Miller says the University's new restriction on putting lectures online can inhibit a professor's desire to enrich the intellectual community at large.

"This is a radical change in policy that restricts our freedom," Miller told The Crimson after the draft of Harvard's new policy was released.

But the concept of Internet education is one that has long been questioned.

"When I am preparing a course for the Internet, it may or may not be the best thing for my own students," Thompson says. "I might be tempted to redesign my course to make it more suitable for the net than for my classroom."

Even Kamarck says that when she was juggling her public career with her job as a professor, there was an inevitable amount of convergence.

"If you are teaching government and working in a presidential campaign, there is bound to be substantial overlap," she says. "There are definitely things that I work on in the campaign that I end up using in class."

Verba says that sometimes it is hard to recognize when a professor is compromising his or her students--and that is the ultimate issue.

"We all write books which sometimes are based on courses and that is not usually considered a conflict of interest," he says. "But if you videotape your course and sell it through a commercial university, then that is really in competition with what you owe Harvard."