A dust-up that could only happen at an Ivy League university. Via the Boston Globe:

Harvard University has revealed that it secretly photographed some 2,000 students in 10 lecture halls last spring as part of a study of classroom attendance. . . .
Peter K. Bol, Harvard’s vice provost for advances in learning, said at the faculty meeting that researchers at the college’s Initiative for Learning and Teaching, which Bol oversees, installed cameras last spring to measure student attendance, according to a copy of his remarks provided by the university.
The cameras snapped an image every minute, and a computer program scanned the images to count how many seats were empty and how many were filled during lectures.

The revelations have not been well received by faculty and students. Said Peter Burgard, a professor of German, “We know there are hundreds of cameras all over Harvard, and we accept that they’re there for protection and safety and security. 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.” “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,” junior Brett Biebelberg told the Globe.

This is the elite American university in a comic nutshell. Harvard administrators want to know how many students are attending class, and light upon installing secret cameras in lecture halls as the best way to do that. Then, when the scheme is discovered, professors and students who are expected to be present for Quakerism and Queer Theory 1301 from 1 p.m. to 2:30 p.m. on Tuesday complain that it is a violation of their civil liberties to be recorded as being present in Quakerism and Queer Theory 1301 from 1 p.m. to 2:30 p.m. on Tuesday. Subsequently, the administration is forced to issue a massive apology and contact every student who was surreptitiously recorded, and assure them that all unauthorized photographs of their person have been destroyed, so there is no longer any physical evidence that they were, or were not, present at their Quakerism and Queer Theory 1301 course from 1 p.m. to 2:30 p.m. one Tuesday in March.

I know there are plenty of smart people around Harvard Yard, but maybe I could make an outside-the-box suggestion: Perhaps the administration could skip the study and simply tell students to, you know, go to class. After all, isn’t that why you went to Harvard in the first place?