Everyone groans on the first day of lecture when the teacher announces he or she will be taking attendance each class, but perhaps signing an attendance sheet is preferable to being photographed entering the classroom each day without prior knowledge.
That’s what went down at Harvard University in Spring 2014. Harvard revealed at a faculty meeting Tuesday that the administration had secretly photographed 2,000 students and faculty in 10 lecture halls to study classroom attendance. This little experiment was only publicized after Harvard professor and former Dean of Harvard College Harry Lewis, who had heard about the study from two colleagues, questioned Vice President for Advances in Learning Peter Bol’s invasion on student and faculty privacy.
The study, which was operated by Bol, aimed to analyze the patterns by which students attend and miss lectures. Bol said he formulated the experiment after receiving a number of complaints from professors that a growing number of students had been skipping lectures and neglecting homework. The experiment’s accuracy relied on the fact that students would not know they were being monitored and would therefore not alter their attendance patterns.
Bol said his larger goal was to see if lectures were still an effective form of learning or if it was time to replace them with more interactive teaching techniques. After researchers at the college’s Initiative for Learning and Teaching installed the camera, students were photographed for the entire semester. When Bol had completed his sample, he showed each professor the data and asked what they wished to do with it.
“I can report that every single person I met with thought the data was interesting and potentially useful, agreed to the use of the data keeping the identity of the course and was interested in learning more about the research,” Bol posted to Lewis’s blog. “Faculty do care about their classes and their students.”
Sounds like an interesting study. Too bad nobody — not even Harvard President Drew Faust — knew about it when it was happening or after the fact, save for the professors Bol individually approached and his team of researchers. Now, as fingers are being pointed at Harvard for encroaching on student privacy, students and faculty at the school are questioning the line Harvard draws between research and surveillance.
University settings traditionally encourage students to question ideas imposed by society, so it’s odd to think that the very institution telling students to be skeptical of authority is nevertheless exercising that power — and in secret. However, universities do have more power than students tend to think. For example, if a student is using an email address attached to their college, as many Boston University students do, that university technically has the right to sift through that email. Creepy? Sure, but that’s the reality.
Taking photos of people in a public place — and one could argue for and against the idea of Harvard as a public place — happens all the time. Photographers take pictures of people at events without necessarily asking their permission. If it’s in a public setting, it’s OK. And it’s not as if Harvard published these images. In fact, Bol said he had all of the photos subsequently destroyed.
And the research was done with good intentions. As one of the leading universities in the world, Harvard must remain at the forefront of educational technology. Socratic-style lecture halls have been around since, well, Socrates. They’re easy to fall asleep in or not attend altogether, and in an age ripe with technology, maybe it is time to give them a facelift. As the university that spearheaded Massive Open Online Courses in the United States, Harvard has every right to revamp lectures too.
Sure, it’s a little creepy that Bol and Harvard’s Initiative for Learning and Teaching essentially surveilled its students and teachers for months, but in the name of research, that can be forgiven. What cannot be forgiven is the fact that the administration was unaware.
Harvard’s president is forced to respond as students, faculty and media uncover this study, despite not even knowing about it until Tuesday. It is the administration’s responsibility to be aware of how each department is working, and Bol failed to give the administration that option.
This is the kind of experiment that could only really happen at a school like Harvard, which is constantly forced to experiment, analyze and improve education methods for the benefit of education overall. BU, while a large research university, is generally more concerned with scientific innovations than internal experiments, making it difficult to imagine such a thing happening here. Most of the articles published on BU’s new Research website is about biology, engineering and health science research, save for one story on a linguistics study. While Harvard was not wrong in conducting this study, its failure to inform administration until now calls for appropriate criticism.
