Freedom to information

It isn't often that America's most prestigious university is in the news for negatives. However, Harvard University has hit headlines constantly over the last few months after a scandal within the Ivy League's undergraduate school, Harvard College, led to a controversial email search of resident deans.
Concerns arose over the potential privacy invasion, but that doesn't mean Harvard's hunt wasn't justified.
The school was cast into the spotlight back in August when Harvard publicly revealed nearly half of the students in a 279-student government class were suspected of having cheated on a take-home final exam. Following the find, the administrative board sent out a memo to the resident deans on how exactly to deal with cheaters, and somehow, somewhere that memo got leaked to the media, and confidential word-for-word discussion from an administrative board meeting was shared with the Ivy's student newspaper, The Harvard Crimson.
Let the searches commence.
Students, faculty and staff thought their troubles were behind them when they were notified in February that the majority of the investigated were facing disciplinary action, including temporary forced withdrawal from the college or probation. But in the last week, The Boston Globe revealed Harvard had secretly searched the emails of 16 resident deans, most of whom were not informed.
The searches allegedly did not involve a review of email content, according to Harvard - just a subject line search. Faculty of Arts and Sciences dean Michael D. Smith referred to it as "a very privacy-sensitive search." The deans and other professors disagree, referring to the school's actions as "dishonorable," "disgraceful" and even "creepy."
But while Big Brother's watchful eye frequently and unethically peers into the business of many unknowing victims, Harvard met all demands when it comes to privacy.
The overlying issue is if employers should be able to look into the business - not personal - email accounts of their employees. In many cases where employers are permitted access, the employees have filed lawsuits based on claims of a violation to the Fourth Amendment's restriction of unreasonable searches and seizures. But in even more cases, employees are completely aware that employers have the right to search for matters of the utmost importance. Harvard considered the mass cheating on a final exam to be one of those matters, and they are right to do so. As your employer monitors your performance and actions in person around the workplace, it's fair he or she should be allowed to monitor your actions on your business accounts as well.
Members on campus have disagreed, saying it's a college, not a corporation, and that college is limiting freedom. Should someone expect the right to privacy? The quick answer is yes, but that right to privacy is limited to personal use. If Resident Dean So-and-So wanted so badly to inform the media of what was going on behind Harvard's walls, it couldn't have been that difficult to send it through a different email, one that his or her employer couldn't possibly be able to screen.
Either way, contrary to popular belief (and clearly to the belief of these loud-mouthed leaders) the Internet is not this secret, secure free-for-all where you can whatever you want without consequence; it's permanent, a time capsule of all the private conversations and embarrassing pictures that you thought you got rid of. And it can be accessed from anywhere and by anyone willing to take the time. There's absolutely nothing about that that screams "privacy" so claiming that this specific search was an invasion of such is not only too optimistic, it's just na??ve.

Email: editorial@ubspectrum.com