A First Amendment group sued Texas Governor Greg Abbott and others on Thursday over the state’s TikTok ban on official devices, arguing the prohibition – which extends to public universities – is unconstitutional and impedes academic freedom.
Yeah it’s very confusing to agree with them because they are right for the wrong reasons.
TikTok is a security nightmare - I work in IT so I know a little about this. But the idea that a work owned device has restrictions about what can be installed is nothing new. Now I do work in IT but also in academia, so you know how you get around this? Grant money. Go buy whatever device you want and it’s not university/state government owned.
This looks like a cherry picked problem to make a stink about something not important. Texas has much bigger issues that need dealt with.
But with that being said fuck TikTok.
Scientist here. Unfortunately who owns the device really depends on the funding source. If the money is coming from one of the bigger funders (NSF, NIH etc) the devices are usually still owned by the university and their rules apply.
The TikTok problem is real. She needs to access the content that’s being produced to do her research. If she has to go to other or secondary sources (TikToks uploaded to YouTube or whatever) that will impact the quality of her research, which may make it less reliable.
I’m currently struggling with a similar but less severe issue. My university has, in their limited wisdom, decided to stop allowing us to purchase gaming computers. I do games research, so that’s obviously a bit of a problem.
Gaming computers? Really? I work for our distance education dept (well it’s called digital education now since pretty much everything has on online component) and we have a group doing lots of 3D media creation (3D scanning, virtual environments,etc). Guess what that requires? High end gaming machines. It seems a little short sighted by your university. Luckily we don’t have bean counters scrutinizing every purchase like that. Man would that get annoying.
I guess I’m starting to realize how good we have it hearing about all these weird restrictions being placed on purchases.
The powers that be seem to be under the impression that workstation class computers are suitable replacements, while failing to realize that those are several times more expensive for the same performance and also mired in a whole mess of driver issues.
It’s basically a clusterfuck. I know the dean and his staff are working to solve the problem, but we’ll see how that turns out. Hopefully the magical words “impacts student success” and “inability to acquire grants” will work.
