"Counsel says Harvard searched e-mail in good faith; Investigator gives new details" by Marcella Bombardieri | Globe Staff, July 22, 2013
An outside counsel hired by Harvard University to investigate covert searches of instructors’ e-mails by college administrators found that all of the searches “were undertaken in good faith,” while revealing for the first time that about 14,000 e-mail accounts were searched for contact with a Boston Globe reporter.
(Blog editor chuckles)
Attorney Michael B. Keating’s report, released by the university Monday, describes in far more detail than previously known the efforts Harvard officials undertook last fall to determine how information about a massive student cheating scandal was leaked to the news media [and] it became a major national news story. As tidbits about the case leaked into the Harvard Crimson, the Globe, and elsewhere, administrators grew increasingly alarmed, Keating found.
While Harvard officials have apologized and acknowledged some mistakes, such as failing to notify instructors that their e-mails were being searched, administrators believed they were following internal policies at the time, Keating concluded. One policy posted on a Harvard website indicated that the instructors should have been notified, but Keating found that few people at Harvard — and no lawyers in the general counsel’s office — knew it existed.
“Hopefully, it will never happen again,” William F. Lee, a member of the Harvard Corporation, said in an interview. Keating delivered his findings to the corporation, Harvard’s governing board, and Lee said that the report was made public in its entirety.
Even with “the unprecedented nature of the events, the urgency of the events, the fact that students’ privacy and individual rights were involved, it’s clear that the policies that we as a university had in place were inadequate to the task,” Lee continued.
A separate committee is discussing recommendations for how Harvard’s privacy policy should be revamped, and it is expected to finish by the end of the fall semester....
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Related: Sunday Globe Special: Harvard Honor Code
Also see:
Harvard's Fishing Expedition
Harvard Hacker Cheated on College Quiz
Harvard Basketball Players Foul Out
Where Mitt Romney Learned Racism
More of an elite thing.
