You never brought up the fact that you don’t have *quite* as much power as the government?

Joey Headset: “Because, as a person who is on the internet, white and not gay, I understand that the greatest atrocity that as ever been perpetrated against humankind is the offhand possibility that somebody has access to my cellphone records.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man

And I see no parallel between what privacy I should expect as an individual and what my government should claim.

Would you mind elaborating on why the standards for government and academia (or other non-government entities) would need to be similar? Governments already have special powers–why isn’t that enough to justify more accountability (and the additional transparency needed to demonstrate that accountability)?

a) More transparency is reassuring because it reveals that many professional conversations would withstand the scrutiny of everyone except cranks and assholes, who would be cranks and assholes whether they see the real deal or not. This was something I was noting on social media this summer about MI5 files in the UK archives–the MI5 people come off really pretty well a lot of the time, especially compared to the little tinpot bureaucratic assholes who keep reporting people to them. Same in a few State Department files I was looking at in July–at the height of the Cold War a lot of their staffers are keeping a pretty cool head when ordinary folks write to them to try and fink out a neighbor because he was modestly interested in Russia or some such.

b) I think the dilemma is not whether we’d like to see what people say about us in confidential files but whether we’d be willing to say what we need to say if we had to say it straight to someone in a professional context. Academics may have more reluctance to do this for both good reasons and bad reasons. The good reasons stem from teaching, which is not a supervisory or straightforwardly hierarchical relation–we recognize that as in a therapeutic relationship, you may not be entitled to tell all students exactly what you think of them. But there is a big ethical and emotional range in that relationship–some faculty do brilliant, beautiful jobs as teachers by delivering the hard news without apologies or reservations. The bad reasons may be that we like to act like our professional world is flat and lacking in hierarchy, which in some ways it is and some ways it isn’t at all. Being unpracticed in face-to-face assessment is a way to efface the ways that it isn’t.

I do like the idea of transparency. I’ve been privy to confidential conversations about various decisions. And then have had colleagues assume some kind of conspiracy when actually it was nothing of the sort. In fact, it’s usually completely innocuous. I think when organizations aren’t transparent, that’s what happens. People assume bad things are going on and/or the organization decides it can do bad things because “no one will find out.”