Notes from the FIRE Conference: KC Johnson

Tonight I attended FIRE's second conference on free speech and academia.

The first talk of the night was by KC Johnson, a professor at Brooklyn College. Professor Johnson wrote a book titled Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Case that I read early last summer.

KC Johnson had a lot to say about the Duke Lacrosse case, but I was more struck by his observation of how so much of the information -- the syllabi, emails, etc. -- was publicly available and how a lot of that data became less available as the issues related to the case went to trial. He predicted that a lot of that university provided information would dry up. He may be right, but I think that the self-promotion of academics will encourage them to put more and more information online. After all, as KC Johnson notes, academics are often hired away by other colleges. Why would they voluntarily restrict that information?

Professor Johnson also predicted that as technology gets smaller, more students will record their professors being abusive or moronic. Cameras and audio recorders are going to be in the classroom and once that information gets leaked out, trustees and parents can see what things are really happening in the classroom. In that vein, I can imagine technology that records and distributes the content throughout the internet so that it cannot be bottlenecked at YouTube.