Re: robust software

[Bernard Cleyet <anngeorg@PACBELL.NET>]

Back in the early seventies, I met a US citizen teaching in Cuba who reported
similarly, except instead of the ITs being king it was the students They had a
great amount of influence on hiring and firing.

bc

Arnulfo Castellanos Moreno wrote:

> This point has been a big surprise for me.
> I live in Mexico, working in an autonomous
> university where academic freedom is very important,
> but reaching an extreme position, so that every one
> can do everything as he wants.
>
> In his office room each teacher use windows or linux.
> Fortran or C, eudora or outlook, etc...
>
> No legal action can be done against you if you work
> with your own academic material. A lot of teachers
> take their computers (laptop) to the house, where they continue
> with their work, to come back with some advance after
> a weekend. Our institution get free colaboration because
> teachers are working out of the campus.
>
> As a consequence of this freedom, two years ago,
> our main administratives decided to buy a filter for
> internet to avoid students and teachers watching "porno"
> through the computers in the campus.
> Something similar to a father in his home.
>
> Except for that, I feel that this is a better situation in some sense, but a
> bad in another: a lot of freedom give us some chaotic
> aspects of our academic work.
>
> Arnulfo Castellanos-Moreno

cut