Get Herald RSSThere's a protest underway at the University of Iowa. Outraged graduate students have launched an e-mail petition to thwart a new library policy they believe violates their rights. Meanwhile, they're refusing to sign up for the new system and tampering with copies of the library license to replace it with a policy they prefer.
On the surface, these are the typical contours of student revolt: Since the 1960s, students have used the boycott and the petition to resist administrative bureaucracies that ignore their interests.
What makes the Iowa case unique is that the new library policy is one the same students might have supported five or ten years ago when they were college freshmen. The University of Iowa has decided to digitize its library, joining GoogleBooks and Project Gutenberg in the quest for a universal, searchable, linkable archive of written texts. Iowa students - members of a generation prone to using Wikipedia over dusty manuscripts for research anyway - should be thrilled.
Instead the graduate students are furious. About to submit theses and dissertations, they're no longer concerned with having easy access to the research of others; now they are worried about publishing their own work. Because Iowa, like many academic institutions (including Brown), catalogs student theses in its library, the graduate dissertations would be subject to the University's new digitization process.
Finding themselves on the producer side of the intellectual property issue, Iowa's students are looking for stricter copyright laws. They are replacing the "Open Access" clause on the university's library license with the phrase "All Rights Reserved."
Does this mean the generation that championed Napster is changing its mind about open source ideals the moment it's us - and not big corporations - who stand to gain financially from exclusivity?
Take the case of two groups at Harvard and Yale responsible for online versions of the board game, Risk, with maps of college campuses. Hugo van Vuuren of "Kirkland North" and Brad Hargreaves of "GoCrossCampus" each claim they had the "original" idea, yet both groups appropriated as much from Hasbro's Risk game as either did from each other. But now that they're about to graduate and trying to make a buck, exclusivity looks appealing.
Or, consider gossip site JuicyCampus. Like IvyGate and Gawker, JuicyCampus is a Web site where students can post their (and others') sexual antics and incriminating photographs. And although the Web site's official rules forbid contributors from submitting libelous or obscene content, JuicyCampus is unconcerned with enforcement. The New Jersey Consumer Affairs office is investigating JuicyCampus for fraud, arguing that the anti-libel rules mislead students into thinking they are safe. But lawyers will have a hard time stopping JuicyCampus, since students need not be contributors (those legally covered by the Web site's rulebook) to be slandered on its pages.
Notably, many of the complaints have come in from juniors and seniors about to enter the job market who have told reporters at the New York Times and the Chronicle of Higher Education that they're worried about what potential employers might think of their JuicyCampus pasts.
Yet these same students likely tagged drunken photos of themselves on Facebook as freshmen and sophomores. And while Facebook used to be a walled community that corporate headhunters couldn't access, that wall broke down last year. Since then, I've seen more and more of my peers restrict their profiles and seek to reclaim the privacy and exclusivity we rejected as teens.
That these incidents are all happening at once, just as I'm about to graduate from Brown, has me thinking there's a bit of generational change taking place. The first batch of students to have Facebook throughout college is graduating: For the first time, the Facebook generation is no longer America's student generation. Does that mean the end of our student ideals? Is selling out simply part of growing up?
Some older observers - our parents - can perhaps enjoy a knowing chuckle over all this. Their generation - hippie students who graduated college in the 1970s - decided to stop "sticking it to the man" when they needed the man to employ them. They became America's middle-class establishment, the suburban uber-parents David Brooks derides as bourgeois-bohemians. Watching our generation reclaim privacy and exclusivity in the effort to make our public selves employable, I wonder if we're following their pattern.
Indeed, the only thing scarier than the slander on JuicyCampus is the thought that I'm turning into my mother.
Maha Atal '08 believes history repeats itself
is a member of the 
