Over the weekend it was revealed that Harvard had searched the emails (actually, just the subject lines) of 16 deans to look for the person who leaked information on a cheating scandal to the New York Times. Yesterday, after the deans got pissed, they got thrown a microscopic bone in the form of a “sorry if you feel that way” statement:
Some have asked why, at the conclusion of that review, the entire group of Resident Deans was not briefed on the review that was conducted, and the outcome. The question is a fair one. Operating without any clear precedent for the conflicting privacy concerns and knowing that no human had looked at any emails during or after the investigation, we made a decision that protected the privacy of the Resident Dean who had made an inadvertent error and allowed the student cases being handled by this Resident Dean to move forward expeditiously. We understand that others may see the situation differently, and we apologize if any Resident Deans feel our communication at the conclusion of the investigation was insufficient.
In other words, in case you thought being a Harvard dean meant that your bosses wouldn’t snoop through your email if they thought they could gain from it, welcome to the real world. And, OBTW, if you’re going to do any leaking, think like Wal-Mart middle manager, instead of a Harvard dean, and get yourself an anonymous Gmail account.
Also, too, if you want to read some grade A bullshit, don’t stop with the excerpt I quoted here, read the whole non-apology apology, because it is a classic of the genre: wordy, ill-reasoned, evasive and condescending.
lojasmo
Workplace email accounts belong to the master.
Never use them for anything you want to keep private.
Walker
This. My students are smart enough that when they want to send me tips about possible cheating in the class, they make up a one-time, throw-away G-Mail account.
Indeed, many students simply use campus e-mail addresses as a forwarding address for an offsite address so that the campus does not control it. You would think they would be a bit more savvy about this at Harvard.
Va Highlander
Who would have believed that Resident Deans could be so appallingly naive?
Howard Beale IV
And-surprise-many companies now block webmail access as well.
Frankly, there’s no such thing as an anonymous email unless you use a service like riseup.net, and connect to it using a VPN and TOR at a minimum-and watch what and where you browse.
NonyNony
@Walker:
The academic environment is very sheltered. VERY sheltered. The deans probably never thought that they would even have to consider the idea of their private communications being kept private because, well, academia.
Faculty who work at state universities started getting the wake up call a decade or so ago, but I imagine that in the premiere institutions they haven’t quite figured out that the academic world is more like the business world than anyone wants to believe.
dmsilev
@Walker:
We’ve basically stopped providing email accounts to undergrads. You get an email address with the .edu, but it’s just a forwarding link to some other account of the student’s choice. This was mainly a money-saving move, but it was also practical, since just about everyone these days comes in with an already-established online identity.
Rosalita
high intelligence, no common sense
NonyNony
Anonymous Gmail account, and send the e-mail from a non-university computer connected to a public network. Public libraries are great for whistleblowers, as is Starbucks.
If you have documents you need to attach, stick them on a thumbdrive and take them out of the building via sneakernet instead of forwarding them through the network.
Anything you do on a company network is trivially traceable by a competent network engineering crew if they’ve set up their firewalls and logging correctly these days. (And not just whistleblowers should care about this – even as long ago as 10 years ago it was possible to essentially fire anyone “for cause” at a place I worked at because all a manager had to do was request a report on the employee’s internet usage, find out that the employee had been browsing entertainment sites or Amazon when not at lunch or on their timesheet-tracked break, and then write it up and have them fired.)
Amir Khalid
@lojasmo:
True. But if Harvard University made even a tacit promise not to go poking around in staff email in-boxes, then it has broken that promise. And a real apology is in order, not some weak “sorry if I hurt your feelings” shit.
Walker
@NonyNony:
I work at another Ivy, though not as prestigious as Harvard. The students I run into are not this naive about e-mail.
Soonergrunt
@Amir Khalid: I’ll give you that in a heartbeat, but as an IT guy who deals with all sorts of stupid (and occasionally illegal) things in people’s email and web caches, if Harvard ever said or implied their users had any right to privacy on Harvard’s system, they were wrong.
RSA
Harry Lewis (computer science professor and former Dean at Harvard, who helped write the privacy policy for faculty email) has an interesting insider’s perspective on the story. Essentially, there seems to be a difference between staff and faculty in the way email is treated, and the Residential Deans’ email was not being treated as if it were faculty email–where Harvard would need to give advance warning that they’re going to look at it.
NonyNony
@Walker:
Ah, but you’re talking students here, not privileged faculty members, former faculty members, and people who have worked their entire lives in a collegial academic environment.
Our students have seen first hand what happens when your private life gets out on the internet and have adapted to it. The dumb ones post their pictures of themselves taking bong hits or committing minor acts of petty vandalism online and the smarter ones have seen what happens to them, so they’re more cautious (and I’d assume that you have a higher proportion of “smart” ones to dumb ones at your institution – we seem to, and we’re “just” a state school).
The older generation not only hasn’t adapted to it, they don’t see the need to adapt. Or maybe they didn’t until now, when they’ve got evidence that “even at Harvard” the administrators will treat other administrators like dirt, let alone what they may do to faculty members…
Steve
Leaking information regarding a student investigation is a huge deal. Did they really expect Harvard not to investigate?
BGinCHI
Surely there’s no gambling at Casablanca.
Omnes Omnibus
FWIW I don’t even check my personal email using work computers. I don’t want anyone to even be in the position to be able to argue that I had my personal account had been used for work purposes and, therefore, was open to investigation or discovery during a lawsuit.
Mandalay
@RSA: Interesting, but he seems as naive and clueless as the offended faculty:
If Harvard is no longer “lovingly indulgent” towards its members then good fucking riddance.
FridayNext
As far as I know, employers have ALWAYS had the right to look through stuff they provided. Even before email, employers could look through your desk, files, correspondence, etc if they paid for it and it was work product (which belongs to them, not you) and if something is done on company equipment, it is by definition work product. If Harvard promised something else and then reneged on that promise it is a breach of faith, but hardly the profound violation of rights so many faculty seem to think it is.
BTW, this is so much worse in state schools, especially in states with expansive sunshine laws. If you live in Florida you can request the emails of any state employee, including faculty at state schools, and get them (barring information protected like medical information, personnel or grades) and that includes email written this morning. This was blowing up quite frequently, especially when some professors had the temerity to criticize powerful politicians and industries (tobacco), but most professors I know there now almost never use their school emails for anything and you’d be wise not to email anyone in Florida to their university or state account.
Mandalay
@NonyNony:
Oh for heaven’s sake.
ETA …or is that a snark?
Omnes Omnibus
@FridayNext: During the union busting law protests in Madison, a professor at the UW wrote an Op-Ed about the history of labor law in WI which was pro-union and it sparked a big brouhaha over his possible use of state resources for political purposes. As it turned out, he used a personal computer and other personal resources which were not subject to sunshine laws in order to produce the piece. He was careful and smart.
Barry
@Walker: “Indeed, many students simply use campus e-mail addresses as a forwarding address for an offsite address so that the campus does not control it. You would think they would be a bit more savvy about this at Harvard. ”
They won’t know what else is done with the message (e.g., forwarded further, replied to, etc.), but if they want, they can read the original message.
NonyNony
@Mandalay:
A bit of hyperbole, though I imagine the affected deans would use a similar phrase. Possibly a more colorful metaphor than “dirt”.
Would you prefer “like common employees, rather than respected peers”?
FridayNext
@Omnes Omnibus:
I had forgotten about that, and he was incredibly smart; no less than what I would expect from the author of Nature’s Metropolis and Changes in the Land.
On the up side, a professor in this situation would be a fool NOT to use school email when corresponding with students on grading issues so that there is a permanent, objective record of all emails, including a record of which were opened. Just in case a student claims you never told them about something.
Mandalay
@Barry:
It seems that Hank Paulson was very well aware of that…
I bet Wall Street enjoyed reading that testimony.
Omnes Omnibus
@FridayNext:
Correct. You always should know when you want to create an official, traceable record and when you do not.
? Martin
@FridayNext:
Of course. But remember, at universities, the faculty share power with the administration. Within the institution, the right to actually do that is granted either by the faculty or the regents or whatever outside group is overseeing the institution. It’s a different arrangement than at regular employers. Deans are even more privileged because not only are the faculty and part of that level of authority, they are administrators in their own right. It’d be a bit like Nancy Pelosi learning that House Republicans were going through her Congressional email account. The uproar would be tremendous, and rightfully so.
? Martin
@dmsilev:
It creates a problem, though. The .edu account serves as a positive identification of the student. If you are discussing anything covered under FERPA or other privacy laws, and you aren’t working entirely through that .edu account, you may be disclosing information to someone that you shouldn’t be. You have no way of identifying the person on the other end of that google account.
roc
The whistle-blower’s best friend is corporate web-mail.
Bring up your work webmail from a private (*not* employer-provided) computer and copy/paste the emails of interest into another application to save/forward-via-anonymous-gmail-account/whatever.
Your employer-provided client computers can even tell if you’re printing or copying files on their hardware, so even that method of trying to secret things away can get dicey. But with web-mail, their data and control are greatly diminished.
In any case: try to make the access look legit. Don’t go snag *just* the dozen incriminating emails, all in one night, six months after it happened. When that winds up in the morning papers, your employer will still be able to piece it together.
burnspbesq
@Amir Khalid:
Must respectfully disagree. This horse left the barn a long time ago. Anyone who believes they have any expectation of privacy in a work email account is delusional.
Also, it’s not like the Harvard cheating scandal is a big secret. Even ESPN has been on the story, after two members of the basketball team who were implicated withdrew from school rather than burn their last year of eligibility while fighting the charges.
Heliopause
I for one am glad that our academic elites and press corps are standing up for the fundamental principle of privacy.*
*This is sarcasm. Our elites and press corps don’t care about privacy unless they are the ones being snooped on. Carry on.
JustRuss
@RSA: Wow. First time I’ve read anything that actually mentions Harvard’s privacy policy. Seems like the deans are owed more than an apology. Somebody in the administration violated policy, and they need to be called out.