Shots in the Dark

As Harvard folks know by now, Harvard College dean Evelynn Hammonds admitted yesterday that she lied in her previous disclosures about the extent of the e-spionage conducted by herself and FAS dean Michael Smith.

The Crimson reports:

Contradicting a previous statement, Dean of the College Evelynn M. Hammonds told faculty at their monthly meeting Tuesday that she authorized a second round of secret email searches that probed the faculty and administrative accounts of a single resident dean identified as having leaked confidential information about the Government 1310 cheating case.

All right, so she didn’t actually say the words “I lied,” but…it is very hard to escape the conclusion that this is exactly what happened.

If there’s ever a good time to quote myself (and there may not be), this is it; I wrote these words after residential dean Sharon Howell told the Boston Globe that the version of events presented by Hammonds and Smith was not accurate:

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.

A number of commenters thought I had gone off the reservation here, which is one reason why I’d like, basically, to say: Told you so.

Again, the Crimson:

On March 11, Smith and Hammonds released a statement which said the searches were “limited to the Administrative accounts for the Resident Deans…as distinct from their individual Harvard email accounts.”

But on Tuesday, Hammonds doubled back on that as she read prepared remarks to a packed room of faculty in University Hall.

“Although I consulted with legal counsel, I did not inform Dean Smith about the two additional queries.

This is kind of a big deal. For one thing, she may be lying; she may have told Smith about the additional spying. [Smith says she told him “in March,” but he and Hammonds put out their original statement in March, with no mention of the additional e-spionage.)

But if Hammonds didn’t tell Smith, that’s a big deal too; Hammonds may be the Oliver North of the Harvard bureaucracy—a rogue agent. The question is, do her higher-ups have plausible deniability?

More Hammonds:

“This was a mistake. I also regret the inaccuracies in our March 11 communication resulting from my failure to recollect the additional searches at the time of that communication.”

Everyone, say it with me now: The idea that Hammonds conducted a secret search about which she obtained legal advice but made a conscious decision not to tell Michael Smith and, when subsequently asked to disclose decanal e-spionage, experienced a “failure to recollect,” is not credible.

Isn’t it just a lie?

Harvard, let us not sugarcoat things here, because this is important—this goes to the essence of what you stand for now and in the future.

The dean of your college secretly reads people’s email and is, at best, misleading and disingenuous about it; at worst, she’s a liar. She has lost trust…she has lost credibility…and she has brought yet another round of bad publicity to the University. (The AtlanticWire: “Oops, Harvard Actually Spied on its Dean More Than We Thought.” Etc.)

She has also put her boss, Drew Faust, in a terrible position. Either Faust didn’t know that she had an Oliver North working for her—or she did.

Two bad choices.

The Globe has this nice touch:

Hammonds, speaking in personal terms, referred to her 10-year-son in stressing “how important it is to own up to your mistakes, to apologize, and to make amends.”

“I have to model that behavior for him,” she said. “This is what I have tried to do today.”

That takes some chutzpah—to use your child as a shield in apologizing for prevaricating—even as you engage in more of the same.

I wrote earlier that it would not be going too far to talk of the resignation of deans Smith and Hammonds. That suggestion was greeted with some skepticism. I stand by it.

And there’s yet another issue—how far does the e-spionage extend? And what did Drew Faust know, and when did she know it?

The Crimson:

[Faust] said she determined that Harvard has “never monitored faculty email, and that only rarely does the University access* faculty email,” but declined to answer questions from faculty asking her to clarify what she meant by “rarely.”

Let’s substitute the word “occasionally” for the word “rarely” here, because in this context they basically mean the same thing, with just a slightly different spin.

“Harvard occasionally accesses faculty email.”

*[George Orwell would appreciate the use of the word “access” in this context. Can we just say “reads’?]

Now…that’s kind of a big deal. I imagine the faculty would want to know why and under what circumstances—under what justification.

Drew Faust has appointed an outside attorney to look into Harvard’s policies on e-spionage. I guess she doesn’t have much choice; the credibility of the internal administration is damaged to the point of non-existence. But could any outside lawyer hired by the president…investigate the president?

“[Gays] are entitled to friendship.”

—New York cardinal Timothy Michael Dolan explaining his belief that the Catholic Church needs to send a more welcoming message to gays, even while it must continue to oppose gay marriage.

The arrogance of the Church always startles me…and no matter how many feet the new pope kisses, the overwhelming message is one of judgment, not humility.

In The Atlantic, Alexis Madrigal writes about a fascinating project by underwater photographer Bryant Austin, who is obsessed with photographing whales, and particularly their eyes.

…as Austin puts it, the whale challenges him “to reevaluate our perceptions of intelligent, conscious life on this planet.” This mammal’s eye — lens, cornea, pupil, retina, photoreceptors and ganglion nerve cells — is a direct passageway into its brain. And when we look at it, Austin can’t help but see an intelligence there, a connection to a brain that, perhaps, works enough like ours for us to understand each other.

I’ll buy this. I once went snorkeling with whale sharks, and at one point dove down about 15 or 20 feet to swim alongside one of the beautiful animals. I was at one point within a yard or so of one of its eyes, and we watched each other, and there’s no question in my mind that that shark was interpreting me—and making contact. Its eye was looking at my eyes. What does that mean? I have no idea. But I can see why Austin would find that contact fascinating.

As Madrigal points out, while we have a pretty good, if amazed, sense of what we are seeing, we really have very little idea of what a whale is seeing. So she asked Sonke Johnsen, a Duke scientist who wrote a book called The Optics of Life, about how whales interpret what their eyes see—particularly given the fact that they have eyes on separate sides of their head. How exactly does that work?

“They have two completely independent fields of view,” ]Johnsen said.] “God knows what they do with that. The internal perception, how do they represent that? Is it like two screens in their head? Do they stick it together? We don’t deal with that because we don’t have a region of our field of view that’s like that,” he said. “For all we know, they represent sonar information as vision. We think they hear a bunch of clicks, but for all we know, it is represented in a visual spatial form in their heads.”

These questions become more urgent as a) we continue poisoning the oceans and b) we are only starting to realize the immense intelligence of these animals. Trust me: It will not be long before we start applying the term “genocide” not only to the victims of Pol Pot, Stalin, Hitler, and so on, but also to the extinctions of animals.

On a lighter note, here’s one of Bryant Austin’s photographs of sperm whales. Being underwater and getting to see something like this—that is most certainly on my bucket list.