Smart University: Student Surveillance in the Digital Age

How surveillance perpetuates long-standing injustices woven into the fabric of higher education.

Higher education increasingly relies on digital surveillance in the United States. Administrators, consulting firms, and education technology vendors are celebrating digital tools as a means of ushering in the age of ＂smart universities.＂ By digitally monitoring and managing campus life, institutions can supposedly run their services more efficiently, strengthen the quality of higher education, and better prepare students for future roles in the digital economy. Yet in practice, these initiatives often perpetuate austerity, structural racism, and privatization at public universities under the guise of solving higher education’s most intractable problems.

In Smart University, Lindsay Weinberg evaluates how this latest era of tech solutions and systems in our schools impacts students’ abilities to access opportunities and exercise autonomy on their campuses. Using historical and textual analysis of administrative discourses, university policies, conference proceedings, grant solicitations, news reports, tech industry marketing materials, and product demonstrations, Weinberg argues that these more recent transformations are best understood as part of a longer history of universities supporting the development of technologies that reproduce racial and economic injustice on their campuses and in their communities.

For anyone concerned with the future of surveillance on higher education, Smart University empowers readers with the knowledge, tools, and frameworks for contesting and reimagining the role of digital technology on university campuses.

Lindsay Weinberg (WEST LAFAYETTE, IN) is a clinical assistant professor and the Director of the Tech Justice Lab in the John Martinson Honors College at Purdue University.