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?