A group of Stanford professors are fighting back against a woke tattle-tale tool that lets students anonymously report each other for discrimination.
More than 75 professors argue in a petition to school administrators that the online tool threatens free speech on campus, with one telling the Wall Street Journal it reminded him of systems in place in the Soviet Union and China.
The Maxient reporting system, employed at 1,300 institutions around the country, has already been challenged by free speech advocates in Florida, Texas, Michigan and Oklahoma.
It has apparently made Aaron Hark, 42, a millionaire, owning a $900,000 dollar home in Charlottesville, Virginia, with his family’s own vineyard.
Hark set up the firm with wife Celeste, 41, with the pair now enjoying the fruits of their woke online hall monitor software in more ways than one.
Back at Stanford, school administrators say the system is necessary to ensure a respectful campus, despite criticism that it is creepy and Orwellian.
The school has been using the third-party system since 2021, when it became widely used at universities across the country for students to report their colleagues who were not wearing masks.
But university professors said they did not know of the system, run by third-party contractor Maxient, until the school newspaper reported on an incident in which a student was reported for reading Mein Kampf.
‘I was stunned,’ Russell Berman, a professor of comparative literature who created the petition, told the Journal. ‘It reminds me of McCarthyism.’
According to the company’s website, Maxient is the ‘software of choice for managing behavior records at colleges and universities across North America.
‘Our centralized reporting and record-keeping helps institutions connect the dots and prevent students from falling through the cracks,’ it says, noting: ‘Maxient serves as an integral component of many schools overall early alert efforts, helping to identify students in distress and coordinate the efforts of various departments to provide follow-up.’
Maxient was founded in 2003 and is now being used at more than 1,300 institutions across the United States.
Hellbound and Down 