The Keating Report
Bits and Pieces 2013-07-23
Summary:
Michael Keating, the attorney retained by Harvard to provide a complete account of last year's email searches, issued his report yesterday. Summaries appear in the Boston Globe and the New York Times.
It is a careful and apparently exhaustive account of the particular email searches that happened in the context of the so-called leak by a resident dean. It does not answer any question beyond that. In particular it gives no clue about how often email searches are conducted, and of whom; the best information is from the president's reassurance last year that they happen "rarely." I did not expect to learn any new information on that, since Mr. Keating's charge was limited to the facts of the searches conducted last fall. Nor was the report intended to consider other issues raised by this case, such as the question of whether it would be wise in the future to follow the precedent of announcing an Ad Board case to the media via a press release.
Except for some confusion about a footnote, which I explain below, I am disappointed with the report in only one respect. The report goes to some length to state that the actions of those who authorized and conducted the email searches were taken "in good faith." However it imputes no motive or intent to the dean who forwarded the email to a student, stating simply "One of the listed emails was sent, on August 16, 2012, by Resident Dean X to a student advisee. Resident Dean X forwarded the `case process' email to the student less than 10 minutes after Dean Ellison sent it." I and others (for example, Professor Thomas in today's Globe story) have speculated that the dean was simply trying to provide the student with accurate and helpful advice, and never thought about the e-mail forwarding as a leak to the Crimson or a breach of confidentiality. Since the report goes to such pains to remove any suspicion from those who did the searches (the phrase "good faith" appears three times, and there are other statements of what various administrators "believed"), the omission of any similar conclusion about the intentions of the Resident Dean might be interpreted to mean that Mr. Keating was less confident, or not confident at all, that those intentions were as pure. I am not sure why, having imputed benign intentions to some of the players in this drama, the report is coolly nonjudgmental about the Resident Dean. If it is true that the dean was simply trying to give the student good advice (and the fast-forwarding suggests that the dean had no more complicated plan), the report might have said so.
The most important going forward is that university officials are using a different voice about privacy protections. William Lee of the Harvard Corporation says in a prepared statement, Mr. Keating found those involved in the searches to have acted in good faith and with a guiding desire to safeguard the confidentiality of the Ad Board process. That aspect of his report is reassuring. His detailed account of how these searches were done, however, makes it even clearer than before that there is much work ahead in improving the University's policies and protocols concerning privacy of, and access to, electronic communications.President Faust's statement is even stronger:
Unfortunately, the detailed factual account in Mr. Keating’s report deepens my already substantial concerns about troubling failures of both policy and execution. The findings strengthen my view that we need much clearer, better, and more widely understood policies and protocols in place to honor the important privacy interests that we should exercise the utmost vigilance to uphold. A university must set a very high bar in its dedication to principles of privacy and of free speech; these are fundamental and defining values of our academic community. The searches carried out last fall fell short of these standards, and we must work to ensure that this never occurs again.And in the Globe, Lee said very much the same thing:
"Hopefully, it will never happen again,” William F. Lee, a member of the Harvard Corporation, said in an interview. …. Even with “the unprecedented nature of the events, the urgency of the events, the fact that students’ privacy and individual right
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