Professor John Hoopla is one of the most successful teachers at Kenyon, having taught political science for nearly two decades "On the Hill." His students and his colleagues respect his teaching and scholarship; many of his students have graduated to fill positions of great responsibility. John is liberal-minded and enjoys having his students probe challenging issues independently, in depth. For the past decade, John has required his students in "American Political Tradition" to write 10-12 page term papers in which they devise and analyze a political situation. This has been a tough but popular assignment which, in 1997, became even more popular with the students when John decided that the final papers would be presented to his department on the web.
John's course attracts many first year students, some of which were excited about the opportunity to demonstrate their skills in web publishing, and some of which were anxious about the imminent experience. While the class generally had not yet had time to understand the campus culture in this first semester, they took to the assignment with enthusiasm.
In November, as John gathered first drafts of the papers (there were 23 students in the class!), he could tell that he had some firebrands in the group. Some of the drafts showed great analytic and writing skills, while others were borderline for taste if not content. One such marginal draft, from Will, imagined that an unnamed mayor of a small town had been accused of fiscal misconduct. Professor Hoopla encouraged Will to be cautious about his handling of the subject, for ultimately, the department would read Will's final draft. Will was not the most compliant student; he had rebuked authority more than once already in this, his first semester. But Will took Prof. Hoopla's advice, for now.
All 23 papers were installed on the campus web server in time for the departmental presentations. No one beyond the department faculty and majors were present, and in fact, very few knew about the presentations. All went smoothly, including Will's presentation. At least, all went well that day.
During the semester break, while students and faculty alike were enjoying some deserved quiet time, Thomas Hearty, mayor of suburban Midlake, Ohio, was surfing the 'Net. He started at the Kenyon web site, his alma mater. As a trustee of the College, he remained a strong moral and financial supporter of the College. He searched for his name on the site and failed to find it, but when he searched for the term "mayor" he found a dozen pages, many of which mentioned his work on behalf of the College. The top-most page, however, was titled "Mayor Hardly responds to charges of impropriety," and drew his immediate attention. While Will's term paper was not announced, and had no direct web links from the Kenyon web pages to it, the mayor had found it. Despite the simple change in the spelling of the mayor's last name, Will's scenario clearly connected this fictitious political scandal to the real mayor and trustee of the College. While nothing slanderous was said, much of the web site was in poor taste when read outside of the context of the course (in which it earned Will a B-). Clearly, while Prof. Hoopla had intended for only his department to read these papers, others, even those off-campus, could find the papers with keyword searches.
Mayor Hearty phones the president who tells the webmaster to remove the paper from the web server. Now there are 22 papers on the web from Prof. Hoopla's American Political Tradition.
On January 17, as Will and his roommate are preparing to register for second semester classes, Will discovers that his paper, and only his paper, has been removed. Deleted apparently from the web server. Will's instinct is to challenge immediately the authority who has selected out his paper, and with thoughts of a legal battle over censorship.
After a moment to reflect, Will decides simply that he will repost his paper on the computer he owns, the one connected to the campus Internet domain through his SNAP+ network connection. He kept an electronic copy of the lastest version anyway. Within 30 minutes, Will's political scenario about "Mayor Hardly" was back on the 'Net, and accessible to anyone on the Internet. He contemplated spending 5 minutes to register his paper with the SubmitIT! service. SubmitIT! would make sure the paper was indexed in the top 50 search engines like Yahoo and AltaVista. He wasn't that proud of the paper so instead he inserted a few "meta tags" in the title - keywords that would surely attract attention to his experience with what he felt was censorship.
What happens next?