David Horsey cartoon from Seattle PI
We had no idea this was even coming up, so didn’t bake a cake or make any other preparations, but today is the 57th anniversary of the invention of the bar code. The big event reminded our friends at NAICU, on their Extra Credit blog, of this 2005 cartoon by David Horsey, Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist of the Seattle PI.
The cartoon happened after a conversation between the PI editorial board, staff of Independent Colleges of Washington, and Father Stephen Sundborg, president of Seattle University.
As Extra Credit notes, the U.S. Department of Education eventually dropped its proposal to track every student in the country with bar codes, but efforts to create some sort of national tracking system continue. We see such efforts as a threat to student privacy and to the autonomy of private colleges.
