More on Why Harvard’s E-Spionage Scandal Really Matters
Posted on April 8th, 2013 in Uncategorized | 38 Comments »
I will agree with Standing Eagle on one point: As much as I believe it’s important to point out the mendacity of those at the heart of Harvard’s e-spionage, there is a larger theme here that’s worth bearing in mind. It is the ongoing tension between corporate and academic values at American universities, particularly Harvard—and all the evidence that corporate values are inexorably winning that battle.
In this case, the specific principles in conflict are freedom of speech versus the right of a corporation to know about and control what its employees say—particularly when the tools of communication are underwritten by the corporation.
Especially insidious in this case is the fact that the two avatars of corporate interests are people who are supposed to represent academic interests: the dean of Harvard College and the dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Can you imagine Jeremy Knowles, a passionate defender of his constituency, poking into email like an East German bureaucrat with a letter opener?
When even academia’s designated defenders have internalized corporate values—not just committing e-spionage but then, in all likelihood, lying about it—the faculty must do more than protest. It must realize what the stakes are and work not just to articulate its values, but codify them. Through their overreaching, deans Smith and Hammonds have made the corporate interest vulnerable. The faculty must take advantage of this temporary retreat to get its interests written into policy.
Especially because it can not count on the woman at the top—who is now streaming “news” from the Harvard Gazette on her website—to stand for it…
38 Responses
4/8/2024 6:47 am
Richard, this is incredibly well said. I work in Central Administration. Inevitably, though I am steeped in Harvard values (and am a graduate of the College), I sometimes make decisions that are more business-oriented than academic oriented. But while it’s my job to consider academic objectives — and I do — my particular mandate is to keep the University out of trouble. I depend on deans to represent the academics and push back so that my mandate doesn’t overwhelm all other mandates. Without that counterbalance, even the best bureaucrats can run amok.
4/8/2024 7:45 am
Thank you, RB and especially HB, for saying this. It is a good formulation of the central issue, though I would tag the driving mission (for Hammonds, at least, if not for Smith) as ‘student learning’ rather than ‘academia’ for its own sake.
I pipe in only to remark that Harry Lewis DID get the Faculty’s interest in unsnooped e-mail written into policy, many years ago. It proved no defense. That’s the truly upsetting thing here: an administration that obeys no rules. What should be the goal of the faculty in responding — not to a flawed exercise of discretion, but to lawlessness?
4/8/2024 9:35 am
I got the ball rolling on that privacy policy, but I think it was actually the late Richard Hackman who deserves the credit for getting the policy adopted. I blogged a bit about that and what the next policy needs to cover that would not even have occurred to anyone prior to this incident. The faculty policy was never properly publicized, perhaps due to administrative oversight and perhaps for some other reason. It would not surprise me if a lot of people didn’t even know the policy existed.
Which is why I agree with RB about the real issue being cultural. The serious issue is not the policy and whether it was followed, much less the hairsplitting about whether Resident Deans are faculty or not-the moral fig leaf that only administrative accounts were search was stripped away on Tuesday. You don’t need a policy to know that, whether you have the authority to do it or not, searching other people’s email is a big deal and you had better have big deal reasons before you do it.
So I keep going back to the beginning. The 9/1/12 Crimson story that set off this sequence of events was actually about how confused students were. It quoted some entirely non-confidential material from the memo to the RDs, exactly the sort of advice needed to un-confuse the students. The story does not say how the memo was obtained, but does say that a RD confirmed that more than one RD had received it.
I wonder if that this last, wholly unremarkable report was what set off the investigation. A resident dean was talking to a Crimson reporter, and confirming the stunningly non-sensitive information that an Ad Board memo had gone to members of the Ad Board. That broke the rule that deans are not supposed to talk to students, even students in their own Houses, if those students are reporters; only the communications office communicates with student reporters. The explanation that has been offered — that the searching was essential because of the extraordinary circumstance that there was risk of student records appearing in the Crimson — seems to me less plausible.
Sorry for repeating myself. But it doesn’t feel to me like the apologies in last week’s Faculty meeting have brought us to the end of this story.
I hope at least that in the midst of all this we are not forced to endure a discussion of the integrity of undergraduates. Too awkward!
Alums are asking me what the hell is going on. We are in the run-up to a campaign announcement. I believe the governing boards were in town over the weekend. Bet it was interesting.
4/8/2024 9:54 am
Harry’s take on this is very interesting. There is a communications apparatus in place now - which RB has also noted - that is totalitarian in its approach. Does Faust approve of this - a desire to make sure there’s no Larry-like communication gaffes? Or does that need to fully control the message at all times come from somewhere else, a sense that the stakes are too high to leave this to individuals. Corporate indeed.
On the other hand, if faculty takes up a greater governance role, they will have to make hard decisions - moving to Allston, cutting costs come to mind. Now, they can blame all that on someone else.
4/8/2024 10:07 am
It would be madness for the faculty to be voting on the expenditure of billions of dollars to move entire Schools. Straw man, ain’t gonna happen. All the faculty want is to be part of a college, a collegium, a community that communicates with itself in a respectful, trusting, and thoughtful way.
4/8/2024 12:05 pm
I’m not persuaded that the whole-cloth forwarding of a Secretary’s e-mail to a student, showing some of the deliberative thought process of the Board, is not in itself “a big deal.” It is true that no harm was intended, and none should have been done, but the media blew up the part of that document that it wrongly considered scandalous. And then the res-dean responsible failed to come forward. That last bit makes the situation potentially and plausibly a big deal: it begins to look like a purposeful leak.
I have been focused on the policy because I think there is a decent argument that the actual incident was indeed a big deal that needed to be nipped in the bud, of just the sort the well-designed policy was designed to embrace. That policy requires notification before or soon after a search.
They got Capone for tax evasion, right?
The cultural issues underlie the entire story, but I think that without the policy there would be no rock-ribbed argument that Hammonds and Smith did wrong. And rock-ribbed arguments are needed when you’re fighting City (Mass) Hall and trying to change the culture.
SE
4/8/2024 12:30 pm
Except for the nonsense about “showing respect” (to elders? to betters?), I think this is an appropriate response to the Crimson’s extreme op-ed:
http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2013/4/8/vote-of-confidence/
4/8/2024 1:48 pm
SE, you have to be kidding. You really think that Dean Hammonds provided “an instructive lesson for all of us in dealing with complex issues”? You and I seem to disagree on whether she is culpable here; I think she is. But I am shocked that anyone thinks her behavior and her address to the faculty (at least as reported) provides a model for anyone, except as a negative example. I would be surprised if even Dean Hammonds thinks so.
The whole letter is nuts. It’s possible to defend Dean Hammonds without pretending that she is some sort of exemplar. And using a call for “thoughtful dialogue” to disregard rather than discuss an opinion with which they disagree is shameful.
4/8/2024 2:04 pm
Lots of people made mistakes in this mess, starting with the students who got bribed into Gov 1310 on the promise of little work and high grades. Many of the mistakes were innocent or inadvertent. I won’t repeat Harvard Magazine’s reconstruction of the events. Be that as it may, bringing up a different Crimson story, about information appearing on a student blog, as an additional rationale for the search, and the claim that the RDs were not told of the search in order to protect the privacy of the responsible RD, seem to me strained and ex-post-facto justifications, so I still don’t think we are at the bottom of this mess. In any case, the editorial board’s opinion is as much an overreaction as several others in this sequence. Would that all were handled with the same understanding and generous spirit. God knows I don’t put much stock in the editorial opinion of the Crimson, which is very often dangerously self-important and short-sighted.
4/8/2024 2:08 pm
Must I be the person to point this out? I only got through about half of the signatories to that list, but virtually every one of them is either a person of color and/or affiliated with the Department of Afro-American Studies. So this isn’t really a question about the merits at all (at least from the signatories’ perspective); it’s just identity politics.
4/8/2024 2:08 pm
Sorry, when I say “that list,” I mean the letter to the Crimson posted by SE.
4/8/2024 2:10 pm
“You really think that Dean Hammonds provided ‘an instructive lesson for all of us in dealing with complex issues’? ”
No, but I believe that most of the signatories to the letter may have seen Hammonds conduct herself well during the fall, on some issues. That’s the letter’s main claim.
Allow me to distance myself from the last two paragraphs in their entirety, especially where they lamely cite “confidentiality” and an ongoing “investigation” as reasons for people not to have opinions on well-established facts. That’s cover-up talk, and it’s pathetic.
SE
4/8/2024 2:14 pm
RB,
That’s already been pointed out at the Crimson. Looking closely, I see that my main point in posting it is seriously undermined by the fact that only five House Masters, representing only three Houses, signed the letter. Surely the other ten Houses’ Masters were approached.
So this is a much weaker endorsement of Hammonds than I thought.
4/8/2024 2:18 pm
Finished going through the signatories. Virtually all are either people of color or affiliated with Af-Am. It’s pretty hard to take this letter seriously other than as an expression of solidarity which makes a delicate situation even trickier by injecting race into it.
4/8/2024 2:19 pm
Not only a weaker endorsement, SE, but a divisive one.
4/8/2024 2:20 pm
Are any of them even from Dean Hammonds’s home department (History of Science)?
4/8/2024 8:00 pm
Richard, as a frequent reader and occasional poster here, it’s annoying that your accusations of ‘identity politics’ only seem to apply to black and brown people. Am I now to assume that the (generally) white men posting on this blog are always engaging in identity politics too? If so, that would seem to justify an identity politics-oriented response, wouldn’t it?!
Alternatively, It could be that the signatories are friends and/or in the same social circles as Dean Hammond — that is a kind of solidarity, but not as conspiratorial as you seem to be implying. To be clear, I think the signatories are dead wrong (and I’m a dreaded ‘person of color’ — and engineering prof at a major west coast university myself’), but it’s demeaning that you think it justified to dismiss them because many are brown and black, rather than just addressing the merits of their case. Hate to say it, but it kind of makes you wonder who exactly is playing identity politics…
4/8/2024 8:42 pm
(first big handful of popcorn)
munch munch
munch
4/8/2024 8:47 pm
(“It’s pretty hard to take this letter seriously.” oh, man, he’s gonna eat those words….)
munch munch
(What was Skip thinking? could have gotten twenty more signatures EASY, from somewhere, surely…)
munch munch munch
(Me? I don’t think anything.)
munch
4/9/2024 3:25 am
What I find shocking is that it’s ok to open private emails so long as “big deal reasons” are in play. Have we lost our manners, our sense of shame and decency? I cannot see how the University—in all its corporate glory—loses anything by limiting email spying to judicial mandates and situations where the President determines a life is at stake. The notion that the faculty would create a policy to take care of and protect itself alone on these matters is selfish and unbecoming. Is the thought staff and students be damned? Are privacy and free expression less essential to staff and students because these two groups are less important to the community than the faculty. This impulse to protect the faculty solely brings shame to the group for it places the faculty only one small rung above the audacious and ill mannered spying condoned by the University against, staff, students and a “rare faculty” member. The only sound coming out of the faculty is a plea for “leaving our women and daughters untouched” in exchange for overlooking the privacy raping and plundering of the politically weak staff and students in whatever fashion suits the Administration. Faculty, show courage and assume the power of the timid office in Mass Hall; pass an iron clad policy that stops all email spying on staff, faculty and students. Does anyone actually believe the University can be a better place with email burglary tools deployed against our imagined enemies?
4/9/2024 6:04 am
Of course that is all true, except for the suggestion that the faculty have the power to vote email policies that apply to the staff. There isn’t even any practical way for faculty in arts and sciences to coordinate on policy with faculty in the professional schools. I explain how this policy, with its admittedly unfortunate limitation, came about over on my blog.
4/9/2024 6:47 am
The resident deans are on the offensive today in the Crimson. They bring us back to the real issue: the nature of administrative power wielded ineptly. Hammonds played the termination card to intimidate her res dean and reassert her control.
Hammonds is badly weakened and may be replaced. In my view, she should be, because this story shows that she and Smith are, at heart, martinets. They believe that leadership power stems from a dean’s monopoly on career violence. Now they are discovering that such violence is a two-way street (with the big difference that if they are ousted they will still have a job at Harvard).
Note, incidentally, that the disputes in this article are (setting aside EH’S now well-known poor memory) on matters of interpretation. No lies, just disagreement. Did the res dean commit a ‘breach’? Arguably. Is threatening someone’s job if they misstep again a ‘further action’? Arguably not. But the resident deans now see that they have an opportunity to weigh in (in defiance, it appears, of an appalling instruction never to talk to student reporters — is that true?).
This outspokenness accords with academic values, especially as it has now become clear that students are being affected more by the e-mail privacy uncertainty (which is, of course, overblown, but that is the Deans’ fault) than they might be by the appearance of conflict between res deans and the central administration.
No need for Hammonds to resign in disgrace. But she is a bully. She does not know how to lead without threatening the vulnerable. Her comeuppance is now. This should be her last year as dean of the college.
When she was appointed, I wrote on this blog:
“I search Prof. Hammonds’ bio in vain for anything that might suggest she is qualified to lead a liberal-arts college.
…
“What we see in this choice (I suggest, looking to provoke you) is the apotheosis of Administration as a prime academic value. An administrator — a SENIOR VICE PROVOST — is becoming the leader of a college that has never, in recent years, paid enough attention to student development and pedagogy. Prof Hammonds’s qualifications are like fresh, clean water to a drowning sailor.
…
“There is plenty of reason to hope that Prof Hammonds will do an excellent job. But she will do so because of personal strengths and wisdom, not professional qualification. Here’s hoping that she can adapt quickly to the real concerns of college students: concerns that they can voice as well as concerns that they cannot voice and do not themselves necessarily understand.
“Administrative skill is great for a bureaucrat but should be secondary for a dean.”
In the event, EH failed when her administrative obsession with secrecy and control came into (a relatively mild) conflict with the crucial work of communicating with students. She panicked, and reverted to what is ultimately a corporate understanding of leadership power: that it stems from hiring and firing authority alone. There, at the core, her unfitness for the job was revealed.
Also, she should have kept better records.
4/9/2024 7:31 am
The poor logical reasoning of Harvard faculty is appalling. Here are two senior administrators, discredited because they overreached and then tried to cover their tracks lying to the faculty, and everyone seems to accept their version of events. Namely, they have said they found the incriminating the email by conducting a ‘surgical search’ of admin accounts….
Far more likely, they searched the accounts of students working for the Crimson… found the source, and then made up a story about how they found it. But this would assume that E-Spionage is far more prevalent at Harvard than has been portrayed by the culprits here.
The discussions of the faculty of this outrageous case have centered in the how-many-angels-in-a-pinhead issue of whether the policy is sufficiently clear. No one has asked for a serious and independent investigation of how prevalent E-Spionage really is at Harvard. They all seem comforted in trusting the claim of the two Deans who so obviously abused their power.
Go figure.
4/9/2024 7:57 am
Ph. Alum 2005, I take your point seriously. For what it’s worth, I don’t actually think that I cry “identity politics” that often on the blog. But I make that suggestion here because I don’t think a social solidarity—i.e, knowing Hammonds socially—is near enough to justify the letter in question; at least, not as it’s written, which doesn’t say “we know her and think she’s swell,” but focuses on her alleged professional merits. But I find the pro-Hammonds case so unconvincing—especially as articulated by the signatories of that letter—that I find it hard to take seriously.
So when you take away the idea that the letter was written on the merits, and yet it’s n argument that isn’t premised on social interaction, what are you left with?
So I would be fascinated to know how that letter came into being. My hunch would be that it started with Skip Gates or at Skip Gates’ suggestion. In which case you have to wonder if some of the signatories didn’t feel pressured to add their names.
Anon 7:31, I couldn’t agree with you more; several of the posters here just seem inclined to take on faith everything that Hammonds and Smith say, even when they subsequently have to revise and extend their remarks. I think it’s entirely plausible that the emails of the Crimson reporters were searched. After all, that would be more efficient than searching the emails of the resident deans.
4/9/2024 8:05 am
That’s a silly theory.
4/9/2024 9:29 am
SE, let’s talk on July 4th, which is to say, the day after the outside lawyer’s report is released. Why be so dismissive when we don’t know the facts? In order to find out the truth, you have to be open to all possibilities, no matter how far-fetched they may seem. Let’s remember: You certainly didn’t predict that Evelyn Hammonds would confess to a broader email search than she initially acknowledged—in fact, you cheered the forthcoming virtue of her first statement—and you didn’t predict the threats of termination applied to the resident deans. So I’m struck by your certitude about anything going forward in this matter.
4/9/2024 10:18 am
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zzs-OvfG8tE
Actually, Richard, my reaction to the Deans’ announcement was “This is a good statement. But it dodges the key question.”. And I highlighted its evasiveness immediately. It’s true I did not have the clairvoyance (Motti) to identify that Hammonds had failed to tell Smith of additional searches under the same investigation, ones that did not violate the notification policy.
Also, actually, my reaction to the entire scenario in which resident deans were at odds with the administration was this:
“The res deans have gotten the message. ‘You are expendable so pipe down.’ None too subtle: and the res deans explained it correctly. I can’t talk to you BECAUSE THEY WILL FIRE ME irrespective of my competence. They are correct to understand the situation that way.
“Now imagine a world in which res deans had appropriate job protection. I don’t mean tenure: I mean the job protection that comes from trusting you will be evaluated fairly on your actual work and your attention to the school’s values.”
That statement is the heart of the story told in the pages of today’s Crimson.
My track record is pretty good so far. Then and now I have made proper use of the canon of parsimony: simpler explanations hold more water than conspiracy theories. I continue to believe that EH’s forgetfulness and miscommunications explain the inconsistencies in the initial statement better than mendacity does. To repeat: this is true because the initial statement covered very few tracks, and exposed the main wrongdoing pretty fully. Concealment cannot have been a major motive of issuing it — although of course “spin” was a motive, as the res deans are showing in today’s re-spinning.
And the theory you’ve just showed interest in is described by you as “far-fetched” (and rightly so, in light of how conscious OGC is of FERPA [Google it] when student information is involved), but is described by its proponent as “far more likely” and a clear product of basic logic. Do you agree with Anon or not?
We’ll see in July who is vindicated on the “lying” charge. But my view has changed: I think this last revelation of supervision-by-threat shows that Hammonds should be replaced. I was confident such threats were made, but now that they are public she is visibly unfit and the President should be able to see that.
SE
4/9/2024 10:20 am
Also, I think you’re right that there is a fascinating separate story involved in yesterday’s letter to the Crimson — a story worth exploring in its own right, both for what the letter includes and for what it does not include.
4/9/2024 10:30 am
Oh, and I meant to highlight this before: it is the basis for my statement that EH is now seriously weakened: others are now emboldened to leak from within the administration. This is a major tell that she is losing her credibility and that people do not expect her to be around for long.
Today’s Crimson quotes “A College administrator familiar with the details of the investigation, who asked to remain anonymous because of its confidential nature.”. It is clear from the context that this is not a resident dean. And this source is going out of his/her way to confirm details that make EH look very bad indeed.
This source probably believes EH is done. At a minimum s/he believes EH should be done.
I hear wheezing from the canary cage in the corner….
SE
4/9/2024 11:21 am
Harry, the FAS had no power or means of throwing Summers overboard, but the task was accomplished. I’m suggesting this same moral authority can produce the desired outcome in protecting email spying of faculty, staff and students. If the FAS plants the flag on ending email intrusion as I have suggested, the Corporation will be shamed into the same position. Currently, there is a moral void on this matter. A faculty stance broadly applied to students and staff as well would be like a Cat 5 hurricane heading right at the center of the Corporation and administration.
4/9/2024 1:17 pm
But of course the President now has appointed a task force to develop exactly such a policy. It is chaired by a law professor and I imagine other faculty will be participating. That is exactly the right next step, though the remit should (as I blogged) go beyond email. Getting the details right is actually NOT simple.
4/9/2024 5:12 pm
The task force, if it is to have any credibility should:
1. Publish the names of authorized users of icemail who can read other people’s emails, and
2. Publish the number of times that email accounts have been accessed from an ‘authorized user’ , other than the legitimate owner of the account, in the current academic year.
This information will settle the issue of how much privacy there really is w email accounts at Harvard
Incidentally, icemail, the integration of email services, is a creation of the current administration:
http://huit.harvard.edu/services/email-calendar/icemail
4/9/2024 7:33 pm
Pioneer13, you make a good point that a faculty proposal on no spying on faculty, students and staff would fill a void but who would enforce this? Absent knowledge of the extent of E-Spionage it would be difficult to propose specific means that would give teeth and legs to your proposed statement.
4/9/2024 7:43 pm
It is interesting that the comments of President Faust on this case have focused on the lack of consistent explicit policies across schools about email privacy, and no on the actual facts that two Deans authorized email searches. Does this stance imply that the President endorses the actions of EH and MS?
More interesting is the fact that she has asked a leading Boston lawyer from outside Harvard to conduct a full investigation into how the searches were conducted and to verify that the information provided so far is a full and accurate description of what actually happened. How exactly will this lawyer that the information provided is a full and accurate description of what happened? Will the lawyer have access to potential intrusion into the email accounts of Crimson reporters? Will he have access to information of the full extent of email intrusion at Harvard subsequent to the cheating scandal? If the premise of the investigation is that what is known may be the tip of the iceberg, how will the lawyer get access to the iceberg?
4/11/2024 7:03 am
An invaluable contribution from Harry, drawing together a number of strands and some terrific historical perspective.
http://harry-lewis.blogspot.com/2013/04/are-resident-deans-faculty-should-they.html
I wonder if this analysis suggests to anyone else that this very strange year at the college might have set up a turf war worth fighting, in which the resident deans might play a very significant role á la Frodo Baggins. (Such an odd thought! a resident dean as turf warrior.) It might be worth winning, and I foresee a perfectly good peace with honor: I have never seen any great reason not to have a couple students on the Ad Board itself.
Obviously any rationale for including students in academic-dishonesty adjudications applies with greater, not lesser, force to other kinds of misconduct adjudications. The only reason that isn’t proposed is a simple-minded view that students can’t set aside their social lives to address peer disputes [sexual assault cases], coupled with fear of litigation on social scenarios involving student Ad Board members.
4/11/2024 2:21 pm
So President Faust will be one of four Corporation members who will comprise the special subcommittee. Why would the Corporation allow something like that.
There is definitely a conflict of interest here. Faust is involved in this fiasco. She shouldn’t be sitting on any committee involved with this problem. She should recuse herself. As a board member of Staples, if the CEO had any involvement with regard to a major problem at the company, would she allow the CEO to sit on the committee that was to receive an outside counsel’s report?
4/11/2024 9:15 pm
I agree with Anonymous 2:21 pm. It doesn’t make sense for President Faust to sit on that committee. Whether or not she is literally “involved in this fiasco,” she is the person with whom the proverbial buck stops, and so she should step aside while the investigation proceeds.
4/12/2023 4:45 pm
It is a very good development that four members of the Corporation will look into E-Spionage at Harvard.
Now they just need to sit down w the University CIO and request full and complete disclosures of who can read student, faculty and staff emails of others at Harvard and on who has done so in recent years. Whether they disclose this information to others is something that should await until they themselves can brief the Corporation on the facts. Some will probably be surprised about what these facts will reveal and perhaps change their minds about some Deans.