Harvard University admitted Tuesday during a faculty meeting that it secretly photographed about 2,000 students in 10 lecture halls last spring as part of a study of classroom attendance, a confession that has drawn ire from professors and students who say it was an invasion of privacy.
According to the Boston Globe, Peter K. Bol, Harvard’s vice provost for advances in learning, said at the faculty meeting that some of the college’s researchers installed cameras last spring to measure student attendance. The cameras snapped an image every minute, and a computer program scanned the images to count the empty seats versus the filled ones during lectures.
Harvard declined to disclose the names of the classes that were monitored, and the students whose images were captured had not yet been notified as of Wednesday afternoon, the Boston Globe reported.
Bol only admitted to the hidden research after being specifically asked by Gordon McKay, a Harvard computer science professor. McKay runs a blog where he writes about the goings on of the faculty and he has written several times about privacy concerns at the university. He posted a transcript of the question he asked Bol on his blog.
“Just because technology can be used to answer a question doesn’t mean that it should be. And if you watch people electronically and don’t tell them ahead of time, you should tell them afterwards,” McKay told Bol at the meeting. “We would all benefit, I think, from more peer feedback on our teaching. But none of us, students or faculty, want to be treated like inmates of some academic Panopticon, never knowing for sure whether we are being or have been under scrutiny while we were going about our daily business of teaching and learning.”
Other professors and students spoke to the Boston Globe about the research project and they heavily criticized the secret nature of it.
“We know there are hundreds of cameras all over Harvard, and we accept that they’re there for protection and safety and security,” Peter Burgard, a professor of German at Harvard, told the paper. “But the idea that photographs will be taken of a class in progress without having informed the students, much less the professor, is something very different. That is surveillance.”
Brett Biebelberg, a junior and a member of the undergraduate student government, called the study “strikingly hypocritical.”
“It is especially troubling in light of the fact that these instances of surveillance occurred not long after the university claimed to be placing more emphasis on ensuring the privacy of its students and staff,” Biebelberg said.
The university recently implemented new privacy policies for electronic communication, after it was revealed that administrators had secretly searched thousands of Harvard e-mail accounts to determine how information about a massive student cheating scandal was leaked to a Boston Globe reporter. An electronic communications committee was also created.
Bol submitted a full statement on the attendance study to McKay’s blog Wednesday.
However it turned out that we did not have any data to support the anecdotes. I thus looked for a way of getting data on attendance, because that seemed to be the only thing that could be measured in a straightforward way that did not rely on self-reporting. I am told that there are no published multiple-course results on objectively-measured attendance to rely on.
But in designing such a study there were some very important considerations. We did not want to bias the sample. We did not want individual students to be tracked or in any way identified. And we did not want the results to be used for the purpose of evaluating the teachers. We wanted to know if we could get valid evidence on attendance, and we wanted to see if there were any patterns in the data that might support conclusions about whether or not we should care.
The protocol was sent to the Committee on the Use of Human Subjects in Research – this is the Institutional Review Board, the group responsible for deciding if research uses human subjects and reviewing that use to make sure that they are line with regulations — which concluded that the study did not constitute human subjects research. It thus did not go to the full committee for review. The protocol was to install a camera that snapped images of the audience in a lecture hall. The images were processed through a program that counted whether seats were empty of filled. The quantities were calculated for each lecture. Once the data was in hand I made appointments, beginning in August, with course heads (two are still outstanding) to tell them what had been done and to show them generalized numerical data on their respective classes. At that time I ordered that images of students be destroyed. The course heads were asked to decide what should happen next. The course head could choose to have the numerical data removed from the study and deleted permanently. The data could be maintained without identifying the course. The data could be maintained with the identity of the course. There could be discussions with the researcher to better understand the data and consider ways of improving outcomes if so desired.
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. Faculty do care about their classes and their students.
The analysis did reveal patterns in the data (patterns that made sense once they were found). The results of the analysis are being shared with course heads. The aggregated data, without identifying courses, has been presented at Harvard to people interested in teaching and learning issues. Here I will only note that there was great variability in attendance.
I do understand the concern with faculty control, but ultimately course heads did have control over the data on students in their classes. Yet this has certainly raised questions about studies involving students that might not be set up to avoid identifying students. For that reason the Committee on the Use of Human Subjects in Research will automatically contact the Assistant Dean for Undergraduate Education in regard to studies that involve undergraduate students.”
