<p>Harvard</a> dean who authorized email searches resigns - U.S. News</p>
<p>What did she do wrong? Every place I’ve ever worked made it clear that the employer had the right to look through mail sent or received on the company account. I’ve never worked in academia, are the rules on mail different?</p>
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<p>Professors don’t have the same employer/employee relationship as one would find in other sectors. </p>
<p>If anything, this is more like one senior executive at a corporation/government sector conducting such a search against other senior executives of the same/greater hierarchical rank. Only difference is that if she did it in those sectors, she’s not only likely to be fired, but also face possible legal sanctions…whether based on actual legal validity or as a way to retaliate for breaching said hierarchy. </p>
<p>This is especially the case as the deans being searched may hold other administrative/Professorial positions where they have equivalent/greater hierarchical rank in the Harvard structure than that Harvard Dean.</p>
<p>Earlier articles that appeared in the Boston Globe explained that faculty email accounts are considered private and could not be search by the administration. The initial justification for searching the accounts in question was that they were not members of the faculty and were administrators, but that apparently was not the case and these deans are considered to be faculty members. </p>
<p>Additionally, these deans (I think are referred to as house deans) are intended to be someone students can turn to for advice and counsel in this type of situation. The search, even though done with the intention of finding the person leaking information to the press, potentially provided access to what should be considered private conversations from a student’s perspective.</p>
<p>She tried to help coverup student cheating, and failed. (And is being fired for her failure.)</p>
<p>Harvard is embarassed, needs a fall-guy, and the dean poorly handled this troubling situation. Cheating episode reveals underlying problems with undergrad teaching at Harvard. Worth reading their alumni magazine’s summary of cheating scandal.</p>
<p>Mini- Where is your evidence? Dean Hammond was the person in charge of accusing and punishing over a hundred Harvard students of cheating. Everyone in the government class of 250 was investigated, and 60 plus were forced to withdraw for 6 to 12 months, with plenty more receiving other consequences. </p>
<p>She broke into the house deans’ email to see which dean was giving information to students concerning the cheating investigation. Hammonds was trying to stop the deans from giving an advantage to the cheating students, not trying to cover up the cheating.</p>
<p>A thorough review of the Harvard Crimson articles from the beginning of the scandal shows Hammond was the foe of the accused students, not the defender.</p>
<p>She made the grave error of breaking the faculty email privacy, and academia takes such a breach very seriously.</p>
<p>But it was a very pleasant way to get fired, she gets a year holiday and then back to being a tenured professor.</p>
<p>It seems that what she did wrong was not to immediately inform the people that their e-mails had been searched, as required by policy.</p>
<p>It says right in the article that she was trying to stop the leak of information about the cheating. To whose advantage is not clear. </p>
<p>Of course, she could have been removed because of adverse effects to the athletic teams…</p>
<p>In one of the articles, it said that the first search of emails was with the proper authorization, but a second search lacked authorization, which is where she ran into a problem. I find it ironic that an investigation of rule breaking involved the investigator getting demoted for failing to follow rules. (maybe not so ironic, happens a bit)</p>
<p>Which reminds me of a story. As a law clerk, the head partner gave us clerks a luncheon and a little talk. At the end he said that at some point in your career it will become clear to you that either you or your client will go to jail. Make sure it is the client who goes to jail. We all laughed, and for years I thought it was just a joke. That was until some lawyers involved in various political scandals went to jail, but their clients did not. They must have never met my former mentor.</p>
<p>The Harvard Crimson articles reported that she was trying to stop a House dean from giving information to a student athlete who wanted to know if he should withdraw to keep eligibility for another year. (If the athlete played one game, he would have forfeited a year of eligiblility.) This information was in the student handbook.</p>
<p>If you read the subsequent articles about Hammond breaking into all the deans’ email, you will see the faculty protested her actions. She defended the privacy invasion by saying the House Deans were administrators, not faculty. However the House Deans are all faculty members.</p>
<p>She did a thorough (some say too thorough) job on punishing the cheaters.</p>
<p>cross-posted with ^^.</p>
<p>If Harvard tells its faculty their email is private even if written using Harvard equipment and on Harvard servers, it must remain private. If she breaches that promise even though she has control of the Harvard computer system, it’s time to go.</p>