Louisiana State University is providing students and faculty and staff members with free daily monitoring of their credit reports and $2,500 in identity-theft insurance under an agreement reached Friday with Equifax Inc.
The yearlong agreement, which the university claims is the first of its kind between a credit agency and a higher-education institution, is designed to protect members of the campus community if their confidential information is compromised and they become victims of identity theft. The university will pay the company $150,000. See The Chronicle’s full coverage.
8 Responses to Protecting Users’ Private Data
bizdean - February 23, 2012 at 7:46 am
“…because the father has not conceded that these children are his and so such claims might be frivolous.” Outmoded idea also, in this age of DNA testing.
“fathers who have not cemented their ties with their offspring through legal channels…” What legal channel would that be? Adoption? You can’t be talking about marriage, which cements legal ties with a spouse, not with offspring. Ah, you might say, marriage plus adoption would do it. (Unless there’s some modern version of the Victorian “acknowledgment.”) But consider divorce, which severs ties with spouses but not with children. The logic would need to hold up in both directions, and it doesn’t.
mbelvadi - February 23, 2012 at 8:03 am
You seem to talk around this point but please let me hone in on it – there is an underlying sexist assymmetry to the term makes it unacceptable today. The child may have a fully legal (that is, recognized by law) tie to the mother, but that doesn’t make the child “legitimate”. Only the legal relationship to the father matters to this label. It’s a throwback to the days when a family (children AND wife) were seen as the property of the male head of household, not merely a recognition of the asymmetry of childbirth as you suggest.
dank48 - February 23, 2012 at 9:43 am
Good heavens. As an adoptive father, I had to help explain the term “illegitimate” to our daughter years ago when she came across it somewhere. As one can imagine, the emotive force of the term varies, depending upon whether it’s referring to someone else in the abstract or to oneself or to someone one loves. At the time, I leaned on Dear Abby’s (or maybe it was Ann Landers’s) decades-old comment that there is no such thing as illegitimate children, but there are illegitimate parents. That’s a tad judgmental too, of course, but it seems less of an injustice to assign the responsibility to those who made the baby than to the baby itself.
Fortunately, we’re not seeing any social fallout from this trend.
11182967 - February 23, 2012 at 10:28 am
Yet another example of the pernciousness of tying all sorts of things to a formally recognized state of attachment denominated “marriage.” Children’s rights and parents’ responsbilities should have nothing to do with the formal legality of the attachments between and among the parties (except, obviously, in case of adoption). The argument about what to call ”illegitimate” children would be moot if there simply were no such children by definition. Then maybe the awkwardness would be over what to call “children conceived and born within the context of a formal relationship legally defined as marriage.”
BlueLoom - February 23, 2012 at 10:30 am
“What legal channel would that be? Adoption?”
In some states, including the state in which I live, a child born to a woman who is married is presumed (legally, e.g., for the purposes of inheritance) to be the child of the man to whom she is married. If does not matter if, in fact, the father of the child is a next-door neighbor or the postman, or whoever.
jffoster - February 23, 2012 at 11:13 am
First, “unacceptable to whom”? Youm?
2nd, as Ferris points out in what I regard as one of her best columns on this blog, it has to do with legal paternity and with things like lawful inheritance rights, and standing to sue for wrongful death of a parent, ….&c.
darccity - February 23, 2012 at 4:20 pm
Wow! First, didn’t anyone watch Downton Abbey’s second season? Illegitimate was once the “politically correct” substitute for “bastard”, which the maid’s child was called by the father’s parent. Try defending that term your article! In any case, marriage is today divided into civil and religious aspects which have little to do with one another. And what about the old “living in sin” for cohabitation and common law and civil union and living together and shacking up. Or notice how often the politically correct has moved from the indirect euphemisms “in a family way” and “with child” of the Jane Austin and Victorian age through the 1950s I Love Lucy to the direct, harsh, clinical, or even shock-value of pregnant or “knocked up.”
On the other hand, it is always hilarious how political correctness seldom settles for one euphemism for very long before that too becomes stigmatized and requires an even more sanitized word. Example 1: Economic “panics” occurred for over a century, but disappeared from the language as too disturbing. So it was replaced by the less scary term “depression.” But the Great Depression made that term too loaded, especially for the party in power that allowed it. So we had the even milder description of “recession” which in turn became downturns, corrections. Example 2: underdeveloped countries because developing countries (as if all are). Prison guards became corrections officers, even though they are neither correcting nor are officers.
whatthe - March 1, 2012 at 8:17 am
Really? ‘Unwed mothers’ is widely considered synonymous with ‘single mothers’? That’s very surprising – it’s absolutely not so for me (in the UK, if that’s relevant).
If a couple in a stable cohabiting relationship but who have not chosen to (or have chosen not to) marry have a child, the mother is of course ‘unwed’ (eech), but I definitely don’t consider her a ‘single mother’. A birth outside marriage doth not a single mother make, if the woman is not in practical terms and in living arrangements ‘single’; contrarily a woman who is married but separated can be a ‘single mother’ despite her marriage certificate.