ESSDRAS M SUAREZ/GLOBE STAFF Evelynn M. Hammonds says she will return to academia. 
 
 The Harvard College dean at the center of the controversy over covert searches of instructors’ e-mail accounts last fall announced Tuesday that she is stepping down. 
 
 While the dean of the college, Evelynn M. Hammonds, says she was not asked to resign the leadership post she has held for five years, her departure was widely viewed by professors and students as the culmination of a chain of painful episodes that engulfed the campus over the course of the academic year. 
 
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 The troubles began at the end of August when the university announced that it was investigating 125 students for possible cheating on the take-home final exam in an introductory government class. The severity of punishments — many students were forced to withdraw temporarily — led to criticism that Harvard had over­reacted. 
 
 The e-mail searches stemmed from Hammonds’s and other officials’ concerns that confidential information about the disciplinary process in that case was leaking to the media. 
 
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 “I was never asked to step down. I have been in discussions to return to academia and my research for some time,” Hammonds said in brief comments provided by a spokeswoman. “The e-mail controversy was difficult, but it was not a motivating factor in my decision to step down as dean.” 
 
 She will take a sabbatical before returning as head of a new program for the study of race and gender in science and medicine. 
 
 Neither Hammonds, her boss, Faculty of Arts and Sciences dean Michael D. Smith, nor Harvard’s president, Drew Faust, would make themselves available for an interview Tuesday. Hammonds also retained a public relations firm to represent her, an unusual move for an academic administrator who is rejoining the faculty. 
 
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 Many professors said Hammonds had become ineffective at her job, and the student newspaper, The Harvard Crimson, had called for her resignation. But some professors said Tuesday that she was unfairly blamed for the e-mail searches, when other officials were also closely involved. 
 
 “She was all trussed up to be the scapegoat here for what was in the main a shared set of decisions,” according to a faculty member familiar with the situation, who declined to be identified to avoid embarrassing colleagues. 
 
 The Globe first reported in March that Harvard administrators searched the e-mail accounts of 16 resident deans because, Hammonds and Smith said, they were concerned that leaks might have threatened the privacy and due process of students facing discipline in the cheating case. 
 
 Weeks later, Hammonds told faculty that the e-mail search had been more extensive. She attributed inaccuracies in the statement she and Smith had made earlier to her “failure to recollect the additional searches.” For the additional queries, she said she consulted with legal counsel but not Smith. 
 
 Hammonds and Smith repeatedly apologized to faculty and the resident deans at a faculty meeting in April. 
 
 Hammonds spoke of her commitment to rebuilding trust and repairing relationships and even made a poignant reference to her effort to raise her 10-year-old son as a good man. 
 
 “As I look out at all of you, I am seeing his eyes,” she said at the faculty meeting, according to the text of her remarks. “I always tell our son how important it is to own up to your mistakes, to apologize and to make amends.” 
 
 At the time, Faust made it clear she did not blame individuals alone. 
 
 “We have highly inadequate institutional policy and process around the rapidly and constantly evolving world of electronic communication,” she said. She appointed an outside lawyer to conduct an inquiry; the probe is expected to be completed by the end of June. 
 
 Professors who have raised questions about the e-mail searches took pains Tuesday to thank Hammonds for her hard work on behalf of undergraduate students. 
 
 “It’s important to bear in mind, the circumstances under which all those decisions were made were very difficult,” said history professor Maya Jasanoff, noting the dean’s obligation to protect students’ privacy through the disciplinary process. “I’m sure Dean Hammonds was operating in what she felt to be with the best interests of the people she was primarily concerned to protect.” 
 
 In statements Tuesday, Faust and Smith praised Hammonds’s accomplishments, which Smith said will benefit “generations of undergraduates to come.” 
 
 Other colleagues also spoke of her accomplishments, such as creating a winter session from scratch to give students more offbeat or career-oriented learning opportunities and helping to revamp residential houses for modern life. 
 
 “To have someone of her stature, her quality of mind, with her own recognition of the transformative possibilities of higher education — as it was [transformative] in her own life — at the helm, making life better for Harvard undergraduates, I think that really set a standard that’s going to be hard to meet,” said Martha L. Minow, dean of the Harvard Law School. 
 
 Former Harvard provost Steven E. Hyman worked closely with Hammonds in her last job, when she was the university’s first senior vice provost for faculty development and diversity. That position was made more challenging because of controversy swirling around former Harvard president Lawrence H. Summers. 
 
 “She was level-headed and effective at a time of great turmoil for Harvard,” Hyman said. “As dean of the college, she has put students first, invariably.” 
 
 Hammonds said in a statement that she is looking forward to redesigning her classes in light of new technological innovations. She is a professor of the history of science and African and African-American studies. 
 
 Her new program, at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard, will look at the role of race in science and medicine. ||||| Amid a buzz of controversy about her role in invading the privacy of several Harvard staff members, Evelynn Hammonds, the 60 year old Dean of Harvard College, will step down on July 1, five years and one month after she became both the first African-American and first female to occupy the highest office in Harvard's undergraduate school. On Tuesday morning Harvard officials announced Hammonds' ouster among a list of her accomplishments during her tenure as Dean, including the establishment of "two academic integrity committees focused on strengthening academic integrity at Harvard College" and an array of student services. Understandably, the list omits Hammonds' decision to authorize the search of staff members' Harvard.edu email account after the contents of a confidential message were divulged to The Harvard Crimson. 
 
 According to The Crimson, Hammonds announced on April 2 that she had authorized the search of staff members' personal Harvard email accounts because university officials believed that a resident dean (an individual who advises students who live in Harvard's house system) had leaked to several Crimson reporters a sensitive message pertaining to the massive cheating scandal that struck Harvard's Introduction to Congress course in the spring of 2012. In the weeks beforehand, Hammonds had characterized the search as much less invasive, targeting only resident deans' administrative email accounts — which stay the same even as resident deans come and go — instead of the same resident deans' personal Harvard addresses. (In the end, a single dean was "threatened" with sanctions — but not fired.) "I and others, entrusted with administering our university business, made serious mistakes, and I stand here to apologize and to join in the commitment to learn lessons for the future," Hammonds said in early April. 
 
 Within a month of admitting to the wider scope of the email search, Hammonds began preparing to step down, and reportedly spent much of April and May negotiating the terms of her departure. According to Tuesday's announcement, Hammonds will land at Harvard's W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, where she will study the impact of race and gender in scientific fields. Before arriving, however, she plans to take a sabbatical of unspecified length. Given the events of the past year — rampant cheating, uproar over how Harvard planned to treat accused cheaters, and finally the controversial email searches she authorized — Hammonds is going to need it. 
 
 Want to add to this story? Let us know in comments or send an email to the author at jtrotter at theatlantic dot com. You can share ideas for stories on the Open Wire. 
 
 J.K. Trotter ||||| Last year, Harvard University welcomed the first female president in its history. In a few months, the university will mark another milestone: the installation of the first black female as dean of Harvard College. 
 
 In a statement Tuesday, the university announced the appointment of Evelynn Hammonds, Harvard’s senior vice provost for faculty development and diversity and a professor of the history of science and African-American studies, to the top post in Harvard College. The appointment comes just as Yale administrators are launching an effort to encourage more racial diversity within the upper ranks of the University’s administration. 
 
 “This is an exciting moment of change for the College, and Evelynn’s academic values and leadership qualities promise to serve our undergraduates well,” Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust, who last year became the first woman to be elevated to Harvard’s presidency after nearly four centuries of male rule, said in a statement. 
 
 Hammonds, 55, will be the first female and first black person to hold the position of dean of the college. Yale has never had a black or female dean of Yale College, although Judith Rodin, who went on to become the first female president of the University of Pennsylvania, was appointed Dean of the Graduate School in 1991. 
 
 Hammonds’ job places her in charge of matters ranging from academic affairs to student life to the general administration of Harvard College, the oldest undergraduate school in the United States. 
 
 “I am honored to have this extraordinary opportunity to lead the College with its exceptional students at such an important period in its history,” Hammonds said in a statement. “I know that there are many challenges facing the College, and I am ready to tackle them with my colleagues’ help.” 
 
 The appointment marks the second milestone for the university in breaking down gender barriers; Harvard, America’s oldest university, went 371 years before appointing Faust, its first female president, last year. 
 
 Faust was the permanent successor to former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, who was all but driven out of Cambridge in 2006 when faculty discontent with the president peaked following a controversial comment he made about the relative aptitude of women in the sciences compared to their male counterparts. 
 
 Hammonds came to Harvard in 2002 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she served as founding director of the Center for the Study of Diversity in Science, Technology and Medicine. 
 
 In July 2005, she was named senior vice provost for faculty development and diversity; in that position she worked with Harvard’s president and provost on teaching appointments and the recruitment and advancement of minorities and women on the Harvard faculty. 
 
 In that capacity, Hammonds visited Yale on Feb. 18 to participate in a panel discussion organized by Yale’s Women Faculty Forum. During the discussion, Hammonds and other administrators discussed the steps their institutions are taking to promote gender equality among its faculty. 
 
 Hammonds also spoke about initiatives Harvard has launched to help women and their families, such as hiring spouses or providing grants that allow faculty to take family along with them during field research. 
 
 “We hire families,” she said during the panel. “We support [women] in meeting their family responsibilities.” 
 
 Harvard’s announcement, meanwhile, comes at a time when Yale administrators have reaffirmed their commitment to encouraging diversity — particularly of the racial sort — in Yale’s top administrative ranks. University President Richard Levin announced that commitment in an e-mail to the Yale community in January, sent in advance of the holiday commemorating the birthday of civil-rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. 
 
 University administrators are scheduled to attend a retreat this spring to discuss a strategy for encouraging racial diversity in the Yale administration, and the Yale Corporation, the University’s highest governing body, received a presentation from administrators on the subject at its meeting in December. Last year, Yale hired its first chief diversity officer, Nydia Gonzalez, who is spearheading the University’s diversity efforts. 
 
 Yale already has significant gender diversity in its top administrative ranks; four of the seven officers of the University are women, and several former top female administrators — Rodin among them — have gone on to assume presidencies of other universities in recent years. But none of the senior officers is an ethnic minority. 
 
 Hammonds is a graduate of Spelman College, the historically black women’s college in Atlanta, and the Georgia Institute of Technology. She later received advanced degrees from MIT and Harvard. 
 
 Yale Graduate School Dean Jon Butler, who served on a committee with Hammonds about a decade ago for the Organization of American Historians, predicted Tuesday that Hammonds will thrive in her new role. 
 
 “She’s smart, she’s savvy, she’s engaged,” Butler said, “and she’s committed, among other things, to faculty diversity.” 
 
 Hammonds will take over the deanship from Acting Dean David Pilbeam GRD ’67, who had served in that post since Harvard College Dean Benedict Gross stepped down last summer after four years on the job. Hammonds will take office on June 1, and the university will immediately begin a search for her successor as senior deputy provost, according to a statement. 
 
 —Sophia Chen contributed reporting.
– The dean of Harvard College is stepping down amid controversy over her decision to authorize searches of faculty email accounts in relation to the school's cheating scandal, the Boston Globe reports. While the email announcing Evelynn Hammonds' departure didn't specifically mention the email snooping, Hammonds was in the thick of that scandal, admitting last month to having conducted the searches even as the school's president agreed with angry staffers that something else should have been done. Rumors have been swirling that Hammond would depart ever since. Hammonds, the Atlantic Wire points out, is the school's first black, female dean. She'll stay with the school, leading a new program on race and gender in science and medicine, but only after taking a sabbatical of undisclosed duration.