See No Evil, Hear No Evil

One autumn morning Dean of the Faculty A. Michael Spence told a group of alumni and one student that the College wanted to build another undergraduate house, that the proportion of the endowment spent on students at Harvard is smaller than at Princeton and that Harvard wants to increase the size of its faculty.

The student was not the Undergraduate Council chairman, nor was he a reporter. He was an employee of the audio-visual department, and he was videotaping Spence's fundraising pitch.

"I don't know if it's confidential," the student employee says. "But it's not information I've gotten from The Crimson or anywhere else."

This student is one of about 100 Harvard undergraduates who, through their University employment, are privy to confidential information.

No official screening process for these jobs exists, and supervisors say they usually rely on their intuition when hiring students. Officials from the admissions, financial aid and development offices, as well as those from the audio-visual department, say they have had few problems with students violating confidentiality rules in recent years.

"Remember these are students that Harvard Radcliffe accepted, so we have a great deal of confidence with them to begin with," says Director of Admissions Marlyn McGrath Lewis.

The only instance in which a student leaked information from the financial aid office, according to Janet Irons, assistant director of financial aid, occurred almost six years ago when the employee commented to his roommate about his financial background. The student was immediately fired, Irons says.

In some departments, certain precautions are taken to ensure confidentiality.

The audio-visual department, which tapes lectures and shows slides for classes, also tapes closed-door meetings of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) and the Board of Overseers. As a security precaution, "students are excluded from some of the more sophisticated and long term projects," says Jane Rogers, coordinator for the audio-visual department.

"Students do not work for us on projects that require Secret Service clearance, such as when President Aquino came to speak," Rogers says. "The FAS faculty meetings are taped by an officer of the University, and a professional, full-time worker who has been with the department for the last 17 years records the Board [of Overseers] meetings."

One student employee in the audio-visual department, though, says, "Confidentiality is not really an issue. Most interesting information that other students might not hear is heard within the department on a rumor level, not first hand."

Of the meetings students are not permitted to tape, the undergraduate says, "Any real interesting information I would have heard about. It's not a real tight-lipped crowd" that works for the department.

Eleven students work in the development office, the department responsible for the bulk of Harvard's fundraising activities. They compile lists of potential donors, says Beverly Bennett, director of development services. The student workers are not privy to donors' financial records, Bennett says.

Although students working in the admissions office have access to applicants' files, "there is an elaborate system of anonymity, and nobody has the leisure to read the files and become familiar with them," says Lewis.

Easy Access to Admissions Lists

Despite such security-conscious measures, Sarah E. James '90, who worked in the admissions office this year, says she had easy access to lists of admitted applicants. But she says, "It's better not to say anything when people ask."

"The only time it got hard," James says, "was when friends had a brother or sister applying and they wanted to know what the committee report had said. In one instance, I knew that a friend's brother had gotten in. However, after the decisions are made many changes can be made. They can take people off and put people on the same day they send the letters out. If I had told my friend I could have been wrong, and then I also would have been fired."

Shortly before the office mailed out its acceptance letters, an admissions officer overheard James, who is also a photographer for The Harvard Independent, talking on the phone about her assignment for the paper. The officer insisted that James be fired, thinking that she was leaking information. Eventually, James says, the misunderstanding was cleared up.

According to Richard Zayas '88, who works in the financial aid office for the Undergraduate Minority Recruitment Program, "Nothing has ever leaked. We do not have access to the really sensitive information, but we do know things like SAT scores."

Zayas adds, "There's a lot of trust in the office between the admissions officers and recruitment officers. We are staff, not just students working in the office."