Thus:

• UK lecturers refuse to spy on students (Press Esc)

Spying on students?  No, we’re not talking about running their code through Google to detect plagiarism:

University and College Union, the main trade body trade union and professional association for higher educators, resolved to “To resist attempts by government to engage colleges and universities in activities which amount to increased surveillance of Muslim or other minority students and to the use of members of staff for such witch-hunts,” at their annual congress held in Bournemouth.

The motion comes in response to British government’s new guidelines that make it compulsory for universities to keep a watchful eye on Muslim students, and immediately report any suspicious behaviour to the authorities.

So now the government’s making it compulsory for people to “immediately report any suspicious behaviour” they see.  Very nice — someone’s been getting into the literary history of his (or her) country:

 Nearly all children nowadays were horrible. What was worst of all was that by means of such organizations as the Spies they were systematically turned into ungovernable little savages, and yet this produced in them no tendency whatever to rebel against the discipline of the Party. On the contrary, they adored the Party and everything connected with it. The songs, the processions, the banners, the hiking, the drilling with dummy rifles, the yelling of slogans, the worship of Big Brother — it was all a sort of glorious game to them. All their ferocity was turned outwards, against the enemies of the State, against foreigners, traitors, saboteurs, thought-criminals. It was almost normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children. And with good reason, for hardly a week passed in which The Times did not carry a paragraph describing how some eavesdropping little sneak — ‘child hero’ was the phrase generally used — had overheard some compromising remark and denounced its parents to the Thought Police.

The careful reader will have no trouble figuring out whence I quoted that.

Nil desperandum, though — the present British government doesn’t seem capable of thoroughly indoctrinating enough people to get them voluntarily to spy upon their neighbours, so instead it tries to compel the unwilling into sneaky little acts of eavesdropping.  As the UCU have shown, that’s an unreliable strategy.