Administrators at Harvard University secretly searched the e-mail accounts of 16 resident deans last fall, looking for the source of a leak to the news media about a cheating scandal that was making national headlines at the time, according to reports by The Boston Globe and The New York Times.
One of the deans was told of the search shortly after it occurred. The others were left unaware that administrators had searched their e-mail accounts until the Globe questioned Harvard officials about the incident late last week.
The information that was leaked in the case was a memo from Harvard’s Administrative Board, which investigated the cheating allegations. The resident deans, who have teaching duties and live in undergraduate residential houses as student advisers, serve on the Administrative Board. What’s unclear in the case is whether they are entitled to the same protections as faculty members when it comes to e-mail privacy.
Under a Faculty of Arts and Sciences policy, administrators are allowed access to faculty e-mails and documents only under certain “extraordinary circumstances,” and then they must notify the relevant faculty members in advance or “at the earliest possible opportunity.”
Another policy, for nonunionized administrative and professional staff members, states that electronic records “may be accessed at any time by management or by other authorized personnel for any business purpose.”
According to The Harvard Crimson, resident deans hold administrative appointments that come with some faculty privileges, and they are listed as “house staff” on the Office of Student Life’s Web site.
Harry R. Lewis, a professor of computer science at Harvard who helped draft the Faculty of Arts and Sciences policy, writes in a blog post that Harvard officials apparently consider the residents to be staff members whose “administrative responsibilities trump their faculty privileges.” But their service on the Administrative Board complicates the issue, Mr. Lewis says. “Their status as faculty is intrinsic to their role as members of the Ad Board—that is, the board to which the Faculty of Arts and Sciences has delegated responsibility for administering its rules,” he writes. “The board is a faculty committee.”
Harvard officials did not specifically acknowledge the e-mail searches but, in a written statement quoted by the newspapers, appeared to defend them. “If circumstances were to arise that gave reason to believe that the Administrative Board process might have been compromised, then Harvard College would take all necessary and appropriate actions under our procedures to safeguard the integrity of that process, which is designed to protect the rights of our students to privacy and due process,” Michael D. Smith, dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, said in the statement.
