Comment by augment_me
1 day ago
No because its not the purpose. The purpose is to reduce risk by having accountability assignment to things like demonstrations that hurts the funding of the institution.
There was a bunch of anti-Israel stuff for example, which goes against the alignment of the university donors. In order to be able to assign accountability and prevent reoccurrence of such events, its useful to know who did these things so you can take necessary measures.
A bunch of cameras cost much much less than what stopped funding would cost the university, so it's the rational choice.
If the goal of the university is to be a fund vacuum cleaner it's rational. If the goal is to output free thinking, open minded graduates...
I don't think the board of a 5.3 billion dollar(2025) revenue machine with a 8-9% yearly profit margin care about the latter things to the same extent as the former.
Maybe what has happened is Universities have become too rich and economically important to be places of free speech and independent thought. If so, some other institution will have to take on that role.
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free thinking, open minded graduates are great as long as they don't question or criticize israel
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> it's the rational choice.
Time will tell. Long term, I think it’ll hurt them.
I really doubt that putting up some cameras will make the institution suffer monetarily in the long term, especially considering that newer generations are essentially brought up and normalized to full mass surveillance already.
I’m still waiting for my ancestor’s liege lord to realize that posting a guard outside our town’s tavern was going to backfire long term.
Security, but at what cost?!
Of course it won't. It never has. The people making these decisions and profiting from them will be long gone, even if it ends up hurting the university (which it won't)
> which goes against the alignment of the university donors
Why do we allow non public universities to exist again?
Have you seen the current US administration? The country isn’t even remotely close to have that discussion, you’re lucky the failed insurrectionist, rapist hasn’t yet made public universities illegal via an executive order (yes that would be absurd, they don’t care)
Those protests were anti Genocide and anti land theft, calling them anti Israel is misleading.