Harvard Search of E-mail Stuns Its Faculty Members | Hacker News Reader

Harvard Search of E-mail Stuns Its Faculty Members

nytimes.com

61 pointscoloneltcb32 comments

I was last at Harvard in 1981, but even as a teaching fellow for one course I was faculty. My ID said "Faculty", I could eat at the Faculty Club, etc. Ditto when I was a Post-Doctoral/Research Fellow there. (Some of my fondest post-doc memories are of sharing a lunch table with guys like Tom Schelling.)

I'm guessing that "Resident Deans" are like what we used to call "Senior Tutors". Whether or not that's the case, it seems pretty clear to me that Harvard tradition would call for them to be treated with the same courtesies (other) faculty are. Indeed, by a large margin, they probably have MORE influence on undergraduate students' academic success than any one professor or teaching fellow generally does.

The question, in my mind, isn't about whether or not it was OK for Harvard to search their mail server, but rather why they would need to do it.

First of all, does Harvard attempt to punish the person who leaked the controversy to the media? And if nearly half of the 279 students were suspected to be cheating and were going to be asked to withdraw, would they really expect the issue to remain hush-hush?

The issue wasn't people leaking the controversy to the media, it was that A resident dean forwarded private email from the administration giving guidance on how to advise athletics students on how to withdraw gracefully.

I would have hoped that this policy would also have been exempt from this pervasive mania for secrecy. The Harvard community in general is well-served to know: 1) that there is a different policy for athletes than for other students 2) that at least some of the "guilty" students were convinced by trusted Harvard faculty (possibly including coaches?) to take a "plea bargain" rather than inconvenience the Ad Board with making a proper determination of guilt 3) that the resident deans, who are privy to many of the secret actions of the administration, don't trust the administration, and they have good reason not to trust it.

Maybe we should have known these things already? Then what harm has resulted from letting the public in general in on it?

I bet it came as a big surprise to the Harvard faculty that the same asshole stuff everybody else's boss does is the sort of thing their boss does, too.

The faculty shouldn't be stunned. Harvard has been reading the e-mail of students for a long time. Why should the faculty be any different?

I'm fairly certain they read my e-mail in 2003 (which I wrote about in my book). Judith Kidd, then a member of the administration, happened to know that I'd hired lawyers in a meeting before I had ever told her. While it's remotely possible that she learned of this from another source, I think it's highly unlikely.

The reason why Harvard (or any university) is not your average employer is that academic institutions, and particularly those with big brand names, are supposed to be beacons of free speech in this country. Professors should be able to discuss or investigate pretty much any [legal] topic they want to without fear of censorship or other repercussions. The notion that the administration could spy on faculty (or students for that matter) without notice could have potential chilling effects that are actually fairly serious.

But am I surprised? Not at all. The Harvard Administrative Board has been and continues to be an abomination. Despite all of the scholarship on the subjects at the law school, due process and transparency remain foreign concepts to these people.

> Despite all of the scholarship on the subjects at the law school, due process and transparency remain foreign concepts to these people.

I have to agree with Aaron here: The worst part of this story is that Dean Michael Smith, who authorized the search, teaches a privacy class, CS 105.

> The faculty shouldn't be stunned. Harvard has been reading the e-mail of students for a long time. Why should the faculty be any different?

Are you sure you went to Harvard? :) It's not a surprise that Harvard treats students and faculty differently. It would be a surprise if they did. The caste system is extremely strong, or at least it was when I was there (class of '96).

And that's my read on this tale: the Harvard castes are re-aligning. Traditionally, it's been faculty at the top, with administration below. The administration is now rising, to the point that it feels it can pick off the lower rungs of the faculty, like the resident deans.

This is a shift occurring all over academia, but perhaps a little later at the Ivies.

If I were still a student I might hope that this will be a sort of "it gets worse before it gets better" moment, in that the faculty are the only party even theoretically capable of arresting Harvard's ethical and managerial decline. Experience indicates that having been blind for decades, they're unlikely to see the light now. The Harvard bureaucracy is big enough and old enough that its true purpose is itself. Only the faculty ever had the power to re-focus the bureaucracy's efforts on students and veritas. I wonder if they still have that power now.

Though TFA quotes several professors' criticisms of the administration's actions, I wonder how much of the issue they're really seeing. Mitzenmacher, for example, has in the past defended the Ad Board categorically. (e.g. http://mybiasedcoin.blogspot.com/2008/10/on-ad-board-harvard... ) Prof. Lewis, however, I find an inspiration in every sense: academic, moral, human, etc. I just have the feeling that he is a lone voice of decency in Cambridge.

Reading the article, what surprises me the most is that they had to search the mail in the first place.

For the information they were after, any relatively primitive mail tracking system would suffice. To be fair, even most outbound spam/virus scanners would log the level of info being looked for.

I can't help but feel as if it's a bit of an overreaction. A very targeted search was done on the mail headers to try and track down a leak. It seems fairly routine work. The lack of notification is a big issue (soon after the event) but even so.

To see the reaction you'd assume that the administrators were going through each persons mailbox reading every single mail.

This seems really silly to me. In large institutions it is very common for this to happen, and the email accounts and all the content in them belongs to Harvard. This is the case with pretty much any employer. A clever faculty member looking to leak to the press should a) not use their Harvard email address or b) better yet, pick up the phone to provide the tip.

I think that misses the point, and the article discusses why. It's not about what Harvard could do; it's about standard protocol for treating faculty, and it's about trust. In the academic world faculty are usually treated with incredible amounts of respect, and several people interviewed in the article see Harvard's actions as a breach of that standard.

This guy puts it well:

>Harry R. Lewis, a professor and former dean of Harvard College, said, “People are just bewildered at this point, because it was so out of keeping with the way we’ve done things at Harvard.”

I don't think it is disrespectful to search their emails though, Harvard is fundamentally an institution funded by donors. This scandal majorly damage the reputation of the institution and was embarrassing to high profile donors and alumni. Protecting that is obviously worth more to Harvard then whether or not professors feel they have academic freedom. The only problem with all of this now is that the public also knows the emails were searched. Seems Harvard can't keep any secrets anymore.

  I don't think it is disrespectful to search their emails 
  though, Harvard is fundamentally an institution funded 
  by donors.

In my mind searching someone's e-mail is like searching their pockets as they leave the office, or asking them to take a supervised drugs test: It's technically legal and some employers do it.

On the other hand, the people who work for me are trusted, respected professionals. I'd understand them taking umbrage if I asked them to turn out their pockets, or to piss into a cup, or if I started reading their e-mail.

The difference is that faculty tend to believe (rightly) that academic freedom gives them the right to communicate freely relative to the average employee.

As someone that works in a large University, I can tell you this is NOT common at all. Last year a faculty member here had a heart attack and was out of commission for awhile-it was almost impossible to get permission to access his email account and set an out of office response-we weren't allowed to 'see' his email (we had to pretend we didn't see any of his message). At my institution even staff email is not allowed to be read unless we have a subpoena.

I personally think a better headline would be "Harvard faculty shocked and awed by Real World practices and policies intruding on Ivory Tower" :-) I wonder how many of these faculty are aware that the US Gov't is already reading their email, regardless of the provider, and further how many of them are aware that the problem is mostly-fixable with end-to-end email encryption a-la PGP/GnuPG?

Does the university have an established policy for email retention and access to that data? It seems unlikely that they wouldn't, but I don't see it mentioned anywhere. It's never a good idea to rely on goodwill to prevent access to sensitive data - if it's there, a need arises and it's not illegal, it's eventually going to happen.

Update from the offending deans: http://www.fas.harvard.edu/home/content/deans-communications

Précis: secrecy is literally the most important thing ever.

Read the terms of your employment... This is common practice in any organization. Work email is the property of the company or organization.

Yep. If you have any mail on your companies email server it's fair game.

Hence why the need to keep work and personal life seperate is important and keep bitching out people on work emails (or any emails for that matter..) is super important.

This ignores that the bar for Harvard has been set higher though.

The existence of email at universities predates the use of email by other organizations -- thus, there are a different set of norms expected by faculty.

They do have a different set of norms, but probably more due to the academic culture. The first email was sent at BBN a company that was part of ARPANET, along with governmental organizations as well as the universities.

Did you read the article? Harvard (apparently) violated their own policy for faculty email, which, among other things, states that "The faculty member is entitled to prior written notice that his or her records will be reviewed, unless circumstances make prior notification impossible, in which case the faculty member will be notified at the earliest possible opportunity." It's not a standard corporate email policy.

I find attitudes like this fascinating. If they were within their legal right to do this, that explains why the resident deans are complaining instead of suing.

When did the fact something is permitted become reason to shut down or marginalize discussion on if it should happen and/or be permitted?

Actually the resident deans aren't complaining at all. They don't have tenure, and so they could be terminated if they spoke out against administrative policy. It's the professors who are complaining.

Some people are incapable of understanding that some rule out there are wrong and should be questioned. They cannot actually understand how people do this questioning. I guess they sleep easy at night knowing all is right with the world, because those lawyers are on our side.

Skipping over the pathetic passive aggressive tone, this isn't about some repressed part of society, this is simply a employer/employee relationship.

There's nothing wrong with an employer doing this to protect the organziation. This is exactly what is happening, it's an investigastion into misconduct, not some big civil liberties case.

When you send email using you work account you should not expect that email to have the same privacy as your own email might.

I am perfectly capable of understanding, and the university are in the right, they have every right to investigate what happened.

Skipping over the pathetic whinging about tone, this is not simply an employer/employee relationship.

The President and Fellows were charged in 1650 with "the advancement of all good literature, arts, and sciences". That can be boiled down to: veritas. There is nothing to support selfish deans avoiding public scrutiny of their poor decisions.

When I've been involved with a public university there are lots of disclaimers and notices that stuff done via University email is not private and isn't subject to requirements for a warrant should the institution want to review it, etc.

However, I would expect that Harvard, being a private institution, and desiring to make its faculty members feel secure, would adopt a standard that's more stringent with respect to institutional access, and that its members, feeling that they're part of the good ol' Harvard crew would feel as though there were an additional informal standard layered on top of any official policy.

In any case, I don't think public or private institutions are likely to treat email at all like private enterprises, and I'm not sure why one would think that is so.

I don't know why you're being down voted? Obviously your employer can look at your work email at any point in time.

I'm not sure if this is right or wrong. I have a gut feeling that this may be right though. I'd like to be able to look through my teams emails if I have a good enough reason (sexual discrimination etc)

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