UD denies purposely blocking student's protest website

University officials on Friday denied allegations that the school intentionally blocked a student's protest website from being accessed on campus. Instead, they said, the site was inadvertently blocked, and the error was corrected once officials were made aware of it.

The site, saveud.com, contains blog posts and satirical cartoons criticizing the university's decision to cut the men's track team. On-campus access to it was restored Friday morning.

The site was set up late last month by senior Corey Wall, a member of the men's track team who is serving as an unofficial spokesman for the group of track athletes who filed a discrimination claim against the university. Wall announced Thursday that the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights agreed to investigate the complaint.

Wall told The Review Thursday that several people had informed him they could not access the site. He said he confirmed it by testing several locations on campus and by accessing his site logs, which showed there had been no visitors from the university network since April 4.

Tests by The Review also confirmed the site was not accessible from campus. A reporter sitting in Kirkbride Hall Thursday afternoon tried, but failed, to access the site. But moments later, the reporter successfully accessed it using a proxy server, a third-party website designed to help users bypass content filters.

"I was very upset today," Wall said Thursday night. "I just don't think the university has a right to do that. They can block explicit material like porn [...] but a blog, voicing an opinion they feel is against them? To me that violates freedom of speech."

Contacted by The Review Friday morning, university spokesman David Brond said the site was blocked April 3 by an automatic process meant to keep spammers and hackers off of the university network.

"The IP address the website is part of tried to contact 11,000 people on this campus," Brond said. "Immediately, automatically our server said, ‘It must be a hacker.' It didn't even know it was saveud.com."

Brond became aware of the site Friday when he received a Google News Alert about a post on the site regarding the federal investigation. When he visited it, he saw another post accusing the university of blocking the site.

He viewed the site and instructed IT personnel to manually override the block.

"It was never a conscious decision to block this," Brond said, adding that several IP addresses are automatically blocked every week.

Although the site is now accessible on campus, Wall said he remains skeptical of Brond's explanation.

"I'm not going to take the university's word for that," he said. "It's definitely possible, but I'm not convinced."

Although Wall set up the site, most of the writing is done by Carl Shields, who blogs under the pseudonym Dino and refers to himself as an "investigative reporter." Shields is a middle-aged supporter of the university's track team who sometimes holds a clinic for the throwers on the track and field team, Wall said.

Shields' posts are an eclectic mix of links to news articles, first-person narratives and strong arguments that reference, among other things, Watergate, the ancient Greek hero Pheidippides and the New York Sun's famous "Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus" editorial.

One of his most recent posts discussed the federal investigation, saying that it was originally thought only to be a rumor.

"I checked with several Title IX experts (sorry can't give out their name) who said this was absurb [sic], impossible, and made Don Quixote look sane. I spiked the story, since this investigative reporter didn't want his reputation soiled by such rubbish," Shields wrote. "But wait, coming across the wire this evening…. Title IX complaint gets green light."

Shields has also posted more than a dozen hand-drawn cartoons, most of which poke fun at university President Patrick Harker. One shows Harker riding in a carriage full of money being pulled by a group of taxpayers. Another depicts him as an executioner waiting to hang a track athlete.

Wall said he started the website to create a forum to talk about the elimination of the track team. He titled it Save UD because he originally intended to open it up to more contributors to discuss a wider range of topics concerning the university.

Wall said he has not had much time to work on it, but hopes to eventually make it a more polished effort.

"I do want to get it to be more of a focused effort rather than random blogs," he said.

Clarification: The original version of this article did not specifically state Carl Shields' role with the track and field team. Shields runs a voluntary clinic but claims he is not considered a coach. Incorrect information was provided to The Review.