Bill Jaeger, director of the Harvard Union for Clerical and Technical Workers, which represents several thousand University staff, said that HUCTW members have noticed increasing pressure to avoid speaking with the press.

“In the past few years, it's been a fairly steady drumbeat,” Jaeger said. “There have been emails, there have been statements, there have been conversations or personalized instructions... Our members have been internalizing the general idea that they best say, ‘No comment.’”

These communications are often sent by human resources, rather than the communications office, but they often ask that requests simply be redirected towards a public relations staffer.

Still, Heenan said that she did not think that HPAC maintained any policy on staff communication with the press, and she did not see her office's role as any kind of information barrier at all. In a university community, she said, public relations officers must show restraint out of sensitivity for “the free flow of information, and the freedom of expression, and disparate voices.”

Emails from human resources departments, however, show that administrators sometimes discourage staff members from speaking to the press— and, in some cases, send them in HPAC's direction.

During the manhunt for the Boston Marathon bombing suspect in April, for example, an email from FAS Human Resources sent to all FAS department administrators said, “A reminder that all connections or conversations with the media or any other external third parties regarding this situation must be made through Jeff Neal.”

Neal is HPAC's University Communications Director responsible for FAS. A statement from Kevin Galvin, the senior communications director at HPAC, said that administrators were concerned that the sharing of inaccurate information could put people at risk in a still-fluid situation. When asked about a media policy in FAS Human Resources, Galvin referred that request to Neal, who in turn did not return repeated requests for comment.

In a 2009 email to Lamont Library employees, a library administrator instructed workers to direct media inquires to the Harvard College Communications Office, advising them “to make no comment.” Galvin said that HPAC could not comment on the email, because the Harvard College Library no longer exists after merging into the unified Harvard Library.

In Harvard's Houses, policy for talking to the press varies. Senior Resident Dean Sharon L. Howell said that following a Crimson article about sexual assault in 2010, resident deans were instructed to direct all media inquiries pertaining to College-wide issues to University Hall or HPAC. Van C. Tran, who was a resident tutor in Lowell House from 2005 to 2011, said that when he was at Harvard, tutors were free to talk to the press about day-to-day issues on which they had direct knowledge, but were discouraged from speaking about major University news events.

Yet HPAC's efforts to help shape the message are not just responsive to administrators seeking assistance or to journalists seeking information and sources. Online and in the Gazette, it seeks to produce and disseminate positive content often leave out some of the University's biggest stories.

MAKING HEADLINES

If you only got your news from the Gazette over the past decade, you would not know about the faculty uproar that led to the 2006 exit of former University President Lawrence H. Summers. You would have had to scour the police reports on page two to learn that a man was fatally shot in the basement of Kirkland House in 2009. You would have only heard of administrators breaking FAS policy with secret email searches in a Q&A that briefly mentions “the controversy over the searches” and was published two months after the Globe first broke the story. And this week, you would have had no idea that Hammonds's exit as Dean of the College came amidst this same controversy.

Some community members have expressed concern over the absence of what they believe to be the biggest issues facing the University in a publication that, according to HPAC's website, covers “University news, faculty research, and campus events.”

“If anything, I think that the willingness to put under the microscope our faults as well as our successes is a measure of how great a university we are,” said Richard Parker, senior fellow at the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy.

But Heenan pointed to the Gazette story about Smith's letter announcing the cheating scandal investigation as an example in which HPAC was as transparent as it could be, noting, as the article does, that Harvard could only provide so much information under the constraints of confidentiality laws.