18 Mar 2004


A belated response to this message from a colleague

> "University bans staff websites after anti-semitism row
>
> Academics at Birmingham University have condemned moves by the university
> authorities to ban 300 of their personal websites."
>
> Story at http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,1166611,00.html
>
> See also the campaign by colleagues to stop the University's ban
> http://web.bham.ac.uk/web_campaign/
>
> I must admit it all seems a bit of a storm in a teacup, but perhaps I am
> missing something?

[[
Note added 11 Nov 2004. The above web site no longer exists
    http://web.bham.ac.uk/web_campaign/

However this one addresses the issues:
    http://www.sue.be/web_campaign/
]]

To me it is just one facet of a large picture in which I see
managers and administrators pushing the university of Birmingham
away from being a world class university towards being a local
technology supermarket.

Look at how Buzz and the Campus web site crow about being the best
'in the region'.

I've always been working towards making us one of the best in the
*world*!

A really good university would be a hot-bed of creative ideas of all
sorts, freely made available to the public at large and not constrained
by some narrow managerial notion of what we are supposed to be doing.

If we have really good people in the university, then some important
subset of those ideas, not recognized now, will be seen fifty or a
hundred years from now as major break-throughs: and they need not have
anything to do with the job the originator was hired to do.

Of course actions have to be taken to ensure that if laws get broken
that is detected and dealt with, preferably by the police. But taking
too much defensive, protective, action turns the place from a collection
of high-flying free-thinkers into a collection of creeps looking over
their shoulders to make sure they don't offend their bosses.

If our selection processes are any good then the people we employ in all
kinds of jobs should be among the most creative and intelligent in the
population and since we cannot pay them salaries that are competitive
with what such people could earn elsewhere we should give them some
compensating advantages relevant to the sort of place a university
should be.

So for example, a computer officer who, working mostly in his spare time
produces a world-renown website on Henry James should not be told that
it has nothing to do with his job and should therefore be moved off the
campus machines. E.g. give google "Henry james" and this one comes up as
about number 8 of over 6 million:
    http://web.bham.ac.uk/doveral/james/

That's the sort of university I want to be in. And you can meet the
author over lunch in the staff canteen.

[[
Note added 11 Nov 2004: but now you can't see his web page on the
Birmingham University web site any more because of university
management policies.

See also  http://www.sue.be/web_campaign/
]]

And if some people go a bit over the top in some of their political
views no doubt others will go over the top in the opposite direction, if
the university really has the kind of diversity and creativity that it
should have.

But only the legal system, and a reasonable upper bound on resource
usage should be the criterion for constraint, as long as people actually
do their jobs OK.

I think I'll put this on my web site.

Aaron
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs/