Dive Brief:

• As part of a study on classroom attendance, Harvard University researchers photographed students in 10 lecture halls without informing the professors until afterward or the students at all.
• The covert photography was revealed on Tuesday during a meeting between faculty members and administrators, the Boston Globe reported.
• The university’s president, Drew Faust, says she is taking the matter very seriously and that a panel overseeing new electronic communications policies will look into it.

Dive Insight:

Students and faculty are upset, especially considering Harvard went through an invasion of privacy scandal a year-and-a-half ago when administrators secretly read through e-mail accounts looking for leakers to the Boston Globe. This study photographed the lecture hall seats once every minute, and then a computer program scanned each photo to count the seats filled. A university review board was informed about the study before the photography began and ruled that it wasn’t “human-subjects research.” Tellingly, the researchers didn’t say how they collected the data when they presented their findings at a conference at Harvard.