Re: Skateboarding rules!

From: Martin Owen (mowen@rem.bangor.ac.uk)
Date: Mon Aug 06 2001 - 05:54:56 PDT


Bill...

Casual watching of popular television programming tells me that the
Commonwealth of Massachusetts is a litigious place. I suspect external
pressure on the formulation of rules . No doubt your mayor does not want
city funds to be devoted to paying compensation for injured skaters, who
despite protestation of individualism in our culture of blame may well
follow their suit.

I am a lapsed climber. If I injured myself I would never dream of suing
the owner of the mountain. Perhaps I would consider suing the manufacturer
of climbing equipment if my damage was caused by manufacturing or design
fault. With person-made things maybe blame is easy to apportion. So it is
with skateparks. Is it enough to post signs which say "At users own risk"?
I doubt it because of the smart lawyers that are currently available.

Does these apexes of "rules" and "community" come in to play?

In the same way I can see the "point" of my institutional bete noires. I
can not enter into contracts which will lose University money (although
the university itself sanctions a lot of loss making activities - like
teacher training!) thus everything I do has to go through several layers
of financial checks. I can not breach either laws or local agreements on
employment (equal opportunities, advantaging existing employees in
insecure employment etc.) thus everything I do has to go through a
personnel check. I can not set up servers which may breech firewalls that
allow the university to be a "bouncing" point for unacceptable mail
services. I will not even begin to comment about the whole apparatus of
academic accountability bureaucracy.

From a university point of view all this is very reasonable. However it is
about protecting the institution and not the work of the institution.
There is a parallel with the external rules imposed on the skatepark. The
university (the admin) seems not to be accountable to me or my clients (
funders or students) in these checks and processes. Therein lies the rub.

It was once suggested that universities should go much further in this
direction- that only the admin should exist. everything else should be out
to tender. Academics or groups of academics should tender services for
supplying teaching. Research is undertaken by autonomous research
institutes. I am not sure how this model applies to skateparks.

Martin

"A big Hi to all you sentient beings out there. For the rest of you, the
trick is to bang the rocks together."
D.N.Adams (1952-2001)



This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Oct 01 2001 - 01:01:58 PDT