Saturday, February 18, 2006

Northwestern's Butz loses his University website... and so does everyone else at NWU

Northwestern University announced that it was shutting down all faculty and student personal websites in the near future.

Officially the reason was because there was little use of this service and there are now many places where people can post personal materials.

Unofficially, this offers Northwestern a way out of one aspect of their Butz problem. He was using his personal website to deny the Holocaust. The university could not shut him down without shutting lots of other people down. Therefore -- until now -- it did nothing.

In the article in the Daily Northwestern one student expressed his dismay at this development. The Northwestern site, he said, provided "credibility" that other sites did not have because they were not university sites.

This may have been precisely the reason the sites will soon be history. As often as the university stated that it did not - in any manner, shape or form -- endorse what was on Butz's site, people still associated his denial with the university itself.

Ciao to the websites.

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