Two top Harvard University officials on Monday explained the details of an effort to search the e-mail accounts of 16 resident deans in order to identify the source of a leak about a cheating scandal that became public last fall, The Boston Globe reported.
The leaked e-mail contained information from Harvard’s Administrative Board, which investigated the cheating allegations, and eventually made its way to the news media. Some Harvard faculty members criticized the university’s administration on Sunday, after details of the search came to light, according to The New York Times.
The forwarded e-mail was “quite concerning” and “warranted a better understanding of what had occurred, since it threatened the privacy and due process afforded students before the board,” Michael D. Smith, dean of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and Evelynn M. Hammonds, dean of Harvard College, said in a written statement.
Harvard’s information-technology department performed what the two officials called a “a very narrow, careful, and precise subject-line search” of the deans’ administrative e-mail accounts. That search, which examined only subject lines and did not look through the contents of the messages, turned up two e-mails from one sender, whom Harvard did not identify. Campus officials deemed the forwarded message an “inadvertent error and not an intentional breach,” and no further action was taken, according to the statement.
The statement also responded to critics who questioned why the university did not tell the entire group of deans about the search after it was completed, noting that such a question “is a fair one.” Operating without a clear precedent and with the knowledge that no person had looked at any e-mails during the investigation, the Harvard officials said they “made a decision that protected the privacy of the resident dean who had made an inadvertent error and allowed the student cases being handled by this resident dean to move forward expeditiously.”
The statement also offered an apology if any of the deans felt that official communication “at the conclusion of the investigation was insufficient.”