Review of the Book: Monitoring and Personal Privacy
Sure! Here’s a rewritten version that maintains the original ideas while omitting the promotional call-to-actions:
As another new book makes clear, this conversation also needs to include student data. Lindsay Weinberg’s *Smart University: Student Surveillance in the Digital Age* reveals how the motivations and interests of Big Tech are transforming higher education in ways that are increasingly detrimental to student privacy and, arguably, education as a whole.
*Smart University: Student Surveillance in the Digital Age*
Lindsay Weinberg
JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2024
By “smart university,” Weinberg refers to the growing number of public universities across the country that are being restructured around “the production and capture of digital data.” Similar in vision and application to so-called “smart cities,” these big-data-focused institutions are increasingly adopting technologies that can track students’ movements around campus, monitor how much time they spend on learning management systems, flag those who seem to need special “advising,” and “nudge” others toward specific courses and majors. “What makes these digital technologies so seductive to higher education administrators, in addition to promises of cost cutting, individualized student services, and improved school rankings, is the notion that the integration of digital technology on their campuses will position universities to keep pace with technological innovation,” Weinberg writes.
Readers of *Smart University* will likely recognize a familiar logic at play here. Driving many of these academic tracking and data-gathering initiatives is a growing obsession with efficiency, productivity, and convenience. The result is a kind of Silicon Valley optimization mindset applied to higher education at scale. Get students in and out of university as quickly as possible, minimize attrition, relentlessly track performance, and do it all under the guise of campus modernization and increased personalization.
Under this emerging system, students are perceived less as self-empowered individuals and more as “consumers to be courted, future workers to be made employable for increasingly smart workplaces, sources of user-generated content for marketing and outreach, and resources to be mined for making campuses even smarter,” writes Weinberg.
At the heart of *Smart University* seems to be a relatively straightforward question: What is an education for? Although Weinberg doesn’t provide a direct answer, she demonstrates that how a university (or society) chooses to answer that question can have profound impacts on how it treats its students and teachers. Indeed, as the goal of education shifts from producing well-rounded individuals capable of critical thought to producing “data subjects capable of being managed and who can fill roles in the digital economy,” it’s no wonder we’re increasingly drawn to the concept of smart universities to achieve these ends.
While books like *Means of Control* and *Smart University* effectively expose the extent to which our privacy has been compromised, commodified, and weaponized, they can also start to feel somewhat predictable in their concluding chapters. Familiar themes include calls for collective action, often supported by hopeful anecdotes detailing previously successful pro-privacy initiatives; references to a bipartisan privacy bill in the works or other legislative efforts aimed at closing significant surveillance loopholes; and commonly, technical guides outlining how individuals might better secure or assert control over their personal data.
The motivations behind these suggestions and privacy-focused guides are understandable. It’s natural for readers to seek answers, guidance, or at least some reassurance that change is possible—especially after confronting the range of issues associated with surveillance capitalism. However, it may prompt one to question whether these approaches are genuinely advancing the cause for privacy in the way its advocates envision.
