COMMENTARY

For Using Copyright As A Tool For Academic Censorship, The Muzzle Award Goes To Yale University

In January 2014, 1,418 Yale students organized their class schedules for the upcoming semester on Yale Bluebook+, a student-created online course catalogue and rating system. But on the first day of classes, students discovered that Yale administrators had shut the site down. Why? Because Yale didn’t approve of the way the website used course evaluation information.

Yale University Wikimedia Commons

Before the site’s sudden disappearance, an administrator sent an email to undergraduate developers Peter Xu and Harry Yu citing myriad reasons why Yale Bluebook+ was “a big problem.” The website was “making [Yale College] course evaluation available to many who are not authorized to view the information” and—in a bizarre invocation of copyright law—may have been improperly using the Yale logo and the words “Yale” and “Bluebook.”

Xu and Yu immediately responded and offered to make any and all changes to their website that the college deemed necessary. In response, Yale blocked it; the error message on the page even condemned Yale Bluebook+ as “malicious activity on the Yale networks.”

The real reason administrators shut down their site, Xu and Yu believe, is because it allowed students to sort their classes by ratings. The Yale-operated online course catalogue, by contrast, was “clunky” and made it difficult for students to see how past students evaluated specific courses.

Perhaps Yale was pouting because Xu and Yu’s website was more popular than theirs (it was), or because they didn’t like the idea of students choosing courses based on their popularity. Either way, Yale’s removal of Yale Bluebook+ earns it a 2013-2014 Muzzle Award because the college demonstrated a lack of commitment to its own claimed mission “to create, preserve, and disseminate knowledge.” But maybe Yale has a copyright on “knowledge” too.