Harvard administrators secretly searched the email accounts of 16 faculty members in August 2012, according to a written statement from two senior university deans.
University deans Michael Smith and Evelynn Hammonds said that a “very narrow, careful, and precise subject-line search” was performed on administrative email accounts belonging to some members of the university’s administrative board. Hammonds chairs the administrative board.
The officials said they were searching for emails about a cheating scandal that shook the university last spring. An email had been forwarded from a member of the administrative board to a student who was under investigation. That email was eventually leaked to the campus newspaper the Harvard Crimson on Sept. 1, 2012.
In August, Harvard announced they were investigating possible large-scale cheating in their Government 1310 class. According to the Crimson, nearly 125 students out of the 280 enrolled in the course were flagged for having “suspicious” take-home examinations.
The leaked email, which has since been published by the campus newspaper, contained guidelines on how to advise students who were under investigation. It spoke of possible penalties, including expulsions or academic probation, but didn’t include the names of anyone involved.
According to the statement from Smith and Hammonds, the search was performed because the university was worried that other confidential information, specifically “student information,” had also been leaked.
“No one’s emails were opened and the contents of no one’s emails were searched by human or machine,” Smith and Hammonds wrote about the search.
The email search was successful in finding the source of the leak, but no discipline has been taken against that unnamed resident dean.
The 16 resident deans were not made aware of the email search. However, Harry Lewis, a professor of computer science at Harvard, debated in a blog whether Harvard broke any of the university’s staff privacy rules in conducting the search.
The resident deans might fall under Faculty of Arts and Sciences policies that say notification for an email search must be given as soon as it is possible, Lewis said.
However, other Harvard staff privacy policies do not say notification must be given. Lewis said the administration considers the resident deans to fall under the less stringent privacy rules.
All resident deans were not alerted to the email search until the Boston Globe published a story regarding the incident on March 9.
Many faculty members at the university said they are disappointed with the administration’s decision not to inform those who were searched.
