We recently reported that one former University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill got paid for a course to which he didn’t even show up!

To prevent something similar form happening, the City Colleges of Chicago system is considering a plan in which faculty are forced to check in everyday by fingerprint.

The faculty response is as one would expect.

A growing number of colleges are choosing to fingerprint new employee hires, including faculty members. But what about being fingerprinted every day, to make sure professors are on the job? That could be the new reality for faculty members in the City Colleges of Chicago system, and they are speaking out against the possibility.

“We say No: Our dignity and our rights have no price,” reads an open letter written by faculty union leaders and published Wednesday on the American Association of University Professors’ Academe blog and elsewhere. “We seek the support of our students, their families, and every citizen of Illinois who understands the severity of this violation of our privacy.”

Faculty, who call the fingerprinting plan impractical and unethical, also plan on protesting today at the system’s Board of Trustees meeting.

“We believe that this is an extreme overreach, asking people to go and use their personal bodies for this purpose and to provide this information,” said Hector Reyes, associate professor of chemistry at Harold Washington College and vice campus chair of the American Federation of Teacher’s Local 1600 union, which represents full-time faculty and other college employees at all seven system colleges. Reyes and other members of the union wrote the letter, along with the leaders of the CCCLOC, the Illinois Education Association affiliate representing adjunct faculty. The clerical and technical workers’ union also has signed on.

Reyes added: “It seems an incredible violation of our bodies and our right to privacy and it feels very humiliating to many people.”

In August, Chicago Community Colleges sent an email to employees, including faculty, notifying them it was piloting a new, biometric screening system to replace its outdated paper time-card system. Fingerprints are not stored in any central database or on individual machines. Instead, a scanner converts an employee’s fingerprints to binary numerical code that matches one stored in the device (but which cannot be reverted back to an image). College administrators already have begun using the system, and faculty members feel it’s only a matter of time until they’re required to use it, too.