Leaving Students in Absentia

Yesterday I received an email from Peter Bol, Harvard’s Vice Provost for Advances in Learning, who retroactively informed me of my participation in a research study. The carefully-worded, unapologetic note did not tell me anything I did not already know, thanks to a Crimson article. I was photographed unknowingly once per minute, for three hours per week, all throughout last spring. These pictures were taken by a hidden camera in one of my lectures, and were used to monitor fluctuations in attendance over time. According to Bol, the images were subsequently destroyed, and all data was anonymized.
The email carried the rather muted subject line of “Attendance Study Update,” perhaps in the hopes that I would disregard the message as just another administrative update, and gloss over the fact that I was never given a formal, pre-study notification about the topic of this “update.” The email failed to name, let alone answer, any of the questions that are sure to be debated in dining halls and department meetings over the next several weeks: Does the study constitute an invasion of privacy? Should Bol have asked for the faculty’s consent? Is Harvard’s bureaucracy really so entrenched that evidence from a massive attendance study is required to justify efforts to improve teaching?
While issues of privacy and consent deserve more attention than Bol has so far offered, they do not address the fundamental reason that this study makes students uncomfortable. By casting students as unknowing guinea pigs, the attendance study epitomizes the lack of respect felt by students from the administration.
The distance between the administration and the student body has been a persistent issue at Harvard. It has come to affect student life in tangible and conspicuous forms—missing student representation in working groups, a lack of funding for student organizations, and speculation on whether the upcoming student center will really be for students—but the general student sentiment has always been the same. Students want to be respected as partners in their education. We want to be invited to conversations that concern us. The attendance study reminds us that Harvard sees students not as independent adults, but as independent variables.
In his justification for commissioning the study, Bol remarked that lecture attendance “seemed to be the only thing that could be measured in a straightforward way that did not rely on self-reporting.” This reasoning reveals the heart of the problem: self-reporting was not ever considered a viable option. Students presumably could not be trusted to accurately or honestly report their own attendance when asked. If the ultimate goal of the study is to assess the need for “new media and pedagogical techniques”, as Bol claims, then why not ask students if they would appreciate such techniques? Or ask students to participate in studies aimed at elucidating their value? Bol shows no intention to include students in the conversation about how to improve student learning.
At the end of his comments on the study, Bol offered vague allusions to its success, claiming that the analysis “did reveal patterns in the data.” Without access to the results, we, the subjects, can only speculate; however, it is difficult to imagine anonymized attendance data translating into more effective teaching. Regardless of any significance of the data collected, Bol could learn a great deal from this study by focusing his attention on the aftermath. Students will remain absent from lecture so long as they remain absent from conversations concerning their education.