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<\/p>\nThe Department of Justice pressured UC Berkeley into deleting massive amounts of free online content<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Government regulations claimed another win against the public last week after the University of California, Berkeley announced plans to cut public access to over 20,000 videos and podcasts.<\/p>\n
Two employees from a Washington, D.C School for the Deaf filed a complaint with the Justice Department alleging that the free content offered by Berkeley was inaccessible to the deaf community. After a short investigation, the department determined that the university had in fact violated the Americans with Disabilities Act.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn many cases the requirements proposed by the department would require the university to implement extremely expensive measures to continue to make these resources available to the public for free,\u201d wrote Cathy Koshland<\/a>, vice chancellor for undergraduate education.<\/p>\n \u201cWe believe that in a time of substantial budget deficits and shrinking state financial support, our first obligation is to use our limited resources to support our enrolled students. Therefore, we must strongly consider the unenviable option of whether to remove content from public access.\u201d<\/p>\n Last week\u2019s disclosure confirms that Berkeley will no longer provide free access to tens of thousands of educational videos. The content is now only available to students\u00a0lucky enough to enrolled at the university.<\/p>\n The ADA wasn\u2019t intended for such use. The public shouldn\u2019t have to lose an invaluable resource because some members are unable to take advantage of it. In recent years tuition prices spiked while wages remained stagnant. College is too expensive for many Americans.<\/p>\n Two employees of Gallaudet University, a school for the deaf and hard of hearing, complained to the DOJ that the free content provided by Berkeley wasn\u2019t accessible to the deaf population<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Free online courses are a godsend to many families. Education should be available to every citizen; money shouldn\u2019t be the litmus test used to determine who goes to college.<\/p>\n \u201cToday, the content is available to the public on YouTube, iTunes U and the university\u2019swebcast.berkeley<\/a> site. On March 15, the university will begin removing the more than 20,000 audio and video files from those platforms \u2014 a process that will take three to five months \u2014 and require users sign in with University of California credentials to view or listen to them,\u201d reports Inside Higher Education<\/a>.<\/p>\n As usual, government regulations have done far more harm than good. Everybody loses with this decision. The ADA wasn\u2019t used to the advantage of disabled Americans; instead it was wielded as a weapon against everyday citizens.<\/p>\n The National Association of the Deaf has so far refused to comment.<\/p>\n The Justice Department\u2019s decision may reverberate far beyond the Berkeley case. The ruling imperils all online education systems. Equality is a sticky subject. It doesn\u2019t always look the same for everyone. Ensuring that the content was ADA compliant might have cost Berkeley millions of dollars.<\/p>\n Higher education remains inaccessible to many American families<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cI can\u2019t imagine the authors of the ADA intended to destroy a valuable public resource because it wasn\u2019t perfectly accessible to all, but here we are. Taking the quality <\/em>out ofequality<\/em>: that\u2019s clumsy federal regulation for you,\u201d writes Reason\u2019s Robby Soave<\/a>.<\/p>\n Not all of the ruling\u2019s consequences are immediately apparent. Creating barriers to online education disproportionately harms lower-income students.<\/p>\n Liberal zeal for equality at all costs lacks nuance. If the two disgruntled university employees who complained about Berkeley\u2019s free content really cared about improving the lives of the deaf, they would have focused their efforts on getting the videos transcribed rather than deleted.<\/p>\n \u201cThis move will also partially address recent findings by the Department of Justice, which suggests that the YouTube and iTunes\u00a0U content meet higher accessibility standards as a condition of remaining publicly available,\u201d Cathy Koshland said. \u201cFinally, moving our content behind authentication allows us to better protect instructor intellectual property from \u2018pirates\u2019 who have reused content for personal profit without consent.\u201d<\/p>\n Perhaps the only beneficiaries of the government\u2019s meddling are the university\u2019s professors. Allowing only students to access recorded lectures obviously reduces the risk that an instructor\u2019s teachings will be re-posted. A professor who teaches live classes will also likely make more money than a professor who favors online lessons.<\/p>\n Ironically Berkeley\u2019s free content was marvelous in part because it could potentially reach so many. Anyone with an internet connection could access lectures given by some of most prestigious professors in the world.<\/p>\n UC Berkeley students receive a world-class education. The PC crowd ruined the school\u2019s attempt to let the pubic share in that knowledge<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Over regulation isn\u2019t confined to Washington. Europe suffers from many of the same problems. The PC crowd continues to swell in numbers.<\/p>\n \u201cWe are concerned that there is a growing unregulated sector of higher education\u2026\u201d states a report <\/a>composed by Britain\u2019s Higher Education Commission. The authors suggest that schools be forced to pay into an insurance system that would bail out failing institutions.<\/p>\n \u201cMore attention has been paid to regulation recently\u2026But UK higher education has not faced scandals or been bailed out by taxpayers\u2026In fact, the existing piecemeal regulation and set of tacit agreements to do the right thing seems to have operated pretty well for hundreds of years,\u201d writes The Guardian.<\/a><\/p>\n Washington, D.C is infected with rampant special-snowflake syndrome. The DOJ exists to uphold justice, not to trample on the rights of the majority.<\/p>\n![](\"http:\/\/conservativedailypost-guvbvzsunddro8yrw.netdna-ssl.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/GallaudetUniversitySignbyMrTinDCflickr.jpg\")
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