Bozeman, MT: “Sir, I’m going to need to see your backstage.”

There have been a number of times that I’ve discussed the ways in which public information on the internet is not private.  If you make photos or information about yourself publicly available, you have to recognize that others might take it into consideration when forming an opinion of you.  Now, however, the city of Bozeman, MT wants to know what private information you have, too.  As noted by Ars Technica, the city’s background check waiver form includes the following request:

“Please list any and all, current personal or business websites, web pages or memberships on any Internet-based chat rooms, social clubs or forums, to include, but not limited to: Facebook, Google, Yahoo, YouTube.com, MySpace, etc.” the form reads. But Bozeman isn’t simply interested in finding out where to look for potentially embarrassing personal details; the city wants full disclosure, since the form demands username and password information for each. City employees will apparently be able to dig through any information applicants have put online, regardless of whether it’s accessible to the public.

Applicants need not worry about their potentially sensitive private information, though, because the city won’t look at “protected” things:

A local news station spoke to Bozeman’s attorney and asked about the potential for problems of this sort. The city’s answer? Trust us! “One thing that’s important for folks to understand about what we look for is none of the things that the federal constitution lists as protected things, we don’t use those,” said attorney Greg Sullivan.

An examination of private information like this is ridiculous and the recent media attention will hopefully end Bozeman’s use of this practice.  If not, your next employer may want to come to your house and take a look through your belongings before deciding whether or not you should be hired.  Who doesn’t love Big Brother?

Update: Bozeman rescinded this policy on Friday, June 20, stating:

The extent of our request for a candidate’s password, user name, or other internet information appears to have exceeded that which is acceptable to our community.  We appreciate the concern many citizens have expressed regarding this practice and apologize for the negative impact this issue is having on the City of Bozeman.

Read Full Post »

Teaching without a net

While the prospect of preparing for 42 class sessions in a semester is daunting, it doesn’t compare to the idea of being thrown in front of a classroom full of college students less than four months after completing your own college degree.  As a new pseudonymous writer at the Chronicle of Higher Education describes:

When I was a graduate student, I participated in academic fraud. I didn’t plagiarize to get an article published or inflate my CV to get a job. I did something worse. I accepted a teaching assistantship as a doctoral student at Elite National University.

By becoming a TA there, I took on a responsibility for which I had no qualifications: teaching first-year composition courses. Even though I had a bachelor’s degree in English, I hadn’t taken an introductory writing course while I was an undergraduate. I’d never taught before or had any course work in education. I didn’t even have a master’s degree. My hometown community college wouldn’t have hired me as an adjunct, but Elite National U. put me in charge of two sections of a required class.

Students attend ENU to be taught by experts, not amateurs. In my defense I can only plead ignorance. Before I set foot on the campus, I didn’t know that teaching assistants actually taught. My undergraduate institution, Flyover College, had no TA’s. The financial-aid offer I received from ENU made no mention of specific duties, so I assumed the phrase “teaching assistant” meant assisting a teacher. Only when I arrived on the campus did I learn that I had to stand alone in front of two sections of grumpy people each semester. I asked around and discovered that other graduate students who had spent their undergraduate years at small liberal-arts colleges were also surprised to be given teaching duties as TA’s.

My sense is that this is more common in English than sociology, but that may make the situation worse.  Despite my love for sociology, if a new graduate student does a poor job of teaching Soc 101 I assume that there are fewer ramifications for the students than those in a poorly taught section of Eng 101.  I suppose that most people don’t feel completely prepared to teach for the first time, but I am glad that I had a few years of grad school behind me before I was given the responsibility of providing college students with useful knowledge.

Read Full Post »