A L S O_ T O D A Y

Slaves to the game
By Isaac Zaur
Once the violent world of video games seeped into our friendships, there was no going back

Comics
Sternelli's madness, Burroughs' secret: Our dark trilogy concludes -- for now

------------An Internet inquisition?

WHEN A UNIVERSITY OF OREGON ANTHROPOLOGY MAJOR USED THE SCHOOL'S COMPUTERS TO FOLLOW PAGANISM AND SATANISM NEWSGROUPS, THE LAST THING HE EXPECTED WAS RELIGIOUS DISCRIMINATION.

Craig Hunt, an anthropology major at the University of Oregon, uses the Internet to keep up with such abstruse interests as Satanism, paganism and Barbra Streisand. Logging on to his university computer account recently, he was surprised to discover that some of his favorite newsgroups were missing. Alt.pagan, alt.magick and alt.satanism had been deleted. Hunt soon learned that Joe St. Sauver, the assistant director of the computer center, had dropped them from the university's list of 35,000 newsgroups -- and he wasn't putting them back. Since the university carried 18 other occult-related newsgroups, such as alt.divination, alt.astrology and alt.atheism.satire, St. Sauver considered the deleted groups redundant.

Hunt and psychology major Kerry Delf filed a religious discrimination complaint with the university's office of affirmative action and put out word on the Net, garnering a blizzard of angry e-mails and articles in the campus and town newspapers. The computer center responded with a 3,000-word document defending its policies and musing on whether Satanism was a religion at all, or "merely a cultural practice ... such as ... tailgate parties ... [or] Scandinavian folk songs. "Finally the office of affirmative action pronounced its solution to the matter: a committee. Holding that St. Sauver's actions "could be perceived as discrimination, albeit unintentional," it ordered that "formal general guidelines regarding university newsgroups be developed." Meanwhile, the students say, St. Sauver has retaliated, sabotaging the Usenet system with a technical trick. He reduced the amount of time messages are kept on the system from the standard week or two to a single day, making discussion difficult.
-- Etelka Lehoczky
SALON | Dec. 18, 1998