I remembered something tonight that I had not thought about in a long time. And because of it, I tumbled on to something I find very disturbing.
At Brandeis University, in the fall of 1987, two years after I had graduated, a group of students, protesting what they saw as forced political correctness put together a school-wide referendum that mandated the school officially relabel all "freshmen" as "freshchunks." It causes quite the stir on campus and even made it into the New York Times. Ironic statement or not, a lot of people were terrified it would pass and the school might be obligated to follow along.
For the record, it got voted down by more than 2-1. But I am not writing about the referendum itself. I am more intrigued/disturbed by the fact that when I went back to refresh my memory about the vote, I could find NOTHING online about it. Not even the New York Times article. I would assume Brandeis has cleaned all mention of the incident off the Internet. (The fact that I could find so little even had me beginning to question whether it really happened. But finally I was able to scare up copies of The Justice, on the Internet Archive. I then had to hand-page through a couple years of editions until I found confirmation.)
I find it outrageous that a school - a place of leaning - would do something like this (although I am not surprised). This was a very silly episode, but it really has me wondering: how often do schools do this? Do they clean their web history all the time? Do various crimes and other negative items gets buried deep so prospective students might never know about them? We already know a lot of schools play fast and easy with crime reporting standards (even though they are mandated by the Fed). How often do schools basically "censor" the Net?
For that matter, now that I have put the terms "freshchunk" and "Brandeis University" together on a single web page, does that mean my blog is going to be buried?
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