Harvard accused of spying on students to take class attendance

A group of Harvard professors whose classes were secretly photographed as part of a project to assess attendance are accusing the school of using “Orwellian” tactics to spy on them and their students. The program, which involved cameras installed in lecture halls where about 2,000 students attended 10 courses, came to light during a faculty meeting last week.

The cameras took a photo every minute and a program processed the images to count empty and occupied seats during this year’s spring semester, professor Peter K. Bol explained in a statement given at the faculty meeting and reported in Harvard Magazine. Bol oversees Harvard’s Initiative for Learning and Teaching (HILT), the group that conducted the study.

The teachers and students in the classes received no notice of the study before it took place to avoid biasing it. But Bol said he began to make appointments with the course instructors in August to inform them and discuss the data. Bol also said he ordered the captured student images destroyed.

Harry Lewis, a Harvard computer science professor, said he learned of the study from two colleagues whose classes had been photographed, according to the statement he delivered at the meeting, reproduced in Harvard Magazine and on his blog.

“We would all benefit, I think, from more peer feedback on our teaching,” Lewis said. “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.” (The Panopticon is a building model, developed by English utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham, in which a single tower in the center can observe all rooms.)

Harvard German professor Peter J. Burgard described the study as “Orwellian,” according to The Harvard Crimson.

“We know there are hundreds of cameras all over Harvard, and we accept that they’re there for protection and safety and security,” Burgard told The Boston Globe. “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.”

On the other hand, Gonzalo Giribet, a Harvard professor of zoology and organismic and evolutionary biology, told The Chronicle of Higher Education he did not consider the study spying, “especially since the purpose was not knowing what specific individuals did, but just trying to assess attendance to class by anonymous individuals.”

Bol said in his statement all the course heads he’d met with found the information “interesting and potentially useful.” HILT conducted the study to shed light on student engagement, and it revealed an average of 60 percent of students attended lectures across the 10 courses. It also discovered average student attendance varied widely from course to course, from 35 percent in one to 95 percent in another, according to a presentation at a September HILT conference. (The video of the presentation does not explain how HILT collected the information, but Harvard Magazine notes Lewis’s remarks make it clear the data was from the photographs.)

But some faculty questioned whether installing secret cameras in classrooms was the best means of gathering information. “Just because technology can be used to answer a question doesn’t mean that it should be,” Lewis said in his statement. “And if you watch people electronically and don’t tell them ahead of time, you should tell them afterwards.”

Bol told The Harvard Crimson in an email after the faculty meeting that he would tell the students in the courses their photos were possibly taken but then destroyed. His response seems to have mollified at least some of his critics.

“No real injury was done to anyone except a feeling that something slightly creepy happened,” Lewis told The Chronicle of Higher Education.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.