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Comment by hnriot | Hacker News Reader

Read the terms of your employment... This is common practice in any organization. Work email is the property of the company or organization.

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Did you read the article? Harvard (apparently) violated their own policy for faculty email, which, among other things, states that "The faculty member is entitled to prior written notice that his or her records will be reviewed, unless circumstances make prior notification impossible, in which case the faculty member will be notified at the earliest possible opportunity." It's not a standard corporate email policy.

I find attitudes like this fascinating. If they were within their legal right to do this, that explains why the resident deans are complaining instead of suing.

When did the fact something is permitted become reason to shut down or marginalize discussion on if it should happen and/or be permitted?

Actually the resident deans aren't complaining at all. They don't have tenure, and so they could be terminated if they spoke out against administrative policy. It's the professors who are complaining.

Some people are incapable of understanding that some rule out there are wrong and should be questioned. They cannot actually understand how people do this questioning. I guess they sleep easy at night knowing all is right with the world, because those lawyers are on our side.

Skipping over the pathetic passive aggressive tone, this isn't about some repressed part of society, this is simply a employer/employee relationship.

There's nothing wrong with an employer doing this to protect the organziation. This is exactly what is happening, it's an investigastion into misconduct, not some big civil liberties case.

When you send email using you work account you should not expect that email to have the same privacy as your own email might.

I am perfectly capable of understanding, and the university are in the right, they have every right to investigate what happened.

Skipping over the pathetic whinging about tone, this is not simply an employer/employee relationship.

The President and Fellows were charged in 1650 with "the advancement of all good literature, arts, and sciences". That can be boiled down to: veritas. There is nothing to support selfish deans avoiding public scrutiny of their poor decisions.

The existence of email at universities predates the use of email by other organizations -- thus, there are a different set of norms expected by faculty.

They do have a different set of norms, but probably more due to the academic culture. The first email was sent at BBN a company that was part of ARPANET, along with governmental organizations as well as the universities.

When I've been involved with a public university there are lots of disclaimers and notices that stuff done via University email is not private and isn't subject to requirements for a warrant should the institution want to review it, etc.

However, I would expect that Harvard, being a private institution, and desiring to make its faculty members feel secure, would adopt a standard that's more stringent with respect to institutional access, and that its members, feeling that they're part of the good ol' Harvard crew would feel as though there were an additional informal standard layered on top of any official policy.

In any case, I don't think public or private institutions are likely to treat email at all like private enterprises, and I'm not sure why one would think that is so.

I don't know why you're being down voted? Obviously your employer can look at your work email at any point in time.

I'm not sure if this is right or wrong. I have a gut feeling that this may be right though. I'd like to be able to look through my teams emails if I have a good enough reason (sexual discrimination etc)

Yep. If you have any mail on your companies email server it's fair game.

Hence why the need to keep work and personal life seperate is important and keep bitching out people on work emails (or any emails for that matter..) is super important.

This ignores that the bar for Harvard has been set higher though.

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