[Reader-list] On Anonymous Notice Boards in Universities

[abhayraj at nls.ac.in]

Hi. This is my second posting on the project entitled ‘The Need for
Anonymous Notice Boards in Universities in Bangalore: An Empirical Study.’
An abstract of the broad framework of this project is available at (last
visited on 15th June, 2004)
http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/2004-January/003363.html.
In light of my technical inadequacy in reproducing TABLE 1 below (which is
crucial to this posting) in a more reader friendly form in this email,
this posting makes a much better read from the Word document [POSTING TWO]
I have attached along with this email. Apologies to all group members for
the bulky size of this email.
As regards current project status, a preliminary literature survey on the
broad areas of free speech, hate speech, and anonymity (with relevance to
universities) has been completed, while the primary thrust of the project,
viz. determination of the existence, characteristics and functioning of
institutional and non-institutional forums for anonymous speech and
expression in a cross-section of universities across Bangalore has begun,
and is well underway. In this posting I shall be focusing on the
background scenario for one primary case-study undertaken, which reflects
a unique phenomenon documented at the National Law School of India
University, Bangalore – the creation [birth] of an institutional anonymous
forum in a scenario where none existed, the operation of the same in a
university setting [life], and the consequent regulation leading to the
eventual termination [death] of the forum (this fascinating trajectory
discernible from the case-study will be extensively detailed in my next
posting.)This posting has three broad parts:
I The Quantified Setting – with a statistical analysis of the notice
boards present in the NLSIU academic block and the nature of student
access to the same.
II Choking of Voice – comments and analysis on the collected data.
III The Poetic Birth, Life, and Death of a Forum for Anonymous Speech –
The contextual introduction to a major case-study undertaken.


I. The Quantified Setting:
As of mid June 2004, the central academic block of the National Law School
of India University, Bangalore boasts a total of 61 notice boards of
varying sizes, locations, colours, and significantly, student access
rules. A detailed listing of the nature of these notice boards along with
relevant access status is provided in Table 1 below.


Table 1:

Sl. No. 	Description of  Notice Board.	Number of Such Boards. Whether Open
Access/Use Available to Students.  Nature of Restriction on Access/Use.

1.	Law & Technology Committee Board.	1	No.	Signature of Committee member
mandatory for all notices put up, which necessary entails only
non-anonymous notices [SEE ENDNOTE 1]  [process hereafter referred to as
vetting ]

2. 	Issuing Library Board.	1	No.	Librarian authorized access only

3. 	‘Law in the News’ Board.	1	No.	Librarian access only.

4.	‘New Arrivals (Books)’ Board.	1	No.	Librarian access only.

5. 	‘Current Journal Contents’ Board.	1	No.	Librarian access only.

6. 	‘Thought for the Day’ Board.	1.	No.	Librarian access only.

7. 	Individual Faculty Notice Boards.	28	No.	Respective faculty  use only.

8. 	Sports Committee/Cultural Committee/Literary and Debating Society
Common Board.	1	No.	Relevant committee vetting required.

9. 	Sports Committee Announcements Boards.	2	No.	Sports Committee vetting
required.

10. 	Undesignated Notice Board currently used for announcements of
university organized activities and conferences.
	1.	No.	University/Administration use only.

11.	University Notices
(Information/General)	1.	No.	University/Administration use only.

12.	Master in Business Law (MBL) Notice Board.	1.	No.	MBL Administration
use only.

13.	Student Bar Association 19(1)(a)  Notice Board.	1.	No.	Student
Advocate Committee vetting required.

14.	Student Groups/Students Notices.	2	No.	Student Bar Association (SBA)
President/Vice-President discretion to remove ‘undesirable’ notices.

15.	Examination Notice Board.	2.	No.	Examination Department use only.

16.	University Notices (Administration).	1	No.	University/Administration
use only.

17.	Law & Society Committee/Campus Development and Management Committee
Common Board.	1	No.	Relevant committee vetting required.

18.	CEERA Notice Board.	1.	No.	CEERA use only.

19.	Library (Journal Section) Notice Board. 	1.	No.	Librarian/University
Access only.

20.	Centre for Child & Law (CCL) Notice Board.	1.	No.	CCL use only.

21.	Centre for Women & Law (CWL) Notice Board.	2.	No.	CWL use only.

22.	The Institute for Law & Ethics in Medicine (TILEM) Notice
Board.	1.	No.	TILEM use only.

23.	Literary and Debating Society ‘Wall Mag’	1.	No.  	Vetting required.

24.	Student Letters/Messages Notice Board.	1.	Unknown. 	Unknown.

25.	Undesignated Board current used for notifying students about
courier/speed-post mail received.	1	Unknown. 	Unknown.

26. 	Class Notice Boards	5.	Unknown. 	Unknown.

Cumulative 	              - 	61	No open access/use –
54.Unknown – 7.	No Access – 45. Vetting Required –
7.President/Vice-President discretion to remove/edit undesirable notices–
2.Unknown – 7.


Tabular Note 1: Open access/use is defined as the absence of
regulation/restriction of any nature on content/source/quality of student
notices along with the absence of any possibility of legitimate
censorship/editing/removal of notices before or after they have been up on
a notice board. This does not include within its ambit restrictions
necessitated by paucity of space or ‘illegitimate’
censorship/editing/removal of notices by ‘unauthorized’ persons.

Tabular Note 2: The entries made in columns 4 and 5 are based on existing
enumerated rules/regulations, prevailing university/student practices and
conventions, general prevailing perceptions, and physical factors such as
presence of a locked casing for the notice board, etc. While denoting a
notice board as one with no open access/use to students, I have considered
the “power to regulate” as opposed to “actual regulation”. Therefore, for
example, while an anonymous notice may, in actuality, be
un-problematically displayed on the notice boards referred to in entries
10 and 23, these boards are denoted as no open access/use above simply
because the SBA President/Vice-President or the Literary & Debating
Society has, in the absence of contrary practice and in light of existing
information, the power to remove such a notice at any stage on account of
its anonymity.

Tabular Note 3: Entries 24, 25, & 26 are denoted ‘unknown’ because no
reasonably conclusive determination may be made as to access status of the
same, in light of the existing information pertaining to the indicia
referred to in Note 2 above,

Tabular Note 4: The notice boards referred to in entries 24, 25 & 26 are
generally unused/empty and do not factually serve as active fora for
student expression.


II The Choking of Voice?
While the multitudes of notices marking the corridors of NLSIU’s academic
block may suggest an active institutional framework promoting student
expression, a closer critical look raises some important facts and
questions. Significantly, of the 61 existing notice boards, students have
access (limited or open; regulated or unregulated) to only 16 boards. Of
these 16 notice boards, 9 boards have clearly identifiable
regulation/restriction rules, which apart from enabling notice-content
regulation also render student anonymity impossible. Of the remaining 7
boards, no conclusive determination of access/use status was possible in
the available time, but their relative desuetude juxtaposed with the
considerable examples of non-institutional [SEE ENDNOTE 2]  anonymous
student expression,[SEE ENDNOTE 3]  is suggestive of the fact that they
too are non-facilitative of anonymous speech. [SEE ENDNOTE 4]  Therefore,
we are faced with a thought-provoking conclusion: there exists no
institutional forum (in the form of a notice board) for anonymous speech
and expression in NLSIU. This conclusion merits contemplation in the light
of several complex deep-rooted factors, of significance, which I must
mention here without going into the extensive detailing of each.
·	The student community in NLSIU, as in most universities in Bangalore,
while being highly pluralistic has a clearly identifiable ‘mainstream’ and
‘fringe’ student population. The relative importance of anonymity to the
student fringe/minority vis-à-vis the majority, in the conceptualized
setting of a university, is significant. [SEE ENDNOTE 5]
·	Hate speech and abusive language, defamatory statements and allegations,
sexually explicit references and caricatures, wrongful information, etc
have been expressed in the past, under the protective shroud of anonymity,
through the several ‘illegitimate’ non-institutional forums for anonymous
speech that I have made reference to earlier (See endnotes ii and iii).
Importantly, a little probing revealed that the prevention of hate speech
and of wrongful information are the primary rationales for the regulation
present in all 9 notice boards referred to in entries 1, 8, 9, 13, 14, 17,
and 23 in Table 1 above.
·	Flowing from the point above, the regulations relevant to the notice
boards permitting limited student access/use are formulated, put in place,
and enforced, by students themselves [in their role as authority wielders
– for example, regulation by the SBA President or by a particular student
committee] and not by the university administration.
·	All anonymous expression has not been derogatory/misleading/offensive.
Consequently, a significant amount of anonymous speech expressed through
non-institutional fora is tolerated and left un-molested. Crucially
though, legitimate anonymous speech through an institutional forum of a
notice board is not possible.
·	The expression of hate speech/undesirable expression through
non-institutional fora is temporally contemporaneous with the regulation
of institutional fora to prevent hate-speech/undesirable expression.
These factors, it is submitted, play an important role in deciding the
ultimate question of whether and to what extent anonymous speech is to be
proscribed/facilitated/permitted/ in university settings, through both
institutional and non-institutional fora.


III The Poetic Birth, Life, and Death of a Forum for Anonymous Speech
Before I conclude this posting, I would like to briefly introduce the
essence of what my next posting shall deal with in a detailed fashion: the
circumstances under which an institutional forum for anonymous speech can
be created, the possible trajectory of operation of such a forum, and the
circumstances under which such a forum is subject to regulation that
eventually mutates its character to one preventing anonymous speech. By
the happy coincidental marriage of my poetic ambitions and my research
objectives, a fascinating case study was presented by the ‘Wall Mag’
operated by the Literary & Debating Society of NLSIU (entry 23 in Table 1
above) in the time period commencing from the first week of April till mid
June, which enabled one to witness a transition from a notice board
implicitly disallowing anonymity [given the general premise that all
committee notice boards in NLSIU require vetting by a member of the
student committee concerned, before student notices may be put up]  to a
notice board facilitating anonymous ‘poetic’ expression to a board
expressly disallowing anonymity, under the influence and incidence of
anonymous and non-anonymous ‘poems’ exhibited thereon in the
above-mentioned period. A detailed report of this phenomenon will be
provided by my next posting, which I expect to be able to send within a
few days.


ENDNOTES

1. The non-anonymity could be either direct, that is, requiring a name or
other identifying mark of the student indicated in the notice as a
pre-requisite to the notice’s authorization by those entitled to give such
authorization, or indirect, that is, the student’s loss of anonymity in
merely approaching the authority-wielder for authorization of her/his
notice.
2. I use the term non-institutional here to refer to those fora for
expression that are not conceived/created/supported/tolerated by the
university and its authority-wielders as forums for expression. Endnote
iii provides illustrations of such non institutional fora.
3. [NON INSTITUTIONAL FORA/ ILLEGITIMATE FORA] Anonymous
writing/illustration on varied student/general issues can be found on the
benches and walls of all five classrooms in the academic block, on the
walls of the men’s and women’s toilets in the academic block, and on the
notices on most notice boards across the academic block. The ‘illegitimacy
‘of such anonymous expression is evidenced by the institutional/authority
responses to the more extreme cases of such anonymous expression – the
graffiti and writing in the men’s toilet on the ground floor has been
freshly painted over, ‘unbearable’ benches and walls are repainted or
replaced, and ‘undesirable anonymous expression’ is regularly
whitened/scored-off from the notices by the appropriate authority
wielders.
4. The point simply being that if someone could anonymously communicate
her/his point by a notice on a widely-read, well-located notice board,
she/he would resort to that notice board instead of laboriously and
illegitimately making use of a bench, wall, or other notice, at risk of
discovery and/or immediate censorship. Of course, it is conceded that such
analysis wont stand with regard to the small proportion of confirmed
bathroom/bench/notice graffiti aficionados.
5. Apt at this juncture would be a short reference to the tale regarding
the creation of the central 19(1)(a) notice board, which currently serves
as one of the most active forums for student expression on the NLSIU
campus. Almost 15 years ago, at a time when no student notice board
existed in NLSIU, an anonymous notice drawing attention to the growing
elitism in the NLSIU community was found on an administrative notice
board. In the furore that followed, one of the several issues that
unfolded was the need for a forum for student expression. Consequently,
19(1)(a) was born.


I look forward to any comments, suggestions or information. I can be
contacted at abhayraj at nls.ac.in

Abhayraj Naik
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