Harvard Backs Off Media Policy

This from N Y Times:

Harvard Medical School is backing off a new student policy that would have restricted interaction with the news media after students complained it would chill their ability to talk about current issues in medicine, school officials said Tuesday.

“We need to be very careful,” said Dr. Nancy E. Oriol, the dean of students, who helped develop the policy. Promising it would be revised, she said the policy was intended to help students, rather than limit speech or control what they say on controversial topics.

But several students said the policy was an attempt to keep them quiet about issues like medical conflicts of interest...

The statement added Feb. 2, which the administration now says it will revise:

Student Interactions with the Media.

All interactions between students and the media should be coordinated with the Office of the Dean of Students and the Office of Public Affairs. This applies to situations in which students are contacted by the media as well as instances in which students may be seeking publicity about a student-related project or program.

Harvard Law School Suspends Program Giving Students Free Tuition

This from the New York Times:

Less than two years after announcing that it would waive tuition for third-year students who pledge to spend five years working for nonprofit organizations or for the government, Harvard Law School is suspending the program — in part because almost twice as many students as expected signed up.

Almost twice as many Harvard students, shown in the law library, signed up as expected, leading in part to the suspension.

“This was always an experiment and just one of many ways we were trying to encourage students to explore public interest careers,” said Martha Minow, the dean of the law school, adding, “What we found is that we had less trouble than we thought encouraging that.”

But the recession was also a factor. “It’s really a function of the endowment going down drastically,” said Robb London, the law school’s assistant dean for communications...

Stanford Opens Access to All Its Education Studies

This from Education Week:

Faculty members at Stanford University’s school of education have voted to make scholarly articles available to the public for free, a policy change that the university says makes Stanford’s education school the first such school in the nation to join the growing “open access” movement in academia.

“We think it’s a huge gain in terms of public access, professional access, policymaker access, and lawmaker access,” said John M. Willinsky, the education professor who proposed the idea to his colleagues at the California university. “This is a body of work that is now available to schools that hasn’t been available before.” ...

...Stanford’s new policy was preceded earlier this year by a similar change at Harvard University, where the faculties of the school of arts and sciences and the law school also voted to share their academic work with the public.

“I think it’s important for Harvard and Stanford to do this, to use our weight to take the stand and give publishers pause before saying, ‘We’re not accepting any articles from Harvard or Stanford,’ ” Mr. Willinsky said.

The “open access” movement originated at an international conference held in Bulgaria in 2002. Until recently, though, the movement has largely focused on research in fields such medicine and technology, rather than the social sciences.

Pressure to share research findings with the public is also coming from a 2006 federal law, known as the Federal Research Public Access Act, which requires 11 federal agencies, including the U.S. Department of Education, to make the studies they finance more widely available.