ideological criminal

Below is a brutal and hilarious affront to the Brandeis administration, written as a letter to the editor of the campus newspaper, The Hoot, in response to the recent actions taken against Donald Hindley, professor of Politics. The incident is recounted in Inside Higher Ed’s article Sending in the Class Monitor.

Letter to the editor: Response to human apparatchiks

Dear Editor,

I was distressed to read that the administration is assigning human apparatchiks to monitor Brandeis classrooms to assure linguistic conformity and political orthodoxy. Surely, the administration knows that the technology of authoritarian surveillance has advanced far beyond the primitive methods employed by the likes of J. Edgar Hoover and Erich Honecker.

A laptop and a webcam can do the job far more cheaply and efficiently. Just position one unit per class in the back of the room, then patch the feed into a mainframe system located in Bernstein-Marcus. This simple expedient would not only provide an accurate audio-visual record of conversational malfeasance by faculty and students, but the real-time surveillance would allow the administration to dispatch agents immediately into the classroom to stop the utterance of verboten words or ideas.

-Prof. Thomas Doherty (AMST).