Yale University ran up the white flag last week in its battle to keep seniors Peter Xu and Harry Yu from creating an easier-to-use and more informative version of its online course catalog. The school's real battle, however, was against technological change — and so defeat was inevitable.
Xu and Yu, who are twins, invented an ingenious way to combine the catalog with course evaluations. The popular site soon had more than 1,800 student users. Yale tried to shut it down, partly on intellectual property grounds: It was, after all, Yale's data. Another student found a workaround, and techies and campus free-speech advocates lined up on the brothers' side.
So Yale (which happens to be my employer) gave in. Mary Miller, the dean of Yale College, conceded that no other outcome was possible: "Technology has moved faster than the faculty could foresee when it voted to make teaching evaluations available to students over a decade ago, and questions of who owns data are evolving before our very eyes."
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