Tuesday, July 6, 2010

Michel Foucault Comes to a College Campus Near You

Jeremy Baumann monitored cameras that were trained
on students at the testing center at the University of Central
Florida. Photograph © Steve Johnson for The New York Times.

I found this front page story in The New York Times - about the lengths to which colleges are going in the 'global war on cheating' by establishing surveillance regimes - pretty amazing. If Dean Ellis at UCF hasn't read Foucault, he ought to do so. After all, the lesson of Discipline & Punish, is that even as we proliferate the means of surveillance we push the disciplined (read students, in this instance) to elaborate new and re-newed means of resistance.