Surveillance cameras are being put into college and university classrooms to supposedly guard against cheating.

Bloomington, Ind.- Business students at Indiana University will be filmed during major exams after the Kelley School of Business installed cameras in the classrooms to curb cheating. (This is a just another way to condition our students that it's normal for authorities to be watching them 24/7)

"Like every school, we're concerned about ensuring that students aren't cheating on exams," said Interim Dean Idalene Kesner.

She explained that the school has been testing the cameras since the spring semester and put them into action during midterms this fall.

Kesner told Fox 59 the cameras caught several instances of suspicious activity that would've been missed otherwise.

"I'm not sure we would've caught these instances without the camera," said Kesner.

The cameras were bought as a result of the school's rapidly growing enrollment. It serves nearly 5,000 undergraduate students and Kesner said, the school was short on proctors.

"There simply are not enough people to go around during crunch periods of testing," said Kesner.
During an exam, a trained employee watches the feeds from the cameras in a separate room and then informs the instructor of any activity that resembles academic misconduct.

Even with the surveillance video, faculty members decide what to do with what they see.
www.fox59.com/news/wxin-iu-cheating-school-adds-cameras-in-classrooms-to-curb-cheating-20121022,0,4652397.column

Outsourcing privacy in higher education to Microsoft.

After several years of negotiating, a dozen colleges have reached an agreement with Microsoft that could inspire more institutions to outsource their internal communications and data storage systems to the company and its far-flung servers — even when those systems hold sensitive student and research data.

Since 2010 Microsoft had been in talks with a dozen universities about drawing up a standard contract that would address colleges universities’ obligations to federal privacy laws such at the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). The idea was to eliminate the tedium and expense of negotiating around these compliance issues with each and every university client.

Now, after several years, those talks have finally born fruit, according to Tracy Futhey, the chief information officer at Duke University.

Microsoft on Friday announced that it had signed up Duke, Emory and Thomas Jefferson Universities and the Universities of Iowa and Washington for its new, cloud-based e-mail and work software, Office365. The deals will save the universities on infrastructure costs by migrating various internal communication and data systems to Microsoft’s servers — a move that would have been virtually impossible without resolving FERPA and HIPAA concerns.

Many colleges have preferred to keep these data on their own servers so as to oversee privacy compliance directly instead of entrusting that task to companies like Microsoft and Google, which also offers cloud services to higher-ed institutions. (Microsoft released Office365 earlier this year to compete with Google Apps for Education, and has been promoting its new product aggressively on campuses.)

Allowing a company like Microsoft to handle federally protected medical and education records on behalf of universities requires a bit of finagling. In this case, the company “agree[d] to be designated at a ‘School Official’ with ‘legitimate educational interests’ in the Institution Data,” said a Microsoft spokeswoman via e-mail. As such, the company agreed to abide by the same privacy rules as the colleges and universities.
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/10/22/universities-and-microsoft-write-standard-privacy-agreement-cloud-services

 University tells students don't protest outside the free speech zone.
Dartmouth, MA - A university policy restricting public assemblies to an official "public forum space" creates a "chilling effect" on student willingness to protest or engage in political demonstrations, students and faculty told The Standard-Times.
"It says in this spot and this spot only can you protest," said philosophy professor Phil Cox, who describes the policy as unconstitutional. "It's a very unfortunate compromise of students' rights."
The public forum area, commonly called the "free speech zone" by students and faculty, encompasses a patch of grass 75 feet southeast of the campanile at the center of campus and bordered on each side by walkways.
Assemblies in the space are banned after midnight until 6 a.m. and megaphones or other noise-making devices can only be used with permission from university administrators, the policy, posted on the university's website, says.
"My thought is that they put those (rules) in place to prevent students from demonstrating," said Brian Pastori, a 2008 graduate of UMass Dartmouth who protested the policy when it was created.UMass Dartmouth spokesman John Hoey countered that the university does allow protests outside the zone with prior permission from administrators and defended the policy as necessary to ensure demonstrations do not interrupt university functions or services.
The UMass Board of Trustees created the system-wide policy in 2005 after protests erupted at UMass Amherst and saw students storm through an administrative building shouting and banging on windows, The Boston Globe reported at the time.
But the policy is far too restrictive and relegates protesters to a less-trafficked part of the campus, Cox said.
"Like any other place, (UMass) can regulate time, place and manner (of protests)," Cox said. "But this goes way beyond that. There's no decibel level for the noise or anything. It's just no megaphones without permission."
http://www.southcoasttoday.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20121017/NEWS/210170329/-1/NEWS24
UMass/Dartmouth free speech zone: unenforced but still unconstitutional.
The university's rules conflict with its own statement that it "recognizes the rights of members of the University community . . . to freedom of assembly and speech, and strongly endorses the free exchange of ideas at the University." The statement goes on to clarify that students may exercise their rights in "public forum spaces," which are "locations that by tradition or policy are available for public assembly and speech."

Of course, by tradition—and keeping in line with the First Amendment, by which UMass Dartmouth is legally and morally bound—the vast majority of campus should be available for public assembly and speech. Reasonable, content-neutral time, place, and manner restrictions may be appropriate where student speech could disrupt the school's functioning, but "[m]aterial disruption of or interference with instructional activities and other University business and campus events" is already prohibited separately from the establishment of the free speech zone. 

Second, as Cox articulates, the policy's "existence is intimidating." Even if administrators choose not to enforce the policy, the fact that it is on the books certainly deters students from practicing speech that might violate the policy—even when that speech is constitutionally protected. The chilling of free speech on campus is always problematic, whether it is through the threat of potential punishment or through actual administrative response. 

Further, an unenforced policy that is still officially in effect leaves ample room for selective enforcement. The university could easily decide to enforce the policy when confronted with speech it does not like. That it apparently hasn't so far is arguably a good sign, but then why maintain the policy at all? As things stand, there's nothing preventing this state university from engaging in unlawful censorship starting this afternoon.

Until UMass Dartmouth aligns its rules and regulations with the First Amendment, and until it aligns its actions with its written policies guaranteeing free speech and assembly, students will have little notice as to what public speech is protected and what speech may land them in trouble—and the university will be vulnerable to a lawsuit it's highly unlikely to win.
http://thefire.org/torch/#15012