Harvard secretly monitors student attendance with hidden cameras

Even students at the world’s finest universities can struggle to make it to class. At Harvard, university officials initiated a controversial research program that saw cameras secretly installed in lecture halls just to keep tabs on student attendance. The program, which was kept secret from professors and students alike, was revealed this week at a faculty meeting, reports 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, an admission that prompted criticism from faculty and students who said the research was an invasion of privacy. The clandestine experiment, disclosed publicly for the first time at a faculty meeting Tuesday night, came to light about a year-and-a-half after revelations that administrators had secretly searched thousands of Harvard e-mail accounts. That led the university to implement new privacy policies on electronic communication this spring, but another round of controversy followed the latest disclosure.