century. The tide was flowing in another direction. I think it took my generation a while as young adults to realize that maybe there had been some problems with the hands-off approach. I also think that the culture industry’s discovery that you could make media that both children and adults enjoyed together helped fuel a sense that being around your kids was not a chore or a burden that contradicted your adulthood, but a potential source of pleasure and satisfaction that made your adulthood more fulfilling.

Anyway, the upshot is that for 21st Century university and college students, having their institution spy on them seemed completely normal for a long time. More than that, really: from the 2000s onward, many of them were demanding to be spied on in order to address a variety of problems.

American academic institutions in the 21st Century increasingly built a kind of fused corporate-civic utopianism into their promises to prospective and matriculated students, a sort of customer-service ethos: there will be no theft on campus, there will be no bullying on campus, there will be no sexual misconduct or assault on campus, there will be no discrimination on campus, there will be no exclusion or marginalization on campus. The gap between this rhetoric and the reality of campus life was because universities actually exist in the real world, talk of “the bubble” notwithstanding. You can’t deliver a better world as a commodified service, you can only get there by transforming society. Which university administrations and the communities they allegedly serve couldn’t do all by themselves, in isolation.

The fact of the gap spurred many campus activists to demand that university administration deploy sovereign authority within the community to close the gap. They increasingly perceived administrations as a sort of state apparatus and invited it to exercise strong executive power to deal with a variety of social problems. At the time, a fair number of faculty tried to politely suggest that this might not be a wise shift to encourage. That was not just because some faculty had expertise relevant to these questions and not just because faculty naturally have a longer-term vision of the university. It’s also because in the 2010s, faculty between 40 to 70 had either directly experienced (and joined) protests against universities for exerting too much authority over student life or had attended college in an era where the success of those protests had led most administrations to minimize their presence and authority over student life.

Now we are on the other side of that juncture. Universities are now almost as heavily involved in monitoring, shaping and controlling student life as they were in the 1950s and early 1960s, and in this iteration of in loco parentis, they have all the tools that parents have to monitor young people and all the tools that employers and property owners possess. Surveillance isn’t just an approach to administering student life, it’s now a comprehensive strategy intended to protect universities from any liability claims. Any place on campus that doesn’t have a camera watching it is now seen as an intolerable risk. Any channel of communication that is not fully locked down by acceptable use policies and comprehensive supervision is now seen as a danger. Any groups meeting on campus are now seen as something the campus must control and authorize. What faculty, staff and students say and do beyond the physical confines of the institution is now increasingly seen as something the institution not only has a right to control but an obligation to oversee.

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I’m feeling encouraged at the moment that students on many campuses are fully waking up to the consequences of this radical shift towards a surveillance-empowered in loco parentis for their own lives and their flourishing as students. I’m seeing signs of that awakening at many campuses, sometimes impelled by the catastrophic over-reaction of many administrations to pro-Palestinian protests, but also just more generally.

Students are beginning to realize that when universities have the authority and the tools to watch everything, collect data on all activities, and intervene in everything driven by comprehensive risk management policies, they are damaging the basic quality of the educational experience. Many of the students are also seeing that the systems that were built to close the gap between utopian promises to consumers and imperfect social realities are precisely the systems that Trumpism has seized upon to try and destroy universities outright—and those students are seeing that the university that promised five years ago that its deepest value commitments were to equity, social transformation, and academic freedom is today throwing most of that frantically overboard in an effort to rebrand in a way suited to the new authoritarianism.

I can’t link to a really excellent essay written by a student government representative at Bryn Mawr College, though I wish I could. The student government there have made uncontrolled surveillance into their central issue of focus this year. In my view, I think their characterization of the out-of-control use of surveillance and the unaccountable actions of the administration is factually correct. The author of the essay has elected to control access to the document in social media outlets that are not under their direct supervision. I understand that thought, but I would like to quote a few statements from it because the essay is so forcefully excellent. These are sentiments that could be expressed from a great many campuses right now with equal accuracy and justice.

Surveillance kills the faith that students are expected to invest into this institution…It should not be up to the administration whether our culture of trust exists or not, though they certainly seem not to want to participate in it.

We…are taken as walking liabilities to the College’s branding and funding structure, and actions by the senior staff reveals a desire to control, monitor, and, thus, surveil our student body to ensure adherence to draconian standards that students never truly agreed to.

As long as students are deliberately excluded from creating policies that shape our community, and for as long as students are not able to exercise the privileges that being self-governed awaits us, it is evident that senior staff are working only with the concept of a student — one that is amicable, unopinionated, and unquestioning.

What this essay understands is that whatever the causal roots of surveillance and administrative oversight of student conduct might have been, current practices are killing the agency of students as learners, as members of a community, and as citizens of the world they will inherit. The student that administrators increasingly imagine as fitting and belonging in the institution they run is entirely subject to its authority, subject to procedures, rules and regulations that they not only play no role in shaping but are not even entitled to have information about. Universities now behave towards students as if they wield an unholy mashup of the authority of parents and employers. You can have your handbook of rules and regulations, but it’s not up to you what it says and you’ll just have to accept what it does, while you’re living under its roof.

That just isn’t how people learn, and it isn’t how adults become adults, at least not the adulthood that the utopian rhetoric in college and university catalogs and mission statements claim they’re preparing people to assume.

It’s time for the pendulum to swing back in the other direction, and not just because policies of surveillance and control so blatantly contradict the fundamental purpose of higher education, but also because the systems we grew into are also so vulnerable to exploitation and misuse by people who despise all of us—our students, our faculty, our administration, our alumni, our purpose.

We need to immediately know less about our students and we need to really trust them to discover for themselves, of themselves, with themselves, what kind of world they want to make.

Image credit: PollyPurvis, “Surveillance”. © The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.

Image credit: “Caméra vidéo de surveillance“ by zigazou76 is licensed under CC BY 2.0.