Word: identimats
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Identimat machine checked to see if a student's hand print matched a pre-coded picture of that hand print on the back of the bursar's card...
With the arrival last week of a set of "Identimat" handprint encoding machines and the narrowly aborted threat that our hands would be scanned electronically every time we are. It seemed to many people as thought the shadow of the Police State had passed over Harvard. One University vice-president voiced a general sentiment when he said that the new machines would be more appropriate in Leavenworth than in the Freshman Union, and he was expressing more than just a personal feeling of outrage--his reaction betrayed the sure instinct of a public relations officer confronted with botulism...
...thing is that Hall has reason on his side. If you ignore his less-than-deft handling of the whole affair and set aside the question of why he didn't simply tell the checkers to look more carefully at people's bursar card photographs, the Identimat plan begins to make a certain amount of sense. It's possible that Hall did his thinking on a purely financial basis and failed to consider anything else, but it's also possible that he decided rationally that the hand-print machines were ideologically innocent...
...reason speaks for the Identimat, unreason has to have its say, too. It may be unjustified, it may be silly to look at the hand-print machines in their Harvard context and automatically think of thumb-screws and firing squads, but the connotations of the machine are no less real for being illogical, identimats in the food lines make Harvard that much more faceless and mechanical, and worse: No amount of ratiocination can cover up the first could smell of the thing when you put your hand...
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