George Washington University has established a "compliance hotline." Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, you can call in and leave anonymous tips about the misdeeds, real or imagined, of students, faculty and staff. It's a win-win situation all around. The University can keep tabs on campus conduct, whistleblowers don't have to fear retaliation, and anyone who likes can have a ball smearing reputations, spreading lies, and making the kinds of false charges that can ruin careers. Personally, I'm very impressed. What could be better for campus harmony--not to mention personal entertainment--than a no-strings-attached compliance hotline?

But for some reason, the GWU faculty don't see it that way. They are up in arms about the hotline, charging that it infringes on academic freedom and denies due process to the accused, who will not only never know the identity of their accuser, but who will not even be informed if they are the targets of anonymous "tips." These people clearly do not appreciate the extent of wrongdoing on their campus, nor do they recognize the climate of threat and fear that requires students and faculty to assume the mantle of anonymity when reporting the traumas, harassments, marginalizations, and criminal acts that make GWU such an unsafe space for those who work and study there. They are also humorless, incapable of appreciating the carnivalesque potential of their hotline to become an agent of massive non-compliance. It should be obvious that the compliance hotline was created in the true spirit of postmodern play, that far from controlling behavior and chilling expression, it is an instrument of resistance, an electronic deconstruction of the concept of the "prison-house of language" guaranteed to produce torrents of the very subversive, transgressive behavior it presumes to prevent. It should also be obvious that this engine of resistance is radically egalitarian in the best, most multicultural sense: since complaints are registered by disembodied, unnamed sources, the compliance hotline models a colorblind utopian community where all are heard, none are silenced, and where everyone has found his or her voice. What's not to love?

Nonetheless, the faculty outrage is being taken seriously. FIRE has gotten involved in the case. You can read FIRE's letter to the University president, along with articles from the student paper, The Washington Times, and GWU law professor John Banzhaf on FIRE's website. Banzhof has launched a hilarious Web site to protest GWU's patently Orwellian behavior at gwlaw.info/e-rat.html. Check it out--you can make anonymous complaints there about GWU's compliance hotline.