Are the Resident Deans Faculty? Should They Be? Will They Be?

Are the Resident Deans of the Houses faculty? The question acquired a certain technical significance when the Globe reported that their email had been searched, because there is a special policy about privacy of faculty email. (See my previous post, Email Privacy at Harvard.) But the proposal for an honor code for undergraduates has raised the question of the faculty status of the Resident Deans in another context, because of the accompanying proposal that allegations regarding undergraduate academic integrity in the future be referred not to the Ad Board, which is made up largely of the RDs, but to a new Student-Facutly Judicial Board. It seems to me that this provision raises basic questions about the nature of the College and its educational mission. Even though I had a hand in drafting the faculty email privacy policy, the attention given to its language and what exactly was meant by "faculty" has seemed to me exaggerated. I have tended to avoid comment on the "are RDs faculty?" issue, not because I was in doubt about it, but for several other reasons.

• The policy was never well advertised, and I suspect that most faculty were not aware of it. Some of those who would have to respect it may not have known about it either, so I am not sure it is fair to made a federal case out of whether the rule was followed or broken.
• The more important point seems to me to be whether it accords with prevailing community privacy values to search anyone's email, except for reasons related to litigation, fraud, or government requirements--and whether ordinary courtesy and respect would not call for informing those searched, either before or after the fact.
• I did not want to get into the minutiae of the Resident Deans having administrative and teaching accounts, of which only the former were searched (which has in any case been mooted by the revelation that in the case of one individual, both accounts were searched).
• I did this analysis for the benefit of a journalist a few weeks back, and wanted to respect his right to tell the story himself. The story never appeared, and I no longer feel bound to avoid the subject.

Now just as this technicality seems to be fading from significance, and the president has wisely asked a task force to draft a more encompassing privacy policy, the question of the status of the Resident Deans has popped up as part of the proposal that the faculty adopt an honor code for undergraduates. The proposed Student Faculty Judicial Board is actually a body that exists on paper but whose remit is so restricted that to date nothing has ever fallen under it. It seems to me inevitable that if the RDs are no longer the people adjudicating questions of academic integrity, the rationale for their having faculty status becomes much weaker. So I see the honor code proposal as starting to topple a row of dominoes, and I'd like to call attention, especially faculty attention, to the teetering balance in which those dominoes now stand. Are the Resident Deans faculty, for the purpose of being captured under the "faculty email privacy policy"? The term is never defined, but at least in the discussions I remember (I was out of the picture by the time the policy was adopted), no one suggested that faculty who also have administrative positions would cease to be faculty for the purpose of the policy. But it's too simple to simply say "Resident Deans are faculty." Here is why. There are thirteen Houses at Harvard. Each has a resident dean. Each of the resident deans of the Houses, right now, holds the rank of Lecturer in some subject or other. That is most definitely a faculty rank, not a high one but not the lowest either. I think most people would say that categories 4 through 12 on page 2 of the FAS Appointments Handbook are faculty and 13-14 are not. So the 13 RDs of the Houses are faculty. But there have been times when that was not the case. Sometimes the "other half" of an RD's appointment has been administrative rather than instructional. Sometimes an Acting RD has been a grad student finishing the PhD. So in those cases the RD would not have been faculty. Also, there are four Resident Deans of Freshmen. They are full-time staff and have no teaching appointment. They do not hold the rank of Lecturer or any other faculty rank. So one might say that it is contingently true that all the RDs of the Houses are faculty. (Though it was once common to have ladder faculty as Senior Tutors -- Charles Maier in the History Department and John Hutchinson in SEAS both served as Senior Tutors and went on to get tenure -- the last ladder-rank Senior Tutor or Resident Dean was probably Sarolta Takacs in the late 1990s, then an Associate Professor of