Each week last semester, 20 students at Yale University met with retired four-star Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal.
In a seminar on leadership, General McChrystal—who had recently been relieved of his command in Afghanistan after criticizing top U.S.-government officials—shared lessons from his own experience and brought in high-profile guests to share stories from their careers as well.
There was only one catch: Students were forbidden to reveal what General McChrystal or anyone else said in class.
The Yale seminar is one of several recent instances like this. Lectures last semester in several classes at Georgetown University by Alvaro Uribe, a former president of Colombia, were off the record, as is a current class at George Washington University featuring lectures by and discussions with Ed Henry, CNN’s senior White House correspondent, and Joe Lockhart, a former White House press secretary.
Should institutions dedicated to shared knowledge cloak courses in secrecy? Absolutely not, says Dalton Conley, senior vice provost at New York University, who thinks the practice runs contrary to notions of academic freedom. “There’s definitely a clash of institutional cultures here,” he says.
Gregory Scholtz, director of the American Association of University Professors’ department of academic freedom, tenure, and governance, says the organization’s founding policy document suggests the opposite.
“Discussions in the classroom ought not to be supposed to be utterances for the public at large,” according to the organization’s 1915 Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure.
The universities say these classes give students inside information they wouldn’t get otherwise: a worthwhile trade-off.
The August announcement that General McChrystal would teach at Yale came less than two months after he was ousted following a controversial article in Rolling Stone. The article and his forced resignation were among the biggest stories of the summer, and his appointment to the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs at Yale brought significant media attention, says Larisa Satara, the institute’s associate director. The class policy was a response to that.
“It was more off the record in the sense that you weren’t going to talk to a journalist,” she says.
But Julia A. Knight, a senior who took General McChrystal’s seminar, said she didn’t discuss class materials with students who weren’t in the class or with her family, either, because of the command in the syllabus.
She’s studied with high-profile professors at Yale before, but this was the first time she’d encountered such a policy. There were no restrictions on classes she’s taken with former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and John D. Negroponte, a former director of national intelligence.
Still, she says, silence was a trade-off that she and her 19 classmates, selected from a pool of more than 80 applicants, were willing to make.
Ms. Knight, who hopes to work in city governance, says that the opportunity to discuss leadership in an academic setting was itself unique, and that the discussion’s being led by a retired general made it all the more valuable.
She also says the policy didn’t have much impact on the classroom environment: “I didn’t dwell on the fact that it was a confidential atmosphere.”
Mr. Uribe, a visiting scholar at Georgetown, didn’t teach any courses, but he did give lectures in several classrooms on the campus. He asked professors in those courses to share the following statement with students, according to Rachel M. Pugh, Georgetown’s media-relations director:
“To encourage an active discussion and exchange of ideas, this class is off the record. All participants agree that they will not record or publicly report on this class or distribute any recordings, photographs or videos of this class or any of the participants. By attending in this class you all are agreeing to these ground rules.”
Ms. Pugh says this isn’t the first time a visiting Georgetown professor or lecturer has elected to make classroom discussions off the record, though she couldn’t cite another recent example.
At George Washington, the course with Mr. Henry, the CNN correspondent, and Mr. Lockhart, the former White House press secretary, is designed to give students in the School of Media and Public Affairs a behind-the-scenes look at White House coverage.
Michael Shanahan, an assistant professor of journalism who is himself a former White House reporter, teaches the course along with the two visitors. He says that he understands the off-the-record policy could be perceived as conflicting with the free exchange of ideas associated with academe, but that the restriction was intended to allow for a more robust discussion between students and the visiting professors.
“We’re not trying to clamp down on the intellectual discourse,” Mr. Shanahan says. “What we’re trying to do is protect Ed from being criticized” for airing his opinions about current events. Mr. Henry, as a CNN reporter rather than a commenter, is expected to maintain an objective public face.
Frank Sesno, the media school’s director (and CNN’s former Washington bureau chief), says the policy reflects the reality of Washington’s media-saturated culture.
“We live in this hothouse where everyone is in fear that anything might be quoted,” he says.
The class policy was already tested, Mr. Shanahan says, when a student in the class who is interning at the news-and-gossip Web site FishbowlDC was asked by the site’s editor to write a weekly column about the class. The student refrained because of the policy.
Off-the-record classes have some historical precedent. Ten years ago, Al Gore taught one at Columbia University’s journalism school that drew national headlines.
It was a few months after Mr. Gore had lost the 2000 presidential election, and was one of his first returns to public life, says Tom Goldstein, dean of the journalism school at the time.
“At that time he was a little gun-shy,” Mr. Goldstein says. “He wanted to teach. He didn’t want a news conference.”
Reporters camped out in front of Mr. Gore’s first class, and news organizations offered to pay students to report on the class proceedings. But what happened in the classroom stayed in the classroom.
Much has changed since then. Social-networking Web sites, blogs, and mobile technology have increased the speed at which information is transmitted.
Enforcing an off-the-record policy is more difficult now, says Mr. Goldstein, who teaches at the University of California at Berkeley: “Are you going to ask students to leave their phones at the door?”
Universities themselves have become more open as well. The rise of open courses, pioneered by MIT’s OpenCourseWare project, makes more classroom material freely available to the public, for example. And Berkeley publishes audio and video of lectures in nearly 50 classes through its webcast.berkeley program. Talks by high-profile visitors, including a 2010 lecture by former President Bill Clinton, are also available.
Ben Hubbard, the program’s manager, says the site aligns well with Berkeley’s motto, “Fiat lux,” which translates to “Let there be light.”
“That’s kind of the core of what we do, trying to provide a window of access to people around the world,” he says.
Class notes are public, too. The nonprofit note-sharing Web site FinalsClub makes notes available from 26 courses at Harvard and Brown Universities. Andrew Magliozzi, founder of FinalsClub, says most professors he’s spoken with have been happy to participate, though a few have declined for various reasons, including concerns about the accuracy of student notes and that the site would facilitate gossip about academe.
None of these mean that classrooms have become town squares, however, says Mr. Scholtz, of the AAUP. “The classroom is like a little community,” he says. “There’s sort of a mutual trust that happens there.”
Mr. Conley, who oversees NYU’s open-course program, agrees that an informal social norm should govern student behavior regarding classroom discussion.
“You don’t run out and post on Gawker what your professor said, whether it’s me or Stanley McChrystal,” he says.
But as universities become more open, he thinks explicit off-the-record policies are a step in the wrong direction. And visiting professors, regardless of their background, should adapt to academic culture, not the other way around.
Bob Smith, provost and vice president of Texas Tech University, says via e-mail that he’s never encountered an off-the-record class at any university where he’s worked.
Texas Tech brought on Alberto Gonzales, a former U.S. Attorney General, in 2009. Mr. Gonzales says, via e-mail, that he’s never considered making any of his classes off the record.
“I operate on the assumption that everything I say in class will end up in public on the record somewhere,” Mr. Gonzales says. “I tell students they should feel free to report or disclose anything I say, but to be respectful of comments made by other students in class. I agreed to be a public official and have my views reported in the media, but other students have not.”
