Most college students attend class looking less than attractive. Flip flops, hoodies and sweat pants are usually the uniform of choice as they do their best to remain alert during a lecture instead of scrolling through their Facebook News Feeds.
Tired, bored and probably hungover, most undergrads try not to run into anyone they know on their way to class, let alone pose for a picture. Unfortunately, that's exactly what some Harvard University students experienced last spring.
Harvard revealed that it secretly photographed about 2,000 of its undergrads in 10 lecture halls on campus last spring as part of a study on classroom attendance, The Boston Globe reported. Students and faculty alike are less than thrilled about the news, claiming the study was an invasion of privacy.
The university first revealed the study during a faculty meeting on Nov. 4 after computer science professor Harry Lewis questioned administrators about the matter, which he learned from two colleagues. Researchers at the college's Initiative for Learning and Teaching installed cameras in the lecture halls last spring to measure student attendance, Peter K. Bol, Harvard's vice provost for advances in learning who oversees the initiative, said at the meeting. The cameras took a photo every hour and counted how many seats were empty and filled.
Students and teachers weren't notified about the study before it was conducted so as to avoid any potential bias in the research. The professors whose classes had been part of the study agreed to have the images used for research when the results came back this fall, but as of Wednesday afternoon, students had not been made aware of their participation, although Harvard president Drew Faust said all of the students involved will be notified. The images have since been destroyed, and the case will be reviewed by a panel, according to The Harvard Crimson, which first broke the news of the study.
Though there's probably no good time for this news to hit, it was especially bad timing for Harvard, which came under fire in March 2013 for searching through thousands of university email accounts to try to find who leaked information to the media about cheating on campus. After that incident, Faust created a task force, and the university put new privacy policies on electronic communication into place last spring.
Clearly, what's at stake here is more than a university having possession of photos of you without makeup on. The issue is the age-old question of how much privacy do students really have when they're under the jurisdiction of an academic institution?
Though when we enroll in college, we'd like to think we're on our own and are growing as individuals, students are still under the authority of the university. With that comes the good, like getting an education and taking advantage of student discounts. But obviously, as in this case, there's also the bad where academic institutions wield a lot of power over you during the course of your four years. They have access to a lot of information about you, and they're not always forthcoming about it. Some wonder how a university can ask its students to follow a set of ethics and an honor code when the school has questionable ethics itself.
However, there doesn't seem to be much harm done from this Harvard study, at least from what we know now. Harvard's Institutional Review Board approved the study, which wasn't designed to track or identify individual students, according to Bol. Although, one wonders what the reasoning behind taking photos of students was to monitor attendance in lieu of just reporting the actual attendance numbers for that day compared to the total enrolled in the class.
Regardless of Harvard's study, we do live in a CCTV world. Security cameras are everywhere, and if we actually knew how much our every move was tracked throughout a single day, we'd probably fall over. Our images are also broadcast on social media all the time, whether we intend them to be or not. It's darn near impossible to not have your picture taken without your knowledge unless you live totally off the grid.
But of course, no one likes to confront this reality. The idea that someone is performing an experiment unbeknownst to you is always going to be an uncomfortable feeling and inspire indignation. Just look at what happened to Facebook when the news broke that the company manipulated users' News Feeds for research. It was a PR disaster.
Unfortunately, technology has made it easier to conduct this kind of research. It'd be nice if it wasn't used to perform secret experiments on us, but unfortunately, it doesn't look like that's going to stop any time soon. And I'm not sure there's much we can do about it.
Image: William B. Plowman / Getty Images
