Harvard University has recently come under fire for a study conducted by researchers at the university’s Initiative for Learning and Teaching, in which students were photographed in lecture halls to record attendance. Researchers gave no notification of their activity to either the students or the professors before the study. Peter K. Bol, who oversees the Initiative for Learning and Teaching, said a federally mandated board that reviews research at Harvard concluded before it was executed that the study did not constitute human-subjects research. After the data on how many empty seats there were in lectures was collected, the photographs were destroyed, and the professors whose classes were monitored consented to the data being used for research.
An undergraduate Harvard student quoted in the Harvard Crimson said the study indicated that the university is “being secretive” and “withholding information from students and professors that could potentially be used against them.”
The controversy raises a difficult question of research ethics. Because the researchers were not gathering information on individual subject behavior, they could carry on with their experiment without informing the subjects, as allowed by Harvard’s Institutional Review Board. But some students and professors have indicated they felt uncomfortable with what the researchers did. This feeling of discomfort could be influenced by the recent revelation that Harvard officials clandestinely searched several deans’ email accounts. When students already have reason to distrust the administration, sensitivity about privacy issues is heightened.
But the criticisms of the researchers in this case neglect to account for the fact that studies often require some amount of deception in order to collect reliable data. If students had been notified that class attendance would be recorded, such knowledge may have influenced their behavior, and the researchers would not have gotten a baseline idea of lecture attendance under normal circumstances.
The idea that the attendance data could “be used against” students misses the purpose of the study, as the researchers destroyed the photographs and did not give them to the professors. There is a distinction between collecting data which is kept as anonymous as possible for scientific research and invading people’s personal emails. This distinction might be blurred by concern about other administrative actions, which were blatantly unethical.
The criticisms also assert that university officials must respect students’ privacy, even in lecture halls. Some professors video record lectures for their own purposes, or for the university’s purposes, such as the “Justice” lecture series at Harvard. But this recording would presumably not qualify as “surveillance,” even though it documents far more information than photographs and is likely not destroyed later.
The difference between “surveillance” and harmless recording, then, is probably knowledge of the camera. But as previously mentioned, such knowledge could have compromised the integrity of the data. An alternative procedure for this particular experiment which would not have taken photographs might have been to solicit research assistants to go to the lectures and count the number of empty seats and the number of attendees. But this approach comes with a heightened risk of human error in data collection.
All research must strike a balance between preserving subject well-being and collecting reliable data. Perhaps in the future, the university could establish an additional research review board to evaluate cases which do not qualify as human-subjects research, but still involve students to ensure the proper balance is always reached.
Read More
EDITORIAL: Celebrating and reflecting on The Cavalier Daily’s independence
By Editorial Board | 4 days agoOur independence grants us the ability to ask the hard questions and to say what University representatives cannot.
ARRAS: U.Va. must revise the Sexual Assault Prevention Training module
By Aoife Arras | 5 days agoIn addition to its failures in interactivity, the module lacks details specific to the University and discusses key concepts in universal terms.
EDITORIAL: Pedestrian safety is an institutional imperative
By Editorial Board | April 15, 2024Amid a national crisis of pedestrian safety, Charlottesville and the University are also struggling to properly maintain pedestrian safety.
