In the past few weeks, you may have received, as we did, an email advertisement from Macmillan Learning for a new way to keep an eye on your students. “Are you interested in tracking attendance,” it asks, “but don’t want to keep track of paper?” Sign up for the new “iClicker Reef,” which comes with a “geolocation attendance feature.” When students show up for class, an app on their phones will indicate their presence. For large courses especially, the device makes a certain pragmatic sense: The sheer burden of monitoring 500 students means that, inevitably, some of them will disappear unnoticed. Now professors can detect patterns of attendance, and students, in an effort to improve, can track their own bad (or good) behavior..
Our own reaction to this ad, before we hit the delete button, was mainly irritation, with a hint of alarm: Here was one more instance of our students being asked to surrender something precious — their privacy. The possible benefits didn’t outweigh what was being given up. And yet, had we purchased this product, it is highly unlikely that our students would have shared our concerns. The spread of monitoring technologies in higher education has revealed a sharp split along generational and professional lines: Faculty uproar at each new apparent violation of privacy has been met, again and again, by student indifference or even enthusiasm.
Faculty uproar at each new violation of privacy has been met, again and again, by student indifference or even enthusiasm.
When the University of Georgia began installing iris-detection cameras last year at the entrances of its dining halls and student center, roughly 900 students voluntarily pre-enrolled within the first week; when Georgia Southern introduced a similar system, in 2013, one student out of the original cohort of 3,000 declined to enroll. In the words of one Georgia Southern first-year, quoted in the campus newspaper: “It’s really cool, and you get through as fast as possible.”
Meanwhile, in Georgia and elsewhere, the expressions of outrage, replete with references to Big Brother, the Thought Police and (in the case of the iris scans) Minority Report, have reliably originated with faculty members. It seems fair to say, then, that we’re living in a moment when the stakes, and perhaps the very meaning, of privacy are up for grabs, or at least in transition. It’s a moment that has certain consequences for the training of citizens — and for the academy’s supposed role in that process.
“Privacy,” as a concept, has a long and complex history, and has meant different things at different times and in different contexts. In the contemporary university, two particular ways of framing the topic are at loggerheads. This conflict is rarely acknowledged, but it lies at the heart of the mixed-messaging evident in the ways that colleges articulate their priorities.
The first of these conceptions is transactional and is concerned above all with information. Every one of us has secrets — or, at any rate, facts about ourselves that we think of as our own. How we deal with those secrets (keeping them concealed, letting other people know about them) is what privacy is all about. As Alan Westin, whose Privacy and Freedom (1967) offers a foundational account of this position, put it, privacy is “the claim of individuals … to determine for themselves when, how and to what extent information about them is communicated.”
The advantages of this informational theory of privacy are self-evident. It accords, for one thing, with our tendency to recast moral problems as economic ones: If privacy is a possession, then it can be treated the same way we treat anything else that we own — bitcoin, baseball cards, your tater tots for my hamburger — as something that can be bartered or hoarded. More to the point, an informational/transactional theory syncs nicely with our system of law, and with tort law in particular. Once we have accepted the idea that privacy is tied to possession, then it becomes possible to address, legally, questions about whether privacy has been violated or not. When is it legal for the government or corporations to take your private information without your consent — or even, perhaps, without your knowledge? When do you have grounds to sue because your private information has been taken away unwillingly — in essence, stolen?
Such questions make for good, clear, case law — and yet, something escapes. Surely privacy can’t be just transactional; surely we value it as a good in itself, or because it does us some good to be private. To these suspicions, the transactional theory of privacy can offer no response — but that’s where the second theory comes in. In this view, privacy is a necessary precondition for the growth of the soul, for the formation of an autonomous person. This argument is most closely associated with Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis, whose 1890 Harvard Law Review article, “The Right to Privacy,” is generally accepted as the first significant attempt to establish that right. In making their case, they reviewed several existing possible grounds (including, as it happened, the protection of property) for a right to privacy, but finally settled on something more abstract and spiritual:
The intensity and complexity of life, attendant upon advancing civilization, have rendered necessary some retreat from the world, and man, under the refining influence of culture, has become more sensitive to publicity, so that solitude and privacy have become more essential to the individual. … Triviality [of social intercourse] destroys at once robustness of thought and delicacy of feeling. … The principle which protects … all … personal productions, is in reality … that of an inviolate personality.
Although some commentators have detected a whiff of class privilege in those lines, Warren and Brandeis were making a point with universal implications: The growth of the self is a fragile process, easily destroyed by external pressures (to conform to social norms, especially), and so, to become a full and independent person, one needs to be left alone. Moreover, since a liberal, democratic society requires free-thinking, autonomous citizens rather than complacent, same-thinking drones, civic health is self-evidently dependent on vigilant protection of privacy. Thus, too, the reason in the present day for a certain kind of panic breaking down along generational lines: a younger cohort with no concern for privacy — or experience of it — would be severely stunted at the core, and incapable of civil participation
The strengths and weaknesses of this second theory complement those of the first. As an entry in a legal debate, “The Right to Privacy” has had a checkered history: Spiritual convictions, like the perceived value of an “inviolate personality,” don’t make for the strongest tort protections. Subsequent thinking in the field has tended to ignore or shy away from Warren and Brandeis’s central insights.
Which concept of privacy one encounters depends on where, on a college’s website, one happens to land.
On the other hand, those insights align well with a view of civic life in which the American university has historically enjoyed a privileged role. In this view, our campuses are special places, designed for the cultivation of the self — quite literally designed, if one considers the cloisters and chapels that still decorate many campuses. These monastic spaces purposely underscore the essentially private nature of the academy (a “private” nature that was once embraced as much by public institutions as by the purportedly elite). Even as academic life provides the conditions for a solitary self-nurturing, it also models the way autonomous individuals, with differing world views, might interact respectfully and productively with one another — yielding, at the end of this chrysalis-like period, fully formed citizens.
This narrative, and the view of privacy on which it relies, continues to thrive, if vestigially, in the way colleges advertise themselves to prospective students, and also, to some extent, in what they expect those applicants to demonstrate about themselves. A heartfelt personal essay, indicative of a rich and saturated interiority, can still make the difference between acceptance or rejection at competitive institutions. The narrative also thrives in the way those institutions articulate their own highest values in their mission statements. Thus Williams College:
This is what we aim to do: To develop in students both the wisdom and skills they will need to become responsible contributors to whatever communities they join, and the richly textured inner lives that will make them rigorously self-reflective, ethically alert, and imaginatively alive. Public and private purposes, as it were, harmoniously nurturing each other.
Whatever one makes of that statement, it has the virtue of clarity: It offers a précis of the necessary part the academy plays within the body politic. It also makes clear the virtue of a particular pedagogy — in which the humanities have a central role, incidentally — in allowing the academy to fulfill this purpose. Of course, the distance between this vision and the corporatist drift of the modern academy need hardly be stated here. It’s the distance between Williams’s idyllic New England quadrangles and its “Entrepeneurs@Williams” program, which “offers students an outstanding opportunity to extend knowledge and skills they have acquired through Williams’ [sic] exceptional liberal arts curriculum,” and which features an annual “Alumni Shark Tank.” It’s a distance that can take the form of vivid proximity — as in Kendall Square, in Cambridge, Mass., where the MIT signage runs about neck-and-neck with that of the corporations (Microsoft, Google, etc.) for which MIT’s graduates aspire to work.
This isn’t to say that the “transactional” and “spiritual” views of privacy are necessarily contradictory: There is no inherent reason that the control of personal information cannot coexist with a high spiritual or psychological valuation of time spent alone. In practice, however, the two seem far apart; and, more to the point, they imply very different relationships between campus and society: preserved space versus a seamless continuity.
Which concept of privacy one encounters depends on where, on a college’s website, one happens to land. If Duke’s mission statement sounds a lot like that of Williams (“the mission of Duke University is to provide a superior liberal education to undergraduate students, attending not only to their intellectual growth but also to their development as adults committed to high ethical standards and full participation as leaders in their communities”), its “Privacy Statement” belongs to another world altogether: Duke University “may collect personally identifiable information about you when you visit [its website] to facilitate providing you with online services [and] may reveal personally identifiable information about you to unaffiliated third parties … if the information is provided to our vendors, service providers or agents to perform functions on our behalf”).
Practically speaking, the modern university encourages, or necessitates, a maximal surrender of student privacy — and, for that matter, of faculty privacy, especially for the growing numbers not afforded the benefit of tenure protections. No iris scan = no lunch. To work or study on a modern campus entails finding oneself caught between at least two narratives about privacy: about what it means, and about its relative value. Student decisions about privacy need to be understood as negotiations of this uncertain landscape.
The most common explanation for students’ seeming lack of concern for privacy — that kids today simply don’t care for it or, worse, are natural exhibitionists — may be dismissed out of hand. One still encounters this charge often enough in the mainstream, and the claim has acquired a patina of academic respectability via the generational theorizing most closely associated with Neil Howe and William Strauss. In their view, the “millennial generation” (born between 1980 and 2000, roughly speaking) possesses “seven distinguishing traits,” including “conventional,” “sheltered,” and “pressured.” As “the most watched-over generation in memory,” according to Howe and Strauss, millennials are often described as indifferent to privacy and as a result either “shame-free” (Mark Bauerlein) or prone to narcissism and exhibitionism (Jean Twenge).
Millennial theory, at least in its more reductive iterations, has been treated as a kind of piñata in recent scholarship. The key descriptions, it’s been noted, best fit a middle-class, largely suburban and college-educated demographic, which has received a disproportionate share of attention from sociologists. To the extent that the descriptions are true, we would add, the reasons have less to do with some inherent quality in people born over a 20-year period than with the people who reared them.
This evident-enough point has wide-ranging ramifications for education. The structures within which younger students (including, of course, those born after the millennium) have been trained reflect a set of priorities belonging to the generation in power. Beginning with preschool, students have been subjected to an unprecedented degree of tracking, assessment, and quantification. A more than $8-billion-per-annum “ed tech” industry has saturated the K-12 classroom with products geared toward drawing as much personal information from students as possible, often with an eye toward marketing possibilities. In a TED talk, Bill Gates spoke at length about the benefits — better teachers, better students — of cameras in the classroom.
Whatever our doubts about systematic tracking and testing, our own students — in stark contrast to those we taught at the outset of our careers — are craving more of it. Speaking anecdotally (but we suspect that the experience is common enough), we both remember the moment, more than a decade ago, when our end-of-term course evaluations began to complain of insufficient assessment. By the time students matriculate in college, they have been acclimatized to a certain view of privacy as it relates to education. The contemporary campus is therefore a space where privacy expectations are, at most, very low. The 900 students at the University of Georgia who preregistered for iris scans during the first week of availability weren’t sacrificing their privacy — there was nothing to sacrifice, so far as they could see, the larger question having long since been decided.
The tendency of the modern academy, once one gets past those mission statements, is to encourage a transactional, rather than a spiritual/Brandeisian, view of privacy. The more closely colleges embrace corporate ways of thinking, and the more thoroughly the ideal of seamless continuity between the campus and the broader economy is embraced, the more privacy comes to be seen as just one more kind of currency, something one trades in order to gain access to, or remain within, an institution. Or, to go further: The more an institution constitutes itself along economic lines, the more likely it is to prize operational efficiency over more abstract and less quantifiable goods, like personal autonomy.
In this view, privacy — withheld information — is an impediment to the smooth running of the machine. For Richard Posner, perhaps our most eloquent opponent of privacy rights (on economic grounds), the concealment of personal facts impedes evaluation, and thus “reduces the efficiency” of the labor market. The extent to which students have accepted this logic may be seen in the readiness with which most of them trade away personal information, even when strong legal protections exist to protect it. According to the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974 (Ferpa), colleges are not permitted to reveal a student’s grades without that student’s consent. Yet — Posner again — “virtually all students give their consent because otherwise a prospective employer [or law school, business school, etc.] is likely to assume the worst.” Refusal to barter away your private information is “a signal that you have something to hide.” Privacy equals a refusal to participate.
None of which is to say that students are entirely indifferent to privacy. In fact, almost no one, outside of a maximum-security prison, lives under the sway of a single privacy regimen. The rest of us pass continually from one environment to another, with the degree and value of privacy often in considerable flux. In some contexts, the extent to which our privacy is violated is extreme and unrelenting, while in others we’re more or less left alone. In some spheres we agree to this surrender of privacy, and in others we have no say in the matter.
Practically speaking, the modern university necessitates a maximal surrender of student privacy.
One might compare that maximum-security prison, for example — in which the loss of privacy is both total and compulsory — with, say, a casino, in which we’re also watched constantly, but on an entirely voluntary basis. In much the same way, it behooves us to see a college campus as consisting of not one but multiple, semi-distinct ecosystems, in which the rules of privacy are subtly, or vastly, different. The same students who consent to iris scans, or who shrug at the way their personal information is collected and stored, potentially forever, on Moodle or Blackboard, or is used by some MOOC company for marketing purposes, might well be outraged at the unannounced appearance of campus security in their dorms or fraternities. The extent to which students view privacy transactionally in their capacity as students, or as customers, hardly means that they can’t view privacy in different terms when “off the clock,” as it were.
Quite the contrary: As a mounting body of evidence, compiled by the Social Science Research Network and the Pew Research Center, among others, has shown, the rising generations continue to value privacy intensely — and more or less along Brandeisian lines, understanding that, in order for them to be healthy human beings, some part of their personality must remain “inviolate.” Precisely because the assault on privacy is so unrelenting from kindergarten on, our students have become adept at segregating not just their private and public lives but also areas of what might once have been called simply “private life” — and at adjusting their behaviors accordingly. The researcher danah boyd calls this process “social steganography.”
Somewhat counterintuitively, students’ expectations of privacy are often greater online, where they can make use of virtual avatars or anonymous digital accounts, than in real life. For that matter, their expectations of privacy might well differ from one digital space to another. Snapchat, in which information is automatically and quickly deleted, and Facebook, about which the same cannot be said, are completely different worlds, privacy-wise. Commentators who point to social-media use as indicative of the exhibitionist tendencies of “millennials” are getting things backward. They withhold themselves far more on Facebook, where their grandmothers can see them, than in the gym or dining hall.
We do not mean to sound overly sanguine. For one thing, online privacy protections are notoriously changeable and unreliable — and what seems either private or anonymous today may be public tomorrow. Until the United States adopts a European Union-style “right to be forgotten” — and we’re not holding our breath — any confidence in online privacy is misplaced. More to the point, the very idea of holding something of the self in reserve presumes something about that “self” to begin with. However effective “social steganography” on social media may be in preserving a nontransactional, private selfhood, those environments are unable to provide the conditions for the cultivation of an “inviolate personality.” That has to have happened already, and somewhere else, away from “the intensity and complexity” of public life.
The “retreat” imagined by Warren and Brandeis as necessary for the formation of autonomous personhood is certainly still possible. But their account of privacy must compete with the unacknowledged and, in practice, contradictory allegiances of contemporary colleges to an economically driven view of privacy. Without underestimating or dismissing the ways that the liberal model continues to be sustained every day on campuses — not least in classrooms where 15 people sit around a table for two hours and talk — the broader tendency of institutional priorities is clear enough.
One more mission statement, this time Harvard’s, which stakes its claims to an older narrative in signally clear terms: “The mission of Harvard College is to educate the citizens and citizen-leaders for our society. We do this through our commitment to the transformative power of a liberal arts and sciences education.”
It’s an open question whether, as one older ideal of privacy fades away, the story made possible by that ideal — about the academy’s role in preparing students for democratic citizenship — can be sustained. Surely those invested in a transactional idea of privacy — and in the relationship between academy and world that it implies — could well object to the suggestion that their outlook is, at root, somehow undemocratic. Nevertheless, it stands to reason that the mixed messages students receive about privacy should begin to show some effects.
In traditional liberal theory, the public and private spheres can’t exist without each other. Just as the autonomy and interiority made possible by private experience render one capable of public activity, so the public sphere helps mark off a way of life entirely private. For a liberal like Brandeis, to believe in the value of one’s own privacy also entailed believing something about other people’s capacity to sustain inner lives. We’re only beginning to find out what happens to the latter faith after the former has been lost.
David Rosen is a professor of English at Trinity College, in Connecticut, and Aaron Santesso is a professor of literature at the Georgia Institute of Technology. They are the authors of The Watchman in Pieces: Surveillance, Literature, and Liberal Personhood (Yale University Press, 2013).
