This past January, activist and world-renowned computer genius Aaron Swartz took his own life. Though his passing was mourned around the world, it particularly resonated with many in our own community, as he was the partner of Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, daughter of two professors here at DePauw.
At the time of his death, Swartz was facing 35 years in prison and exorbitant fines for downloading millions of articles from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's academic databases. He was a staunch supporter of the free flow of information through the Internet and garnered national attention for the issue of open access policies.
Though they're unique to fit the needs of each individual institution, open access policies are overall intended to enable members of academic communities to publish their work online for anyone to use without a pay wall or password.
I'll admit-I've been in denial about the dreaded "G-word," afraid to leave DePauw behind in May. But graduation means losing more than just proximity to Marvin's. While my waistline may benefit from fewer MacBites, I see no intellectual benefit to losing my access to the thousands of academic articles available at my fingertips as a DePauw student.
As Ellen Kobe reported earlier this year, around 85 percent of DePauw's library operating budget goes to pay for journal subscriptions. Some carry a yearly price tag equivalent to a brand new car. We hardly hear about this, and we seldom think of how many people around the world are excluded from the information we have at our fingertips - albeit, only for these four years.
For me, this raises several questions. The first of which - why do we have such an exclusionary culture within academia in the first place? If an important discovery is made, and articles are written, shouldn't we all be able to share in our understanding of this new knowledge, regardless of financial situation or institutional affiliation? Can, and should, we consider intellectual property a public commodity?
Granted, there are important factors to consider in this debate. How could this kind of infrastructure be established - both from a practical economic as well as a philosophical standpoint - without diminishing the validity and caliber of academic work? And if academic literature were available to everyone with an Internet connection, how would this free exchange of information change the value we place on a formal education?
Open access has the ability to fundamentally and radically shift the way we educate ourselves in society as a whole. It's time to begin a discourse on what this could mean for DePauw. Our community is fortunate to have think-groups like the Prindle Institute, who will address the issue of open access policies at a panel on Monday, April 29 at 4 p.m. Hopefully, we can begin to work to answer these complex ethical questions. And as more and more universities - including Harvard, Princeton, Hope, Oberlin and more - are adopting some form of an open access policy, we need to examine the benefits and drawbacks of a system like this at DePauw.
This is about something greater than just us. We can't let Aaron Swartz's legacy fade away at an institution with such ties to his genius.
- Bremer is a senior from Clarendon Hills, Ill. majoring in communication.