Smith and Hammonds: Lying?
Posted on March 13th, 2013 in Uncategorized | 22 Comments »
More than some of the posters below, I think that the statements residential dean Sharon Howell made to the Boston Globe are a bombshell. In effect, she’s saying that Michael Smith and Evelynn Hammonds lied when they said that the residential deans were told to expect an investigation of their email and that she was quickly told of the e-spionage after it occurred.
According to the Globe [emphasis added],
[Howell] emphasized that at the time she was approaching the other resident deans, no administrator had raised the possibility of searching e-mail accounts, much less said definitively that a search would occur.
The Smith and Hammonds statement also said that Howell “was immediately informed of the search, and its outcome” shortly after the fact, a point Howell disputed vigorously. She reiterated her earlier statement to the Globe that administrators did not tell her, “verbally or otherwise,” that the search had happened until last week. She did learn of it before then, she added, but only because the dean who forwarded the e-mail had confided in her.
There’s no way to sugarcoat it: Someone here is lying.
Hmmm. Let’s see. Is it the residential dean who doesn’t have job security and is standing up for a matter of principle and spoke openly to the press for what she thinks is right? Or is it the two deans who spied on people’s email, didn’t tell them about it although university policy mandated that they do so, and have since hidden behind legalese and press releases, not daring to speak an un-lawyered word?
I know who I’m betting on.
Michael Mitzenmacher and Greg Morrisett, according to the Globe, think all this is “overblown.” Their reasoning seems to be that we should take the deans’ explanation of what happened at face value.
Serious question: Why?
Two of the highest-ranking officials at Harvard initiated a Nixon-esque investigation to determine the source of a leak, and appear to have lied to cover it up.
How much worse does it have to get before this becomes a big deal?
And finally, in terms of the university’s reputation, it’s already a big deal. Just Google “Harvard email.” You’ll see.
22 Responses
3/13/2013 10:48 am
Sigh.
I posted the below at 11:07, apparently too late to forestall your overblown accusations. Lying is a much less plausible explanation than the one I lay out below.
Standing Eagle explanation:
All the sources here are telling the truth, but the lawyer who drafted Hammonds and Smith’s statement botched it.
Compare and contrast:
“The Smith and Hammonds statement also said that Howell ‘was immediately informed of the search, and its outcome’ shortly after the fact, a point Howell disputed vigorously. ….
“A university official who asked to remain unnamed told the Globe that ‘both the dean of the college and the secretary of the Administrative Board recall sharing the outcome of the search with the senior resident dean.’ ”
See the difference? The statement claims that Howell was told of the search AND its outcome; the people involved say she was told only of the outcome. That’s a big difference. “Say, Sharon, it turns out the e-mail was leaked by ABRD x in x House. Could you follow up and make sure x understood our concern, and see if s/he has any further questions after the conversation we had with him/her?”
Howell would be perfectly justified in assuming that x had come forward on his/her own, in response to one of the requests. This does NOT mean Howell was informed of the e-mail search (which in any case should have been accompanied by notification of all those searched).
[To spell it out: in the game of Telephone between the Deans and the Associate General Counsel who wrote their statement, the story got garbled.]
A side point, but goes to show what happens when you’re the Dean of the College and you outsource the writing of your own statements.
SE
PS. How do we know the Deans’ statement was written by a lawyer? Because it refers solecistically to the “due process afforded students before the Board.” Only lawyers think “due process” is a natural thing that should appear everywhere, and a phrase with cognizable meaning in every setting. It does not apply to the Ad Board and an Ad Board member should not use it (it confuses lawyers who want to sue the College, and gets them all hot and bothered) — especially if she happens to chair the Board.
3/13/2013 10:51 am
ALSO: a correction:
It’s Allston Burr “Resident Dean,” not “Residential Dean.” I opined when they changed the name that this would be a common misprision, and urged them to change the name instead to “House Dean.”
An ABRD is a dean who is resident, NOT a dean whose portfolio is about residential matters. Hence ‘resident,’ not ‘residential.’
3/13/2013 11:00 am
(To be fair, I think I remember that “House Dean” was suboptimal because it would maintain a split between “House Deans” and “Yard Deans” (for freshmen).)
3/13/2013 11:02 am
Thanks for the terminology correction, SE. But I just can’t agree with your theory about the lawyer screwing up. For one thing, lawyers are exceedingly careful about this stuff—and Harvard has good lawyers. For another, it’s just too tortured. The only way you could come up with this explanation is if you *want* to believe that Smith and Hammonds aren’t lying. I’m not saying your explanation is impossible, but it’s awfully convoluted. Bottom line: From the very beginning of this process—what they told the ABRDs, what they may or may not have told Drew Faust, what they said after the search, what they’ve said to the community and the press subsequently—Smith and Hammonds haven’t been anything close to forthcoming, and in certain cases (not telling the deans, for example) they’ve been deceptive. There’s a consistency here that should be paid attention to. Nothing they’ve done before or after the e-spionage should give us any confidence in their truth-telling.
3/13/2013 11:06 am
Also, you say overblown accusations. Let’s consider that: I’ve said that Smith and Hammonds initiated e-spionage to track down the source of a leak that pissed them off; that they did it dishonestly, by ignoring university policy in how such a search (a nefarious idea in the first place) should be conducted; and that they are now not telling the truth about the matter.
If I’m wrong at the end of the day, I’ll be the first to say so. (Well, at least I’ll try to be.) And I’ll offer apologies to the two deans involved.
But so far…not wrong.
3/13/2013 11:21 am
“I’ve said that (A) Smith and Hammonds initiated e-spionage to track down the source of a leak that pissed them off; (B) that they did it dishonestly, by ignoring university policy in how such a search (a nefarious idea in the first place) should be conducted; and (C) that they are now not telling the truth about the matter.”
I agree with you entirely about A and agree with most of what you say about B. I disagree on C.
Keep in mind that to lie about what they told Howell the Deans would have to be confident that she would not expose their lie as a lie. Since she had already gone public this would have been a bold gamble — and a pointless one, since they were already admitting violating the policy.
A and B are plenty scandalous on their own.
3/13/2013 11:32 am
But the lie was about more than violating the policy; it contained the statement that they informed the residential deans that further investigation would be coming, and at the very least it strongly implied (it would be very interesting to look closely at how the lawyer wrote this) that the deans were informed that this would include e-spionage. That is a very important claim for Smith and Hammonds, and central to their defense. Howell’s statement takes direct aim at it. These things are not reconcilable.
3/13/2013 11:36 am
“lawyers are exceedingly careful about this stuff”
True. I am pretty confident though that in a thirty-minute meeting, taking notes, a lawyer could misunderstand exactly Hammonds said to Howell. Being exceedingly careful, the lawyer would then send the draft to Smith and Hammonds. Whether Smith read it carefully or not, it is clear (to me) that Hammonds did not do so.
It is also possible that Hammonds is a foolish liar, and that the Secretary of the Board is backing her up in the Boston Globe despite clear and public contradiction from the other party involved (Howell). I peg this possibility at .6%; some version of the above at 97.2%. Little men from Mars are holding steady at 1.2%.
BZ, what do you think?
SE
3/13/2013 11:38 am
“the statement that they informed the residential deans that further investigation would be coming”
I disagree with your reading. This statement IS reconcilable with what Howell has said.
She said that at some point they spoke to HER about maybe searching e-mail. This was after other avenues had failed and after the ABRDs were put on notice of some general “investigation.” She has said she responded with horror at the idea and never heard any more about it.
Sort it through carefully; I gotta get back to my daily tasks. For now, I stand by my claim that your accusations of “Liar” are overblown.
3/13/2013 11:40 am
Forgot the little blue female CEOs from Venus; they are other 1.0%.
3/13/2013 12:12 pm
Before rushing to judgement about whether Smith and Hammonds did something egregious here, it would be helpful to know whether their practice is standard for people in their position at Harvard, in which case perhaps the culture of the institution need to change but their individual responsibility would be significantly different than if, on their own initiative, they had decided to initiate this search into email accounts of faculty.
The IT heads of all departments and schools should be asked to provide to the faculty a report of all Deans, Senior Associate Deans and other Senior administrators who have system authorization to read the email accounts of students and or faculty, and who can therefore do this without notifying anyone, from the comfort of their computer terminals. They should also report, based on logs which exist of such things, who among those senior administrators has used their privileged access to email accounts of students, faculty or other staff in the last year.
Once these facts are known to those who are currently in shock over what appears to be an abuse of power on the part of Smith and Hammonds, it will be possible to place this current episode in its proper perspective and context.
Conceivably, that information could be of much greater interest to faculty than information on who authorized the search of the accounts of the resident deans.
3/13/2013 3:19 pm
SE, I don’t buy that this is a lawyer’s mistake. It may have been a misunderstanding between Smith and Hammonds. (I find it rather unlikely that Smith himself spoke to Howell about this matter, at least until yesterday’s Ad Board meeting.)
I may be crazy, but I think it’s a telling detail that the letter contains a serial comma. I have not worked with every lawyer in the Office of General Counsel, but the ones I have worked with never use serial commas. When I first read the statement, I saw that and said to myself that this was not written by OGC, though of course they must have reviewed it. It was probably written by Dean Smith’s office, Public Affairs and Communications, or maybe even Dean Smith himself. But I don’t buy that Communications made the error, either.
3/13/2013 3:34 pm
“It may have been a misunderstanding between Smith and Hammonds.”
I’ll buy that; it actually solves a minor problem with my own theory, which is that Iuliano would never have made the “due process” mistake himself and I would think probably also train his direct reports not to make it either….
In any case Hammons must have signed off and needs to set the record straight about the error — or else call Howell a liar.
3/13/2013 4:51 pm
Mr. Blow/Bradley:
If they were stand-up guys, they would be in another line of work. If you want to hear from ann honest man in an academic administration, ask to speak to the director of physical plant or the comptroller, not the dean of yellow bicycle racks.
3/14/2013 9:20 am
From today’s Crimson:
After members of at least two student organizations canceled their River Run festivities Wednesday night, undergraduates swapped rumors over email lists, voicing concern that administrators had learned of the groups’ evening plans by monitoring student listservs—a claim contested by the University. Faculty of Arts and Sciences spokesperson Jeff Neal wrote in an email to The Crimson early Thursday morning that “it does not appear that the OSL has been monitoring lists.”
When reached by phone late Wednesday night, Dean of Freshmen Thomas A. Dingman ’67 confirmed that administrators had knowledge of “at least one email that was encouraging” students to ignore efforts to keep freshmen out of the Houses Wednesday night, though he did not indicate how that knowledge was obtained.
3/14/2013 4:13 pm
something about this story does not add up…
who actually found the incriminating forwarded e-mail? how? and who knew about this?
Here are some possible answers:
a) Smith or Hammonds themselves read the email accounts of the resident deans. This would require them to have access to those accounts and to read through correspondence.
b) They instructed someone to do the above. This would mean more people are implicated and more people gained access to the accounts.
c) They instructed someone to do an ‘automated search’ -none of them has the programming skills to do this themsellves-. This would require authorization of one of the CIOs
http://ciocouncil.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do
Since all of them report also to the VP and University CIO -who reports directly to the President- they would have had to check with her on something so delicate. She in turn would in all likelihood not have authorized something so sensitives without checking that it was OK with the President and the office of the General Counsel.
So what does not add up is that only the two individuals who have been identified as responsible for this act acted alone. There are more people implicated here and the Harvard community deserves to know who they are and whether this practice was an isolated episode, a case of poor judgement, or an instance in a larger culture that condones the systematic review of email accounts.
3/15/2013 8:35 am
Oh hey Richard thanks for making that correction bro: am sure it will have been v taxing 2 do
3/15/2013 8:39 am
Anon, the answer is (c).
“something about this story does not add up”
Disagree. But you may be right that a CIO or two needs to face the music also on the policy violation.
3/15/2013 9:22 am
Mass Hall is all group think. I’m sure lots of people had their hands in this, or at least knew.
3/15/2013 12:41 pm
“I’ve been snooping on your email” can be sung to the same tune as “I’ve been working on the railroad.”
3/17/2013 9:13 am
It’s a strange world w violations of privacy when it comes to the rights of individuals versus the rights of corporations, or maybe not…
On January 6, 2011, Aaron Swartz was arrested by a federal special agent on state breaking-and-entering charges, in connection with the systematic downloading of academic journal articles from a commercial database that distributes articles which are PUBLISHED, that is, intended by their authors to be accessible to the PUBLIC. Swartz, had an academic affiliation at Harvard and who downloaded the articles from a server at MIT. No representative of these Universities has issued any statement in connection with this case.
For this offense Federal prosecutors charged Schwartz him with two counts of wire fraud and 11 violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, charges carrying a cumulative maximum penalty of up to 35 years in prison, a fine of more than $1 million, asset forfeiture, restitution and supervised release.
Two months ago Swartz hanged himself as a result of the pressure he was put for over two years of his life as part of these charges.
In contrast, at Harvard University, two senior administrators admit that they searched the email accounts of multiple members of the faculty. Those whose privacy was violated express outrage, as do other faculty members. One of the resident deans wrote a public letter to the President asking her to take a stand on this issue. No representative of the University has spoken about this case. Many seem to shrug their shoulders wondering what the fuss is all about.
These are strange days in the academy…
3/17/2013 10:48 am
(Psst! I can help you out.)
(Neither of these situations is about privacy.)