Richwine and the FAS Hegemony over the PhD

I had never heard of Jason Richwine until I started reading the reports about his Harvard PhD thesis, on the IQs of immigrants and the policy implications for the US. The thesis itself (here it is, if you want to read it and make up your own mind) was presented in 2009. Apparently nobody noticed it, or thought it was worth complaining about, until Richwine worked its conclusions into the Heritage Foundation's report on the economic costs of US immigration policy. That blew up, and Richwine resigned from the Foundation.

The expected parties have taken the expected positions on academic freedom and so on. One interesting take is by conservative Ron Unz, who says he has independently researched the issues himself, and thinks Richwine is just wrong on the facts. Whatever one may think of either Richwine or Unz (and Unz has written some misinformed things about Harvard), this part of Unz's piece raises an interesting governance point.

Richwine’s doctoral work was performed at Harvard’s Kennedy School for Public Policy, which is separate from the main graduate school containing academic disciplines such as evolutionary biology, psychology, and sociology. The typical Kennedy School graduate receives a Masters Degree in Public Administration, and is often a mid-career government official, seeking to burnish his academic credentials. The three faculty members who evaluated Richwine’s dissertation—George Borjas, Richard Zeckhauser, and Christopher Jencks—are noted social scientists, but with the possible exception of Jenks, who was apparently a late addition, none seems to have a strong background in IQ issues; otherwise, they surely would have brought the facts I have cited above to Richwine’s attention and required him to properly address them. And once the media mob began baying for blood, Richwine’s advisors immediately backpedaled on any familiarity with IQ issues and quickly disassociated themselves from the dissertation they themselves had approved.

What catches my eye here is that none of the members of the dissertation committee is a member of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Borjas and Zeckhauser are economists, but neither is a member of the Economics Department; nor does Jencks seem to be a member of any FAS department. But the PhD is granted by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences; to be precise, it is the Faculty of Arts and Sciences that takes the ritualized vote on the Monday before Commencement to recommend to the governing boards that they award the PhD to the candidates who will be assembled on Thursday. In this case, the PhD is being granted in the subject of Public Policy (there is a separate PhD program in Social Policy, or rather, two of them).

FAS has insisted that only it, and not any of the other Faculties, can award the PhD degree. Philosophically, the point is that the PhD is a scholarly and not primarily professional degree. It has always been a worry that if the professional faculties could offer the PhD on their own, the value of the currency might be debased, for example if advocacy or skill-training were to eclipse the impartial pursuit of the truth.

So when it is proposed to create a new PhD program, jointly with another Faculty, it is the Faculty of Arts and Sciences that must discuss and approve the program (first in the Committee on Graduate Education, then in the Faculty Council, and finally in a vote of the full Faculty). I remember when the PhD in Education was approved a couple of years ago, part of the FAS discussion was about requiring that at least one member of every dissertation committee be a member of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. I don't remember how that came out in the Education case, but that seems not to be the rule for the PhD in Social Policy. In the case at hand, a dissertation about the social policy implications of IQ was approved by a committee of social policy experts lacking anyone from the Psychology or Sociology department with professional expertise in psychometrics. In fact, while I haven't checked all the names on the Public Policy Standing Committee, it seems to have very limited (if any) FAS representation. By contrast, the list of Core Faculty for the PhD program in Social Policy includes a number of members of the Sociology and Government Departments, some of whom have the relevant expertise to critique a thesis on IQ.

Of course, sticking an arbitrary member of the FAS on a thesis committee does not guarantee that any high standard of scholarship will be met. But perhaps, if the people at Harvard with the right expertise share Unz's skepticism about the soundness of Richwine's psychometric findings, the question that needs asking is whether the governance over the many interfaculty PhD programs is strong enough to provide the quality control that is the rationale for the nominal FAS hegemony over the PhD degree. Because if Richwine's findings of fact are wrong, and the members of the dissertation committee did not see fit to pull in anyone with the relevant expertise to check the details, then this PhD is, in the words a colleague used to describe a different Harvard embarrassment, a stain on the uniform we all wear. Why, if the central facts of this dissertation are wrong, should the public trust that any of our PhDs mean what we claim they mean?

David Brooks on Leaks

From "When Governments Go Bad":

This scandal arises from a larger cultural virus: leakaphobia. Every administration centralizes power more tightly than the one before and is more paranoid about leaks than the one before. Every administration successively narrows the circle of debate, forsaking wide deliberation for the sake of reducing leaks (except the politically useful ones). Why do they do this? Because people who go into government not only have a tendency to want to control other people but also to control information.

…

People can only have faith in a government that self-restrains, and there’s little evidence of that now.

I have no idea why I wanted to post that. It must have reminded me of something else, but I can't quite put my finger on what.

More on Licensing MOOCs

After reading yesterday's post about MOOCs, a colleague asked me why I preferred BY-SA licensing to BY-NC-SA licensing. Now that looks like a technical question about lawyerly alphabet soup, but it is actually a basic question about what HarvardX is trying to accomplish. The faculty should be discussing the nature of the HarvardX intellectual property policy, and if we don't, we'll have another explosion like the one that happened this year when Harvard unwisely sent around detailed proposed revisions to its IP policies and then had to pull them back for reconsideration after a faculty explosion.

To begin with, we need some consensus on what we are trying to accomplish with HarvardX and with our membership in EdX. I think it is fair to assume that among our goals are (1) to extend our educational reach, that is, to spread learning to more of the world; and (2) to cover our costs and to make a profit that can be used to support our traditional educational, research, and scholarly functions. Harvard has articulated other goals, such as to develop tools, and data on teaching and learning that can improve undergraduate education, but I want to focus on the first two, which I don't think are in any way inconsistent with the others.

Now I am not sure some professors even realize that (2) is a goal. Some professors are diffident about any talk of "business models" and so on, but also bemoan the budgetary cutbacks they have experienced to their educational and scholarly efforts. HarvardX presents a potential new revenue source. Of course there are alternatives. Maybe some alum would want to pay the full cost of HarvardX and we would not have to worry about receiving revenues from it. Maybe Harvard could save some money elsewhere and use it to pay for HarvardX. Realistically, I think it makes more sense to try to get HarvardX to pay for itself and more, but that is an assumption. After all, Harvard could in theory decide that undergraduate tuitions should subsidize HarvardX in the long run, and not the other way around. So while I want to mark (2) as an explicit assumption which has not been explicitly stated as far as I know, I hope it will not be controversial.

And of course precisely what policies might work the best to achieve both goals (1) and (2) also depend on how big a profit, per (2), Harvard wants to generate from HarvardX. It's very unclear, to me at least, whether more revenue would come from trying to get a little bit of money from a lot of people or a lot of money from a few people. That is not the only consideration; the latter would, of course, be in tension with goal (1). Tradeoffs everywhere, and doubtless different MOOC providers are going to be experimenting with different approaches.

Now to the question of Creative Commons licenses. A BY-SA license lets other parties use the materials as long as they are attributed to the creator (Harvard in the case of a MOOC) and as long as the derivative materials carry exactly the same BY-SA license. This assures proper credit is given where it is due, and encourages others to add to the "creative commons," the wealth of publicly available raw materials that others can use to construct other creative works.

Now relaxing copyright in this way, it may be argued, carries some risks. Some professors might lose their jobs, the fear voiced by the philosophers at San Jose State University. That is an interesting moral question related to the frictionless information universe, about which I would love to hear Professor Sandel expound a bit more. But that is not today's topic.

Once we make our materials openly available, someone could do something with our creation that we don't like, and we would have surrendered our right of disapproval. True, that is part of the loss of control that comes with greater openness. But even without surrendering any of our copyrights, we are not immune against fair use by others, including harsh criticism and parody. Movie and book reviewers do not need studio or author permission to quote from a work in the process of ridiculing it. We should have enough confidence in the quality of our works to think that they will be used more for good than for harm if we relax control of them.

Another objection is that someone else might make money from some derivative of our works. That may be seen as somehow morally offensive: if anybody is going to make money from our works, goes our instinct, it should be us. That objection is addressed by a separate Creative Commons license, BY-NC-SA, that adds the following "noncommercial" clause:

You may not exercise any of the rights granted to You in Section 3 above in any manner that is primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation.

Why not use this license instead?

One problem with this language is that it is not clear what exactly it excludes. If materials under such a license get used by the profitable Extension School of Podunk University, is that disallowed, or is it allowed because Podunk U is a nonprofit even if its Extension School tries to turn a profit to be used by other programs of the university?

But another problem with the "NC" clause is that it is not clear why, morally, we should care whether the derivative use is commercial or not. Just to take two extreme examples: Would it really be morally good for our materials to be used by Ohio State University, whose president receives a salary of $1.9 million, plus use of a private jet and other amenities, but morally bad for our materials to be used by a small-scale Mongolian entrepreneur trying to offer a technical education to impoverished Mongolians by creating a private technical institute that charges modest tuitions and turns a small profit?

In fact, the whole element of moral indignation that leads to resistance of the simple BY-SA license is introducing into American copyright an element of "moral rights" that is part of the European, but not American, copyright tradition. Under the US Constitution, the purpose of copyright is not to guard the moral rights of the creator, but "To Promote the Progress of Science and the Useful Arts." And that, surely, should be Harvard's objective, per (1) above, in whatever license it cuts for use of its MOOCs.

Under a simple BY-SA license, any for-profit that made a derivative work using Harvard materials would have to acknowledge that they came from Harvard (but then wouldn't most students prefer to get the materials from their original source?), and would also have to make their modifications and enhancements available to others, commercial or noncommercial, on the same basis. I doubt that for-profits would see taking Harvard materials as a viable business model on those terms. But if one did, and somehow produced educational products that were so superior to ours and could make them available so much more cheaply that it could overcome the natural market resistance to picking Unknown Corp's products over Harvard's, well, more power to them. We shouldn't be using legal barriers to win a game we can't win on the merits.

I expect that a lot of lawyerly thought has already gone into the license terms and business models. I have no real expectation that Harvard will go with a BY-SA license; probably it will come up with its own license terms. But the faculty here and elsewhere are only now coming to grips with the force of the MOOC tsunami, as I suggested in yesterday's post. Since they are not merely actors in this drama but the actual agents of change, they should be engaged in a realistic conversation about the program's means and ends, and what they think about hypotheticals like the ones I have posed.

MOOCs, and MOODs?

There is a drive-by quote from me in Nathan Heller's good New Yorker article about Massive Open Online Courses. Reading the story reminds me how hard this kind of writing is -- I spent a long time with Heller, and tried to sell him on the idea of CS20 as an anti-MOOC, but our conversation got reduced to one line about students sleeping through class.

It is interesting to see the MOOC euphoria being replaced by MOOC dread. The best articulation of the worries is that of Prof. Bob Meister of the UC Santa Cruz, after the University's decision to import Justice, Michael Sandel's MOOC course on moral philosophy. It is now becoming apparent, here at Harvard and elsewhere, what is implied when it is said that the Internet will result in disruptive change to higher education. Universities facing crushing budgetary cuts will try to save money. There is no question that the learning experience will change at places like the UC Santa Cruz; the only question is how. The members of the philosophy department do not want to be Prof. Sandel's remote teaching assistants, and Prof. Sandel does not want to be an agent of downsizing philosophy departments elsewhere. Fine, but the UC governors also have the option of not teaching philosophy at all, or drastically consolidating departments, as Rick Scott proposed for anthropology departments in Florida.

So what is Harvard's responsibility in all this? It is a very, very tricky question.

Quite likely the world of MOOCs and other Internet-enabled higher education will recapitulate the history of the Internet. Once information transmission and storage become free, goods that are free or nearly so will undercut the revenue model for information institutions that have been crucial to democratic societies. Nobody involved in the development of the Internet wanted to destroy the newspaper industry, but it is hard to see what they could have done to prevent the havoc that has resulted from the free flow of information even if they had seen coming everything that has happened. -- short of building into the Internet architecture a set of locks and chains that would have been devastating to innovation and entrepreneurship.

In the case of MOOCs (or other ways of chunking online instruction), Harvard could impose burdensome licensing rules in an effort to protect the scholarly professionals elsewhere. (Just as the Wall Street Journal is now Online but hardly Open.) But of course UC would then utilize someone else's product, resulting in lower quality instruction at UC, perhaps at a higher price. Would we at Harvard then sleep better, knowing that if any philosophers had been laid off in California, it was not because of OUR MOOC?

And then there is the fact that in Computer Science, there is no oversupply of academic scholars nor undersupply of teaching jobs. The economic impact of providing CS50X on loose licensing terms would seem to be a huge social win for the world. Perhaps different subjects could be treated differently?

My personal preference would be for Harvard's courses to remain as open as possible, with licensing terms as relaxed as possible, on the theory that we should produce the best materials we can, try to recover our costs and a bit more, but not prevent others who can be even more creative that us from utilizing what we have to offer. Personally I like the idea of a pure Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. I am convinced Harvard could do fine financially on that model and could maximize its impact on the world. (There is as much chance of that happening as of a snowball surviving hell, but that can be for another day.)

In any case, there is no doubt the train is leaving the station. Yale signed onto Coursera today, and Georgia Tech announced an entire Massive Open Online Masters Degree program (hence my MOOD acronym in the title). Which of these institutions will prove to be contestants in a race to the bottom? I don't know, but everybody is going to have to be a lot more candid with each other. Universities should be clear about their revenue ambitions (just to cover costs, or if more than that, to plow the profits into what?). And the faculty are going to have to come to grips with the consequences, good and bad, of openness, and decide whether it really is more noble to be restrictive with its intellectual property than to risk any adverse consequences of sharing its educational creations with a generous and liberal spirit.

A fun trip and a serious anniversary

I am back from a few days in Germany, which have made me appreciate some things about Germany and some things about the US. I was in Berlin and Dusseldorf, and I love how open and uncongested these cities are, with quiet, efficient streetcars everywhere (by contrast, I took the Green Line home from Logan, and was crushed and suffocated). There is a lot of green and many open areas for walking; in Dusseldorf several downtown blocks near the Rhine are given over to pedestrian walkways with shops and restaurants, streetcars providing the only vehicular traffic.

On the other hand, I was struck by the absence of two things I take for granted in the US: (1) A robust consumer health products economy -- there is nothing like a CVS or Walgreens, so small purchases like aspirin, reading glasses, and some diabetic supplies I needed, things that can be gotten on any block in any American city, require finding an Apotek -- which may not have them and probably is closed on Sunday. And (2) simple fire safety regulations -- in one of my (otherwise superbly well appointed) hotels, the only way to lock the door against possible intruders was to insert a key in the inside door handle and turn it 360 degrees to throw a deadbolt. Getting out requires reversing that process. That could lead to disaster in case of a fire -- I think the way doors work in hotels has been tightly regulated in Boston since the Cocoanut Grove fire of 1942. (See today's New York Times for a gloss on fire safety: the lack of regulation is an object of pride in Texas, where some communities lure businesses on the basis of their lack of fire laws.)

My main reason for going was to speak at an awards ceremony for the Vodafone Foundation at Vodafone's Dusseldorf facility. The Foundation recognized several scientists and engineers, in particular cryptographer Ueli Maurer. I was asked to speak on Anonymity, and was glad to have the opportunity to pull together some thoughts on the issue. My basic question was, how can we protect the right to anonymity (which is stronger in the US than in Europe, cf. Common Sense and the Federalist Papers) and yet try to keep the (sometimes systematiclally generated) anonymous dreck in the comment sections of news stories and so on from influencing public opinion destructively? I hope I gave the audience something serious to think about in an occasion that was otherwise celebratory and fun.

My hosts were kind and generous and the event served as a kind of pre-opening gala of the new Vodafone facility, a spectacular building with many green features. Many local dignitaries and politicians were present--including the head of the Dusseldorf Opera, whose controversial production of Wagner is written up in today's New York Times. On opening night, the staging included scenes of Nazi executions and gassings. After a public uproar, the production eliminated most of the staging and stuck to singing and music. It did not help matters that the murder trial of a defiant neo-Nazi woman had begun in Munich almost simultaneously.

In any case, my visit could not have been nicer. The weather was beautiful, and I was able to walk down to the Rhine from my hotel and stroll along the embankment, pausing to enjoy some fresh fish in one of the cafes that line the river in the area near downtown.

As as side trip, my old friend Prof. Johann-Christoph Freytag of Humboldt University invited me to Berlin. (Christoph is second from the left in my 1982 "family photo," next to Margo Seltzer.) I spoke on my "flipped classroom" experiment at the University and then on engineering education at Harvard to a gathering of the Berlin Harvard Club. The talk on the flipped classroom was well attended and the audience was quite engaged in the topic. At the Harvard Club talk I was able to spice up a general discussion of SEAS and the excitement surrounding the growth of engineering at Harvard with some details of the life and loves of our great donor Gordon McKay. I won't retell the story I wrote up a few years ago for that Harvard Magazine article, but I'll share some of the illustrations that I showed in Berlin but could not include in Magazine. Here, for example, is a photo of part of the ceiling of the grandiose mausoleum McKay built to glorify himself in Pittsfield, MA.

And here is a section of one of the five codicils to McKay's will, each of which crosses certain ladies off his list of annuitants and adds others.

There is not much doubt, even at the time, what was going on here. Here is part of an anonymous semi-literate letter which I excerpted and cleaned up for Harvard Magazine:

Ironically, McKay more or less followed these instructions, to "do some good in this world" and "take some poor little waif and educate them." When the last of these many female annuitants had died, Harvard got the full principal, whose value is now in the hundreds of millions of dollars, to support education and research in engineering. This was a fun talk to give, especially to an audience (including one of my AM 110 students from the early 1980s) which had been sipping wine for an hour or so before I started speaking.

I met up in Berlin with my Roxbury Latin classmate and old friend John Fortunato, a civilian clinical psychologist for the US Army posted to one of the bases in Germany. John is doing important work on the treatment of soldiers affected by PTSD -- see this recent article to learn more about his influence.

Christoph kindly showed us around Berlin, a vibrant and youthful city with many green spaces and, again, a wonderful riverbank cafe culture. Our hotel was in the old East Berlin, where I had visited for a few hours in 1970; most of the grim architecture is now gone, thank goodness, and there is ongoing construction everywhere. With all the building and rebuilding, the old buildings retain the pockmarks of the blasts and gunfighting in the closing days of WWII; a few sections of the Berlin wall still stand but its full trajectory is marked with cobblestones. A one-hour riverboat tour took us past some stunning modern architecture (given many American failures, I wonder how Germany managed to do so well in its selection of daring architects for important public buildings) We were a few blocks from the memorial to Marx and Engels, which the Berliners have had some trouble figuring out how to think about.

This photo of the three of us was taken at the Bebelplatz, and the building behind us, known as the Kommode for some reason, was originally the Royal Prussian Library (it's now occupied by the Law Faculty of Humboldt U.). We are standing on the very spot where, exactly 80 years ago today, the Nazis burned the books of Jewish authors and anything they decreed to have "un-German" ideas.

There was a kind of "read-in" going on; visitors were welcome to pluck books off shelves set up on the plaza and settle down on one of the cushions and hammocks for the privilege of reading whatever they wanted in the sunshine. It is a great reminder that when we hear things from our politicians like "No to decadence and moral corruption! Yes to decency and morality!" as they try to control the free flow of information, they are echoing the words of Joseph Goebbels on May 10, 1933, inciting the mob to throw more books onto the Berlin bonfires. Let us remember: Never again.

Moral Courage in Academia

Yesterday's New York Times has an excellent piece by Salman Rushdie, Whither Moral Courage? The political class is notably lacking in courage, Rushdie says, but even artists and writers get no respect for taking tough stands.

[W]e have become suspicious of those who take a stand against the abuses of power or dogma. It was not always so. The writers and intellectuals who opposed Communism, Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov and the rest, were widely esteemed for their stand. … This new idea — that writers, scholars and artists who stand against orthodoxy or bigotry are to blame for upsetting people — is spreading fast, even to countries like India that once prided themselves on their freedoms.

Rushdie mentions the Pussy Riot group in Russia, which mocked the ties between Putin and the Church and whose members were punished severely for doing so. Public sentiment in Russia seems to be much more focused on the group's desecration of church property than on the power abuses that were the point of the protest.

One of the reasons that moral courage is lacking in the US is that it is lacking in universities. As institutions, they now operate much more like ordinary corporations, fearful of bad publicity, eager to stay on good terms with the government, and focused on their bottom lines, than as boiling cauldrons of unconventional ideas sorted out through a process of disputation, debate, and occasional dramatic gestures. Where the Yale of 1964 gave an honorary degree to Martin Luther King, Jr., who had to be bailed out of jail to receive it and was widely considered a common criminal, the Harvard of 2013 will honor … Oprah Winfrey. Where Erik Erikson resigned from the University of California in 1950 rather than sign a government-mandated loyalty oath, the Harvard of 2011 asked all its incoming students to sign a pledge to be kind. There are, on the other hand, ample instances of moral cowardice in universities -- two local examples being Harvard's unwillingness to acknowledge the malfeasance in Russia of economics star Andrei Shleifer and the affront to democratic principles by Harvard professors whom Muammar Gadaffi paid to promote his regime as a democracy.

Rushdie closes,

It’s a vexing time for those of us who believe in the right of artists, intellectuals and ordinary, affronted citizens to push boundaries and take risks and so, at times, to change the way we see the world. There’s nothing to be done but to go on restating the importance of this kind of courage, and to try to make sure that these oppressed individuals — Ai Weiwei, the members of Pussy Riot, Hamza Kashgari — are seen for what they are: men and women standing on the front line of liberty. How to do this? Sign the petitions against their treatment, join the protests. Speak up. Every little bit counts.

But of course people in universities can do a lot more. Especially those of us with tenure can speak up about hypocrisies and moral compromises. If we don't, we will have only ourselves to blame when those we are teaching grow up to favor self-interest over the public interest, and aid the existing power structure by stifling dissent.

For years I have been haunted by a matched pair of comments in the Crimson about the Shleifer affair at the time Shleifer resumed his teaching career.

“We think about him not as the guy who was involved in the AID lawsuit­—we think about him as the exciting, intellectually active colleague that we’ve always known,” [said another Harvard economics professor.] 

[An] economics concentrator who had Shleifer as a thesis adviser … rejected the relevance of Shleifer’s legal troubles to his standing as a Faculty member. 

“He is an excellent professor and does remarkable research and those to me are the two main criteria that you should be using in deciding whether or not he’s going to be a valued professor,” [the student] said. “The other stuff, that is for other people to worry about.” 

If the teachers don't teach, the students won't learn. If the tenured faculty in American universities don't worry about "the other stuff," who will?

Email Privacy Update

Harvard Magazine has an excellent summary of where things stand. Among the unanswered questions the Magazine mentions are these:

What was the impetus for the second and third e-mail investigations? How were they initiated without the FAS dean’s assent? What was learned about the handling of Ad Board materials from those further queries? What transpired in the March 12 meeting that prompted Smith to pursue further queries? When did he and Faust learn about the additional investigations?

There is also an oddity that the Crimson noted:

In her [April 2] remarks, Hammonds also said she had authorized that second search with the approval of the Office of the General Counsel. [Harvard spokesman Jeff] Neal declined to comment Monday night why the General Counsel did not correct the original statement. 

The same Crimson story details some disputed points, for example whether the resident dean who forwarded the email had actually made a mistake by doing so, and whether that dean had in fact not been sanctioned as stated in the March 11 Faculty meeting.

As the Magazine quotes several professors as suggesting, the mistrust emanating from this affair is infecting the way faculty think about other matters where the administration may be withholding information from the faculty. (Cf. also my earlier post, We Operate on Trust.)

So it is good news that the outside counsel's report on the email searches will, apparently, be made public. According to the Crimson, Harvard Fellow William Lee stated,

At the request of a Corporation committee, Mr. Keating’s review is focusing on the facts bearing on any searches of email or email metadata done in connection with the Administrative Board proceedings relating to a take-home exam in a spring 2012 undergraduate course.

 I expect the report to be definitive, truthful, and extremely narrow. I expect it to leave unanswered most of the important outstanding questions. It may, in fact, be very brief: "Yes, the searches described on March 11 and April 2 are the only ones that occurred in connection with this particular incident." In addition to the questions mentioned above, there would then remain the core questions: Were these searches really undertaken out of fear that student records might be leaked to the Crimson, or was the fear, as the Globe editorial board speculated, simply that Harvard's reputation-shaping and control bulwark was being breached, however harmlessly? And how often, and for what kinds of reasons, have searches like this taken place in the past?

A separate story in the same issue of the Crimson reports that the Undergraduate Council has asked for clarification and strengthening of Harvard's policies with respect to searching student email. Here are the relevant paragraphs of the Handbook for Students:

Privacy of Information

Information stored on a computer system or sent electronically over a network is the property of the individual who created it. Examination, collection, or dissemination of that information without authorization from the owner is a violation of the owner’s rights to control his or her own property. Systems administrators, however, may gain access to users’ data or programs when it is necessary to maintain or prevent damage to systems or to ensure compliance with other University rules.

Computer systems and networks provide mechanisms for the protection of private information from examination. These mechanisms are necessarily imperfect and any attempt to circumvent them or to gain unauthorized access to private information (including both stored computer files and messages transmitted over a network) will be treated as a violation of privacy and will be cause for disciplinary action.

In general, information that the owner would reasonably regard as private must be treated as private by other users. Examples include the contents of electronic mail boxes, the private file storage areas of individual users, and information stored in other areas that are not public. That measures have not been taken to protect such information does not make it permissible for others to inspect it.

On shared and networked computer systems certain information about users and their activities is visible to others. Users are cautioned that certain accounting and directory information (for example, user names and electronic mail addresses), certain records of file names and executed commands, and information stored in public areas, are not private. Nonetheless, such unsecured information about other users must not be manipulated in ways that they might reasonably find intrusive; for example, eavesdropping by computer and systematic monitoring of the behavior of others are likely to be considered invasions of privacy that would be cause for disciplinary action. The compilation or redistribution of information from University directories (printed or electronic) is forbidden.

When I saw the last sentence of the first paragraph quoted in the Crimson, I could not help smiling. I wrote that language, just as I had written the FAS policy about which there was so much consternation when the Resident Deans' email was searched. These paragraphs carry fingerprints of the history of computing at Harvard; some provisions are a bit anachronistic, though in general they have held up pretty well.

I would have to go back to Archives to look at old student handbooks to retrace the development of this section. I am pretty sure that a later provision, "Computer programs written as part of one’s academic work should be regarded as literary creations and subject to the same standards of misrepresentation as copied work," dates to the 1980s and maybe to the 1970s, as a Gen Ed course in computer programming had been taught since the early 1970s. I remember being drafted to help the Ad Board with software plagiarism early on, probably because I was sending cases to the Ad Board out of Nat Sci 110, which I taught 1975-77.

I think probably the privacy provisions quoted above were drafted later, sometime in the early 1990s as students began using email. They were meant to cover a variety of stupid but "cute" things students used to do on timeshared computer systems, which students accessed via terminals located in the Science Center. For example, it was not hard to capture students' login credentials by dummying up something that looked like a login screen but was actually some miscreant's data capture program, left running as an active job. With some cleverness the student whose credentials had been captured might not realize what had happened. It was not obvious, in those days when email was new to the non-tech world, that stuff like this was in fact not cute at all.

My email files go back only to 1995, but my records from that year include some editing and drafting of thee privacy provisions, in collaboration with some faculty heavyweights, including philosophy professor Tim Scanlon and CS professor Margo Seltzer. Some corner cases I worried about were reading email that was sent to a student in error (that used to happen a lot, as naive users used to assume that <lastname>@… was a suitable email address for any individual), and that using the Unix "finger" command could not be considered an invasion of privacy even if it revealed more about the movements of an individual than the individual might realize.

The relevant question for the UC memo is, what is meant by ensuring "compliance with University rules"? And more generally, how often does the university read student email? I really don't have good answers to these questions (even though I wrote the language!). I don't think anyone would find it unreasonable to check a student's email box if the student had gone missing for several days and had not been in touch with family or friends. If a student is alleged to have sent a death threat and denies it, it's probably reasonable to check the student's sent-mail to be sure the alleged sender is not being framed. Any imaginative person can probably come up with other "obviously OK" cases, though the question of notice, which is built into the FAS faculty policy, had not occurred to anyone when the student policy was drafted.

During the eight years I was dean of the College, I don't remember the College ever reading a student's email, but that is not to say it never happened --- nothing in the rules says the dean has to approve or be notified. In the case of a missing student it might well have been done by a request of the police to some part of the university administration. I don't know why else a search might have been done and it may be that it never happened.

And in fact, though this clause has been on the books for at least 18 years and probably longer, I don't remember any student ever asking exactly what it meant. The question has arisen only because of suspicion and mistrust raised by recent events. There is a worry that authority the administration quite reasonably needs for extraordinary circumstances has been used for reasons that the community would regard as not particularly exceptional. Once that happens, trust breaks down, more questions get asked, and doubts are raised about the wisdom of unconstrained powers. And that is exactly why the faculty is asking for greater transparency on email searching. I have no idea how the student policy could be rewritten to provide stronger guarantees against abuse and still allow rapid response to emergencies.

There is nothing in the president's stated charge to the committee on email privacy to suggest that student email privacy will not also be on its agenda. That is, it seems to me, a good thing, as the old language, which worked fine as long as the community was confident that its intent was being honored, no longer seems suitable as it stands.