Wayne State U. Draws Fire for New Policy
Limiting Computer Use and Privacy Rights
By JULIANNE BASINGER
Wayne State University's president has banned the use of the university's e-mail system and its Internet access for non-university purposes, prompting outrage among faculty members, who met last week and vowed to fight the new policy.
The policy, issued late last month by David Adamany, informs students and faculty and staff members that the university reserves the right to monitor their use of its computer systems to insure that the equipment is employed in university-related work only.
"Other uses are prohibited," the policy states, adding that Wayne State "is entitled to access and monitor its information-technology resources without prior notice."
"Therefore, the university advises users that they have no privacy interest or expectation of privacy in information stored on or transmitted over the university's information-technology resources, and that access and monitoring is a reasonable means of advancing university purposes," the policy says. Violaters of the policy are subject to disciplinary action.
Roger Nys, Wayne State's executive vice-president, said Friday that the policy, like most "acceptable-use policies," was intended to protect the university from legal trouble if students or staff members used the Internet for illegal purposes. The policy is also meant to insure that Wayne State's computers and taxpayers' money were not being wasted.
"People have said we're setting up a police state, and that's simply not true," he said. "There are legitimate reasons why we need to have a policy like this in place. In an environment where you have limited resources and a desire to exert control, people will express displeasure with these restrictions. That's part of life."
But the policy has made faculty members furious. Last Wednesday, about 60 members of the Academic Senate, the university's faculty-governance group, attended a meeting to discuss the matter, said Seymour Wolfson, a computer-science professor who is the Academic Senate's president.
At the meeting, a faculty committee presented a report that compared the policy to those at Ohio State University and the University of Texas System, which do not emphasize monitoring, Dr. Wolfson said. The Senate voted unanimously to forward the report to the president and other university officials and to protest the new policy.
"The problem is that the spirit of the policy put out by Wayne State focuses on surveillance," Dr. Wolfson said. "You have no privacy, you have no rights."
"It's a very tyrannical approach to the use of the system," he added. "It's mean-spirited, and it's not really designed for what one would think a research institution is designed to do, which includes exploration of the Internet."
The new policy also is "unenforceable," Dr. Wolfson said. Students on the campus found out about the policy on Thursday, when it was printed in the campus newspaper, and many already have vowed to ignore the new rules, he added. Some faculty members have expressed fears that university administrators would use the policy to single out individuals for attention, he said.
"I think they will use this like a tyrannical regime to target and monitor people they want to fire," he said.
Mr. Nys said university officials would monitor individuals only when complaints were made to administrators.
"We don't intend to just regularly monitor people's use of e-mail or information-technology resources," he said. "Something has to trigger us to go in and investigate."
President Adamany, who in January said he would retire as soon as a successor was chosen, has been at odds with the Wayne State faculty before. In early 1996, he instituted a much-criticized policy that requires every section of introductory-level courses to use a common textbook and cover a prescribed set of topics in a fixed sequence. In October 1996, the Academic Senate accused him of stonewalling an investigation into scientific-misconduct charges that arose from a court ruling on patents. The investigation eventually went forward, and two faculty members implicated in the case were exonerated.
Most universities have acceptable-use policies stating that academic needs must take precedence over other uses, but the policies vary in their approach from permissive to restrictive. Many operate on an honor system. And most universities allow their faculty senates to review proposed policies before they are instituted, according to legal experts who have drafted such policies.
Dr. Wolfson said Wayne State's faculty had asked for such review privileges, but Dr. Adamany had turned them down.
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