Word: bursars
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...Stephen S.J. Hall, vice president for administration. He is someone who is in a position usually blessed with total anonymity in a university--yet at Harvard, Hall just can't keep himself out of the news. He is front-page copy almost weekly. Whether mis-ordering storm windows, authorizing bursar cards that would require palm prints to cut down on the number of people passing them around, or airing dirty linen in the faces of other administrators, Hall is constantly at center stage--he's the Mrs. Malaprop of bureaucrats...
...Identimation system is designed to prevent people from lending their bursar's cards to people who are not on board plans...
...point of view he would be right. A machine that records the shape and transparency of your fingers on a strip of magnetic tape--no central files are kept, so the authorities don't know anything about your hand--is no more invidious than the cameras they use for bursar cards now. People who don't balk at showing an ID card every time they want to get into the dining room or the library stacks should have no qualms about hand prints. It's the same principle. The new system is only a way of letting a michine...
Harvard is different from Leavenworth, in any case. One imagines that if Leavenworth had identimats they would be used on different sorts of occasions. Around here a bursar card, with or without hand print, is a mark of privilege--let's face it, you pay $5000 a year so that you and not somebody with a different shaped hand can have Harvard's food and library books. Charging totalitarianism when your palm is scanned in the Harvard dining halls is no more reasonable than complaining when a bank teller checks your signature before handing over the money...
...have to carry around ID cards with photographs on them, there is comfort to be found in their blurry unrecognizability. There are some liberties we've given up in principle to have in fact. If the identination program is only a more efficient version of the old bursar card, that alone is reason enough to be wary...