The Harvard email spying scandal got worse this week, with an admission that administrators had engaged in broader surveillance of faculty communications than had been previously disclosed.

The spying was prompted by public disclosure of an incident in which as many as half of the students in one Harvard class were accused of cheating on a take-home exam, and was intended to root out a faculty member believed to have leaked an internal memo to the press.

Harvard admitted in March that sixteen professors email headers’ had been surreptitiously snooped, but on Tuesday administrators told faculty that the spying had gone further. Specifically, they admitted that one professor’s faculty email account — not just his administrative account — was searched, in violation of college policy.

Harvard College dean Evelynn Hammonds, who authorized the searches, justified the snooping with an appeal to the assembled professors’ concern for their own children. “Many of you are parents,” she said, “and I ask you to imagine that it was your son or daughter who showed up on the front page of the newspaper.”

It was not until deep in the discussion period at the meeting that a faculty member raised a crucial privacy issue raised by the scandal — the fact that Harvard maintains lower privacy standards for the email accounts of “resident deans” (professors who work with students in resident hall settings) than it does for regular faculty accounts.

Benedict Gross, a math professor and former dean of Harvard College, asked the administration to promise that it would not search resident deans’ email correspondence with students, so as to preserve students’ trust in the confidentiality of such . But Hammond would say only (according to Harvard Magazine’s paraphrase) that she had “no intention” of conducting such searches.

Controversial private prison company the GEO Group announced yesterday that it is pulling out of a deal to buy naming rights for the Florida Atlantic University football stadium.

GEO’s prisons, including immigration detention centers and juvenile correctional facilities, have been the sites of a long list of documented violations of prisoners’ rights, and students have been protesting the FAU stadium naming deal since it was announced in February, staging public demonstrations and referring to the new stadium as “Owlcatraz.” The university, however, had until yesterday given GEO and the deal vocal public support, insisting that it would go forward.

(Just to get it out of the way, this was not an April Fool’s Day prank. The deal’s end was reported yesterday in multiple local news outlets in stories sourced to GEO, and a press release confirming it appears on the FAU website.)

A few things stand out about yesterday’s announcement:

First, the decision to terminate the stadium naming arrangement came from — or at least was announced by — GEO, not FAU, even though the university was the primary target of the protests and might reasonably be viewed as having more to lose in terms of public reputation. It appears that FAU was willing to continue to be associated with GEO, but not vice versa. Which means, in short, that it proved easier to shame a private prison than a public university. Worth noting.

Second, this was an unqualified victory for student protest. It was the ongoing student opposition to the deal that rendered it untenable. The chair of the FAU board of trustees was defending GEO as recently as Friday, but the student organizing against it showed no sign of letting up.

Third, the end of the stadium deal means the end of the donation, or most of it. The original arrangement called for a donation of six million dollars in the form of twelve annual $500,000 payments. GEO said yesterday that the first of those payments would go forward.

GEO stock has risen some ten percent since the announcement of the deal.

The Southern Tenant Farmer’s Union was nearly unique in the Jim Crow south in its insistence on an interracial structure and its empowerment of women as organizers. As the Encyclopedia of Arkansas notes, “Many opponents of STFU considered it to be a communist plot.”

Launched with a cotton-picking strike in 1935, STFU leaders included Odis L. Sweeden and W. N. McGoon. The group was closely allied with the Farmers’ Union (FU), and counted Eleanor Roosevelt among its supporters.

STFU: It’s true.

Sources:

• Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture
• Encyclopedia of Arkansas
• Urban Dictionary
• Dungeons and Dragons Online

Here’s something cool: I’ve just learned that a talk I’ll be giving this week in the Los Angeles area is going to be open to the public.

On Thursday afternoon I’m going to be giving the annual Stephen and Sandra Glass Humanities Lecture at Pitzer College in Claremont, California. My talk will be a discussion of “Campus Activism in America’s Past and Present.”

The lecture will be at 4:15 at the George Benson Auditorium on campus, and it will be followed by a question and answer session and a wine-and-cheese reception immediately afterwards.

If you’re in the area and so inclined, feel free to stop by.

The New York Times reports this morning that Harvard is attempting to recruit alumni to serve as unpaid volunteers in its first big MOOC offering.

The university is seeking alums who took the course, “The Ancient Greek Hero,” as undergrads to serve as  “mentors and discussion group managers” — what used to, back in the olden days when people got paid for classroom labor, be called Teaching Assistants.

More than 27,000 people have enrolled in the course’s MOOC version this semester, and Harvard is apparently nervous. Online discussions in MOOCs “tend to run off the rails,” one Harvard staffer told the Times. Harvard has already recruited ten alums who have TA’ed the course in the past to do the same again on a volunteer basis, and is now beating the bushes for more unpaid help.

The Times piece stresses the fact that the Greek Hero MOOC is a free course, but doesn’t address the larger long-term agenda for the MOOC project. If MOOCs were all about providing people with free opportunities to take online versions of college classes that wouldn’t grant them college credit there wouldn’t be much point to the whole thing — if folks want to sit in front of a computer and watch someone talk, YouTube already exists.

No, the place where MOOCs will make their mark on education, and earn their keep, is in charging students to take them for college credit. Coursera, one of the leading MOOC outfits, began rolling out such a plan this year, announcing a fee-based “Signature Track” service in January. A month later the American Council on Education announced that Signature Track would be a requirement for taking Coursera courses for credit.

Coursera is a for-profit company, while edX, the engine behind the new Harvard course, is structured as a non-profit. But profit or non-, projects like these need revenue streams.

As edX president Anant Agarwal put it earlier this month, “we have very lofty goals, but at the heart of it, we’re building a business. We don’t have to turn in huge profits … but we have to be self-sustaining.”

In addition to executive education, the Harvard Crimson reported, edX is seeking revenue in charging for credit certification, as well as — wait for it — “professor contact.”

Hello, alumni!