The website prior to shutdown.
It seems that Yale has not learned from rival Harvard’s history with Mark Zuckerberg when they shut down students Peter Xu and Harry Yu’s course evaluation website: CourseTable.com (formerly Bluebook+). For a school rooted in innovation, the move seems a little short sighted.
The student run website Bluebook+ was designed to help students organize their class schedules, access course summaries, and review course evaluations in one simple, easy to use location.
Xu and Yu say the school sanctioned website, dubbed simply Bluebook, was stricken with aging IT and little if any improvements on the horizon. So what’s a students from a school famed for entrepreneurship to do in a case like this? Produce a work around.
Searching for courses on Bluebook+ was made easier as all the data was pre-downloaded. This allowed students to see course descriptions instantly. Of the 5,000 students on campus, Xu and Yu claim that over 2,000 were using their site before it was blocked.
Xu and Yu claim that they were willing to work with Yale to address their issues with the site, including use of the Yale logo and other copyrighted data. The school also had issue with how easily course evaluations could be seen. Xu and Yu even changed the name of the site to CourseTable to avoid confusion.
However, the school opted to shut it down instead of nurturing the innovation of their students. The blocked site message even goes as far as to call the website "malicious activity"!
View of the downed site from the Yale campus.
In their letter to the school (which has replaced the initial website) Xu and Yu say that, “students who pay $58,600 to attend an institution should be given the information that lets them take the best classes. But actions speak louder than words, and Yale doesn't seem to think so… blocking the website invisibly, first by IP address, and now by calling it ‘malicious activity’, is wrong. It threatens the very basis of academic freedom and net neutrality, and it disappoints us very much to have an institution we love let us down.”
In what remains of their website, Xu and Yu say, “We think that Yale generally supports innovation. Yale as a whole remains a great place for technology, but moreover, Yale has prepared us not only as programmers and designers, but also as activists and citizens.”
And it is hard to get a good activist down, the shutdown has led to a school petition which currently has signature from almost 14% of the Yale student body. In their petition, Peter Xu and Harry Yu say, “let it [CourseTable.com] return to its original state, to once again embrace the Yale values of innovation, creativity, and respect for its students.”
Yale made the wrong move here. If they truly believe in innovation, as they say they do, they would not quake at the idea of students seeing course evaluations. They would be using that information for continuous improvement of said courses and working with the student body.
Furthermore, if innovation is so important to Yale, and this site was superior to theirs (which is believable as over 40% of their students used it), then they should be offering Xu and Yu a salary instead of legal jargon.
Source and Images Courtesy of CourseTable.com
Reference Petition.yaleplus.com, Yale Daily News