Virtual Sit-In
On March 4, as thousands of students and faculty across California took to the streets to protest budget cuts and tuition increases across the state’s university system, Ricardo Dominguez, an associate professor of visual arts at the San Diego campus, engineered a demonstration of a different kind.
Dominguez arranged for hundreds of students to register for a “virtual sit-in,” which involved logging on to theOffice of the President portal on the system’s Web site and prompting the page to reload over and over. The idea was to jam the site, making it difficult for other visitors to enter — in essence, occupying the president’s virtual office, instead of his physical one, in order to make a statement.
According to news reports, Dominguez also caused the message “There is no transparency found at the UC Office of the President” to appear, in emulation of the slogans protesters might express at a conventional sit-in.
The stunt has landed the tenured professor in hot water with campus police and the San Diego administration. According to Micha Cardenas, a visual arts lecturer and Dominguez collaborator, the university is investigating Dominguez for orchestrating what is known as a “distributed denial-of-service attack,” or DDoS. The Department of Homeland Security defines a DDoS attack as an attempt “to prevent legitimate users from accessing information or services” using multiple computers.
The university has informed Dominguez that if he is found to have violated any laws or university policies, it could jeopardize his tenure status, according to Cardenas. Dominguez could not be reached.