Email Snooping Update

Deans Smith and Hammonds put out a very helpful statement yesterday, which has been widely reported. It contains a limited apology ("we apologize if any Resident Deans feel our communication at the conclusion of the investigation was insufficient," which is limited in two ways -- it is restricted to not informing the deans that their email had been searched, and limited only to the deans who had certain feelings and not to the others). Part of it was immediately denied by one of the few people mentioned specifically in the statement, Sharon Howell. The Globe reported, 

Senior resident dean Sharon Howell disputed a portion of the statement that said administrators had told her about the search shortly after it took place. Howell maintained that she had not been officially ­informed until last week, after the Globe approached Harvard asking about the search, which was sparked by the leak of a confidential ­e-mail about last year’s cheating scandal.

The story goes on to cite a second, anonymous source claiming to know that there was no plan to inform Howell.  This detail is maybe a bit of a distraction, but it does not help the deans' credibility, on a matter that is so much about trust in their good judgment,  to have a specific fact they state denied almost immediately. It also does not give a good impression of Harvard's communications apparatus not to have shown the statement, or at least the part describing her, to someone specifically mentioned in the statement. But the good news is we probably understand now how the email, meant to be confidential, got to the Crimson. Harvard Magazine connects the dots in the most reasonable way:

From the language of the Smith-Hammonds statement about the resident dean reviewing e-mails and confirming that she or he had forwarded the memo to two students, and the timing (August 16), it seems plausible that at a time when the enormous academic-conduct investigation was taking shape (with more than 100 students involved), resident deans were scrambling for guidance to offer to the students involved; that this memo from the AB appeared, containing some broad outlines of courses of action; and that it seemed natural simply to pass it along, particularly, perhaps, to student-athletes involved in the investigation, who had to worry about their future athletic eligibility. It could simply be the case that whoever forwarded the memo was extraordinarily busy keeping up with the demands of the burgeoning investigation.

I can, perhaps, shed a little light on this because, ironically, I probably played a role in the creation of the "leaked" email. On August 15, I got a concerned email from a friend, who wanted to talk to me. I told him to call me in Montana where I was on vacation. He told me that his child was in Gov 1310 and was being accused of academic dishonesty. He was pretty calm about all that. The problem was that the child and the child's friends in the same situation in different Houses were getting differing and confusing advice about what was going to happen and how they would have to respond. The resident deans were plainly not all on the same page. I offered to call the Ad Board secretary, just to let him know how much confusion was in circulation. I did so, either on August 15 or on the morning of August 16, and sometime on August 16 I called my friend back to say that based on my call with the Secretary of the Board, I hoped a more consistent explanation of next steps would be forthcoming. The Secretary's email (posted on the Crimson's web site) went out at 5:46pm on August 16. I am sure I was not the only one reporting that students were confused and that the resident deans were giving inconsistent advice. My friend's child had no issue about athletic eligibility, so the need to clarify that certainly came from somewhere else. (By the way, few herrings in the shoals of the "cheating scandal" discussions have been as red as the claim that Harvard should not have been helping its students navigate the complexities of the hundreds of pages in the NCAA and Ivy League rule books, which describe in confusing, legalistic language the contractual relations between the student, the University, and the NCAA and Ivy League.) The point of relating my personal role here is simply to provide one data point for the suggestion Harvard Ma