Two universities released reports this week of investigations into misdeeds at those universities. One report dug deeply into the relevant matters and excoriated some university officials. The other report conducted a pro forma investigation and concluded exactly what the university president had publicly said before commissioning the report: that any wrongdoing was purely the result of misunderstood policies and protocols.

The honest university: Rutgers, which is essentially the state university of New Jersey. The, shall we say, less-than honest university: Harvard.

Here’s the language from Harvard’s report:

All actions taken in connection with these email searches were conducted in good faith. The administrators from the University and the FAS who authorized, supervised and conducted these searches believed that they were acting in compliance with applicable email privacy guidelines. There is no evidence that anyone intentionally violated any requirement to give notice to the Resident Deans regarding these searches. Further, there is no evidence that any of the indviduals involved read the content of any emails that were identified as a result of these searches.

As Dana Carvey/Church Lady used to say, “Well! Isn’t that conveeeeeeeeeenient!”

I’ve only read the report once, but it seems to me deeply, even fatally flawed. It lacks, for example, any discussion of methodology. It appears that the players in the scandal were interviewed—the report’s intro says that Keating “has interviewed persons having personal knowledge of the email searches,” but doesn’t say how many—and there’s no sense of whether they were under any kind of legal oath (doubtful) and therefore would have no particular reason to be wholly forthcoming.

Sometimes the report also makes me wonder about who *wasn’t interviewed. Take complete idiocy such as this, for example, from page 8 of the report, describing a back-and-forth between a Crimson reporter and Resident Dean X, who for some reason goes unnamed even though she apparently outed herself subsequently.

In an email, Resident Dean X [blogger: that is too funny] responded, clearly telling the reporter that the Crimson did not have permission to use any of the information that had been provided, including any direct quotes or general quotes from “a Resident Dean,” because the Resident Deans had been given clear instructions not to talk with the media bout Administrative Board matters. …The Crimson ran with the story anyway.

Naughty Crimson! To run with a story even though it hadn’t been granted permission. Apparently our legal expert is unimpressed with the First Amendment.

Was the Crimson reporter interviewed? It doesn’t sound like it. Why bother? That might contradict the story of Resident Dean X, which would certainly complicate matters.

I also love the part on page 25 where, having established that “Resident Dean X” was the leaker of Dean Jay Ellison’s email—apparently for entirely innocuous reasons—Evelyn Hammonds decides that this is not enough: She should then search Dean X’s personal email.

Thereafter, Dean Hammonds decided….to conduct further searches of Resident Dean X’s accounts, i this case both the administrative and personal accounts, because Resident Deans occasionally use their personal accounts for administrative matters. These searches were undertaken…

That, my friends, does not pass the smell test. Dean X (!) already admitted that she had forwarded the emails. What’s the point of going further? Just to see if you can really nail her ass? Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!

It’d be easy enough to comb through this report and find plenty of similar instances in which common sense is papered over with legalese. And it’d probably be a lot of fun, too. But to do so would be to miss the larger point, which is that the issue here is not just whether the deans acted in good faith, or whether various Harvard policies were violated or not.

It’s not ultimately about the law; it’s about judgment. It’s about whether it was just plain stupid of Harvard officials to conduct a witch hunt over an email. There is abundant discussion of “leaks” throughout this report—as if Harvard were the Nixon White House. And yet Harvard doesn’t learn lesson one from Washington, which is that the hunt for the leaker typically does more self-inflicted damage than the leaker does. It makes you look small and petty and it invariably leads to abuses of power, like the ones that happened here.

And perhaps from a lawyer’s narrow perspective, everyone involved “acted in good faith” because they did not believe they were breaking Harvard’s rules. But this begs the question of whether trying to track down a leaker by any means available is in and of itself an act of bad faith—especially in a university setting. Dean Jay Ellison—the former Texas lawman—seems particularly at fault here. When his email on the case process is forwarded, Ellison doesn’t say, “Oh, fuck, I wish they hadn’t done that”—after all, nobody really reads those stupid and probably unenforceable legal disclaimers at the bottom of emails from various self-important and legalistic organizations—and sit down with his resident deans to remind them of the paramount importance of confidentiality. No, Ellison instantly launches a search for the leaker; he couldn’t be more gung-ho about conducting e-spionage to see who made him look bad. A commenter below congratulates Dean Ellison for asking that his own email be searched, saying that this is an act of honor; I suggest that it’s a basic way of avoiding looking like a total hypocrite and is something about which Ellison really had no choice. On page 24 of the report, Ellison admits pretty much the same.

But the real reason for this report isn’t about getting at the truth, or creating information for a debate on how to revise Harvard’s e-spionage policies. (Nobody seems to think that there’ll be a debate over whether Harvard should be able to read its employees’ email; it’s just a matter of when, where and why.)

The reason for this report is to protect the university against lawsuits, including a rumored threat of one from now-displaced dean Evelynn Hammonds as well as possible lawsuits from students affected by the cheating scandal. (That is, of course, why a lawyer was hired to write it, rather than, say, members of the faculty.) Hence all the good faith: Hey—we tried! And the real reasons for the e-spionage were 1) to protect against said lawsuits and 2) to keep, to the fullest extent possible, any news about Harvard’s cheating scandal from being covered in the press, thus damaging the university’s reputation.

And that is also why this whitewash of a report was produced. But reading between its lines suggests a more damaging picture: that of a university hierarchy obsessed with damage control and image preservation, dominated by bureaucrats and lawyers, where the tensions between academic freedoms and information technology are only discussed in so far as to establish the limits of the former. And so in the end, under the don’t-rock-the-boat leadership of Drew Faust, Harvard will glide through this without any enduring damage—from a public relations standpoint, that is—but with its virtues just slightly diminished, its values somewhat eroded, its purpose now just a little bit more pointless.