Saying that she was "deeply disturbed" by the results of a sexual conduct climate survey administered by the Association of American Universities last spring, Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust reportedly visited Statistics 104 office hours this past weekend for guidance. 

"I was deeply troubled and deeply worried by the proportion of Harvard students who reported that they had experienced nonconsensual sexual contact during their time at the college," Faust admitted in an e-mail to the undergraduate student body this morning. "But most of all, I was deeply confused. Professor Parzen didn't cover how to do this in STATA during lecture."

 

Layla Goldstein '17, a Stat 104 TF whom Faust consulted on Saturday night in Science Center 115, has praised the President's actions in response to the survey.

 

"For a long time, I assumed that Harvard refused to establish a clear policy for handling sexual assault because it didn't want to acknowledge a problem that would tarnish its prestigious reputation," the WGS concentrator said. "Now, I understand. President Faust simply confused the p-value for a two-sided t-test with the p-value for a one-sided one. Anyone could have made that mistake."

 

According to sources, Faust missed several previous lectures on probability, sampling methods, and stating the obvious, due to other important presidential duties like helping grow the Harvard endowment by another couple billion dollars. A harried Faust was reported to have been seen frantically flipping through section handouts before listening to student concerns during an open forum.

 

"We have a lot more data," she said in response to a question about how the university will use the survey results. "We're still figuring out what all of these numbers mean. Like, if Parzen tells another story about his three-legged cat, we won't even get two-way tables by Friday."

 

At press time, Faust was in a meeting with Prof. David Laibson, a member of Harvard's task force on the prevention of sexual assault. The two are rumored to be designing a new survey on how Harvard should respond to the AAU survey, demonstrating Faust's clear commitment to showing that increasing sample size n decreases the standard error.