Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines
I&#x27;m a college student myself (my university, as far as I&#x27;m aware, has no system such as this). As far as I&#x27;m concerned, it&#x27;s both an insidious creep of social-credit policy and a gross invasion of student privacy. It treats us as children rather than as the adults we are, and seems to me to be a sign of the re-infantalization of colleges. Many generations ago, when the age of majority was for the most part higher, colleges acted in loco parentis for their minor undergraduates. It was during the twentieth century that college students came to be recognized as real adults. But now it seems that the coddling has in many ways increased, and some find it fit again, as one sees here, to surveil us like children.<p>Further, while there have been obvious benefits of technological advancement, they have in large part erased informal procedures and social understanding in favor of a rigid and unforgiving process. For example, my assignments are now largely due at midnight, at a very particular second: submit a nanosecond late at your own penalty. Whereas in the past the common practice of most professors would be along the lines of &quot;get it in my mailbox by 4 p.m.&quot;, or something like that, but with the informal understanding that at 4:00:00.0...1, the door of the mailbox would not close and chop off your hand. And exceptions to rules were easier to get before the arbiter of the rules became a severe and unfeeling one.