Harvard Medical School To Revise Controversial Media Policy

Shortly after pulling a policy perceived as being a limitation on student interaction with the media, Harvard Medical School administrators have agreed to revise the policy with student input, school officials announced yesterday.

Following news reports highlighting the policy’s wording—which some students criticized as an infringement on their freedom of speech—the school’s Dean for Medical Education Jules L. Dienstag sent out an e-mail to the student body stating that all students are “absolutely free to speak with members of the media about anything they wish.”

“It is vitally important that you know the guideline for interaction with media was never intended to limit anyone’s freedom of speech,” Dienstag wrote in the e-mail.

Dienstag, along with a handful of Medical School administrators, convened a meeting yesterday afternoon with four medical school students to discuss the policy’s intent.

Stunned by student reaction to the policy, administrators said that the policy was originally designed to “ensure that students are sensitive to issues that relate to the patient perspective,” especially in protecting patient confidentiality, Dienstag said.

The original policy reads: “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.”

That guideline was pulled from the electronic version of the student handbook last week, and the four students present at yesterday’s meeting plan to draft a revised version of the guideline within the next week or so.

“The goal is to ensure that [the revised policy] unambiguously expresses the original intent of offering students resources as they learn to navigate the patient-doctor relationship,” said Dean for Students Nancy E. Oriol in a statement.

After the policy came under fire for its perceived restriction on freedom of speech, the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation of Massachusetts contacted school officials to discuss the policy. Long an advocate of the freedom of expression on university campuses, the ACLU Foundation of Massachusetts wrote a letter to Clark University in Worcester last spring, urging university officials to reconsider a decision to cancel a talk by controversial political scientist Norman G. Finkelstein.

“Our focus in this case is to preserve the right to freedom of academic expression,” said ACLU staff attorney Sarah Wunsch.

Though freedom of speech cannot legally be enforced at a private institution such as Harvard, University officials have an obligation to apply and protect the same principles in an academic setting, Wunsch said.

“We’re watching to see what happens,” she said.

—Staff writer June Q. Wu can be reached at junewu@fas.harvard.edu.