Privacy, Ethics, and Institutional Research

Despite widespread agreement that privacy in the context of education is important, it can be difficult to pin down precisely why and to what extent it is important, and it is challenging to determine how privacy is related to other important values. But that task is crucial. Absent a clear sense of what privacy is, it will be difficult to understand the scope of privacy protections in codes of ethics. Moreover, privacy will inevitably conflict with other values, and understanding the values that underwrite privacy protections is crucial for addressing conflicts between privacy and institutional efficiency, advising efficacy, vendor benefits, and student autonomy. My task in this paper is to seek a better understanding of the concept of privacy in institutional research, canvas a number of important moral values underlying privacy generally (including several that are explicit in the AIR Statement), and examine how those moral values should bear upon institutional research by considering several recent cases

Downscaling Lamentation: On Trope and Fratricide

It is not clear whether poignant and pained acts of utterance, such as those contained by lamentation, belong to performance or rather indicate the refusal of performance. By its very nature lamentation must disavow its performative value, for no rhetoric is adequate to the sorrow that it seeks to carry. Lamentation is burdened by its very ability to say pain since it involves the language of the unsayable. It is as if lamentation could not afford to indulge a stance of melancholic jouissance, a kind of pleasure effect taken in the very expression of its suffering. Pervasive, yet largely abandoned to its own fate as sub-genre and phenomenon, lamentation has no secure place in philosophical discourse. This is all the more perplexing since philosophy has never been shy about confronting the edges of pain, fear, terror, and trembling. In any case, philosophy abdicates its hold on liminal affect, turning the materials of lament over to the authority of music. Language does not want to let go, however, striking a compromise with music by reverting, in critical phases, to furtive expressions such as the echo and the murmur