Dartblog

The Times is reporting that the Harvard administration has searched the e-mail accounts of various deans:

Harvard Searched E-Mails for Source of Media Leaks

Bewildered, and at times angry, faculty members at Harvard criticized the university on Sunday after revelations that administrators secretly searched the e-mail accounts of 16 resident deans in an effort to learn who leaked information about a student cheating scandal to the news media. Some predicted a confrontation between the faculty and the administration.
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“I was shocked and dismayed,” said the law professor Charles J. Ogletree. “I hope that it means the faculty will now have something to say about the fact that these things like this can happen.”

News of the e-mail searches prolonged the fallout from the cheating scandal, in which about 70 students were forced to take a leave from school for collaborating or plagiarizing on a take-home final exam in a government class last year.

Harry R. Lewis [see his blog post on the issue here], 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.”

We’re due for a similar scandal in Hanover. I know two former administrators who were confronted with their own e-mails in the course of investigations conducted by their superiors in the administration. And numerous College faculty members seem to have gotten the message; they have Gmail addresses in addition to their Dartmouth.edu accounts.

The law is clear that an employer owns and can search e-mail sent and received using company equipment, but in a university setting, expectations of privacy and academic freedom are quite different.