As some of you may remember, last August there was a scandal at Harvard that implicated upwards of 125 students in a large class of cheating on a take home exam. Well apparently, the students aren't the only ones sneaking their way around Harvard.
The Boston Globe has just reported that administrators at Harvard have secretly searched the e-mail accounts of 16 of their deans. The original scandal stemmed from a leaked administrative e-mail, and it appears that officials at Harvard may have been a bit too eager to identify the guilty party. So far Harvard administrators have kept mum about the specifics of this new finding.
"Any assertion that Harvard routinely monitors emails - for any reason - is patently false," said Harvard spokesman Jeff Neal in an e-mail.
Needless to say, that word 'routinely' is a pretty strategic way of not really saying anything at all. And when one considers the fact that nobody had accused Harvard of routinely monitoring e-mails in the first place, it would seem that that word 'routinely' more than likely means: "we're buying some time till we can figure out how to smooth this over."
"They don't seem to think they've done anything wrong," adds Sharon Howell, Harvard's senior resident dean.
Harvard's privacy policy does allow for administration to search through faculty's electronic records during internal investigations, however, it also states that the administration is required to notify the faculty of any searches "unless circumstances make prior notification impossible, in which case the faculty member will be notified at the earliest possible opportunity." Of the 16 deans whose e-mails were searched, only one was notified.
The academic kerfuffle all started when a teacher's assistant noticed some irregularities on a take home exam in an undergraduate government class. Faced with the prospect of suspension, several Harvard athletes left the college rather than lose a year of sports eligibility. In total, roughly 70 students were forced to withdraw from the class.
