The Report Harvard Should Have Asked For

Harvard needs to be as honest with itself as MIT is being. In some ways the tragedies are disproportionate; the Gov 1310 mess has cost no lives that I know of, though I understand that some students were under severe psychological stress, lost weight, and so on. On the other hand, it seems that many dozens will have their lives permanently altered by the experience and the black mark that goes with it on their transcript. 

From my conversations with families and students involved in the Gov 1310 case, what strikes me is how un-family-like they feel their interactions with the university have been. Harvard's disciplinary process is meant to be paternalistic; to be sure parents must sometime discipline their children while still loving them. There is not much sense out there among the Gov 1310 students I know that Harvard loves them. 

Good for MIT for recognizing that its reputation will, in the long run, be enhanced if it tries to figure out if and where it went wrong with Aaron Swartz, and that the best way to do that, in a family setting, is to ask a wise uncle to figure it out and report to the community. I wish Harvard had the same attitude.

The Abelson report is now out. (Here is a link to it.) It is an extremely honorable and good report. It very carefully reconstructs the timeline, documenting insofar as possible every relevant conversation and decision that was taken. That was difficult to do, because, for example, both MIT and Swartz had outside counsel (Swartz had several different ones at different times). Figuring out whether and why some party at MIT was or was not included in a conversation about which lawyer is talking to which state or federal official must have been a nightmare (lawyers typically are not the most open folks about their back office conversations). All that effort was needed to settle some critical questions people were asking, such as "Why did MIT call in the feds?" (It didn't; the feds showed up alongside local law enforcement, and there was nothing MIT could have done about that.) The Harvard and MIT cases are different in important respects, so the responses to them could not have been identical. As I noted in January, nobody at Harvard seems to have died because of Gov 1310 (though I am not so confident that no one came close to dying). As a result, there is probably no single thing about the Gov 1310 mess that everybody in the Harvard community would agree is regrettable, in the way that the sad memory of Aaron Swartz hangs over every page of the MIT report. Still, this report shows that Harvard could learn a lot from MIT about how to run a university. The quality of the final report stems from President Reif's charge letter. I have already suggested what the first part of the charge was--to figure out what happened when. But the charge has two other parts:

(2) review the context of these decisions and the options that MIT considered, and (3) identify the issues that warrant further analysis in order to learn from these events.