In previous articles, members of the Faculty Organization for Human Rights have expressed their concerns about collateral damage caused by the current administration’s focus on war as the answer to terrorism. We are not only concerned about Iraqi civilians, but about civilian rights at home. Today, I focus on Homeland Security and its collateral damage on campus.

Our campus is being secured. Whether it will lead to a more secure campus remains an open question.

On April 16, 2003, Chancellor Carnesale notified the campus community that “future circumstances may require that staff and faculty provide positive identification and confirmation of their UCLA affiliation in order to obtain and maintain access to university buildings and services. Therefore, effective June 1, 2003, all faculty and staff will be required to obtain a UCLA Bruin Card and to carry it with them when on university property.”

Specific and apparently systematic measures are being taken in response to vaguely articulated concerns, and the justification given is that they are “not unlike such requirements at other colleges and universities nationwide.”

Left out is any suggestion of how the immediate requirement for us to carry a Bruin Card and the impending requirement to show it to gain access to buildings and services is intended to make anyone any safer. From what threats and how will these measures protect us? How was this decision arrived at, and in consultation with whom?

Perhaps the manner in which an expanded ID system leads to enhanced security on campus is self-evident, and I am stupidly missing the obvious. But I find that each possibility for how such a system might increase security seems tenuous at best, and disturbingly intrusive at worst.

For example, one use of such a system might be to allow computerized analysis of patterns of activity or access. Such systems are currently being developed under the TIA program (originally Total Information Awareness, now Terrorism Information Awareness) of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). TIA intends to create a system for mining data from massive databases compiled from all manner of communications, transactions and records of U.S. citizens and others.

Whatever the reasons for establishing on-campus ID and access systems, it would be very useful to have an explicit rationale to consider.

Professor Neil Postman of NYU has shown that the education we receive includes both explicit and implicit components. The explicit component is the subject matter of our particular courses. The implicit component includes the social and institutional relationships that are the daily experience of each person.

The implicit component has to do with who determines what to do, how to do it, when to do it, under what conditions, what constitutes success, what will be allowed, what will not be allowed, and how differences of opinion about these issues will be resolved. In short, what we learn is our institutional role. This is what our university teaches every day. And the implicit component is a major factor in how we learn about our relationship to the larger society.

Given this implicit education, two questions arise in the context of the changes coming in the name of “security.” First, will these changes alter the experience of being part of the campus community, and, if so, how? Second, what social relationships are “taught” via the creation of these security measures? Related to this second question is whether the conduct of the university in establishing security measures promotes our role as meaningful participants in a democratic society.

The answer to the first question seems clear. Increased security measures and the requirement to show ID to access buildings and services should increase the sense of distinction between who belongs and who does not. It will first increase the awareness of being monitored, and then lead, through monotonous familiarity, to habituation to such monitoring. In addition, it may heighten the sense that we live under threat and that outsiders, in particular, constitute a threat.

The second question is partly answered above. The social roles of the authorized and unauthorized will be highlighted.

But, more importantly, what does this teach us about our role in the decisions that affect our daily experience in society? The lesson may be appropriate to the world we live in: administrations will make such decisions and will inform us of their implementation.

This is not dissimilar to what occurred in the passage of the little debated “Patriot” Act, signed into law by President Bush on October 26, 2001.

Given that further legislation is coming that will continue to expand the surveillance and detention powers of the government (e.g. the Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003, a.k.a. Patriot Act II), it seems a good time to consider what our experience within the campus community will teach us about our role in the larger community.

It is my hope that members of our community will develop an interest in becoming active partners with the administration in discussing security measures, evaluating how they will affect us, and examining the ways in which they are intended to make us more secure.

Dr. David Adelson is associate member of CURE – the Center for Ulcer Research and Education.