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. 
 
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 J.K. Trotter ||||| 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. ||||| Harvard University central administrators secretly searched the email accounts of 16 resident deans last fall, looking for a leak to the media about the school’s sprawling cheating case, according to several Harvard officials interviewed by the Globe. 
 
 The resident deans sit on Harvard’s Administrative Board, the committee charged with handling the cheating case. They were not warned that administrators planned to access their accounts, and only one was told of the search shortly afterward. 
 
 The dean who was informed had forwarded a confidential Administrative Board message to a student he was advising, not realizing it would ultimately make its way to the Harvard Crimson and the Globe and fuel the campus controversy over the cheating scandal. 
 
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 All the Harvard officials interviewed by the Globe declined to identify the dean, although one said no punishment had been involved. 
 
 The other 15 deans were left unaware their email accounts had been searched by administrators until the Globe approached Harvard with questions about the incident on Thursday, having learned of it from multiple Harvard officials who described it in detail. Those officials asked for anonymity out of fear of reprisal. 
 
 Harvard administrators said they would inform the remaining deans today—almost six months after the search. 
 
 The deans have two Harvard email accounts – one primarily intended for administrative duties, and another for personal matters. Only the first category of accounts was searched; information technology staffers were instructed to look only for a specific forwarded message heading and to not read the content of messages. 
 
 News of the incident could nonetheless anger Harvard faculty members, whose privacy in electronic records is protected under a Faculty of Arts and Sciences policy. 
 
 Resident deans are not professors, but they teach. At issue is how much privacy they should expect. 
 
 “If reading the deans’ email is really OK by the book, why didn’t they just ask the deans who leaked the memo, threatening to read their email if no one came forward?” said Harry Lewis, a computer scientist and former dean of the college who helped draft its current email privacy policy for faculty. “Why not tell them what was being done if it was really an OK thing to do?” 
 
 The Globe requested interviews with several members of Harvard’s central administration regarding the incident. In response, the dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Michael Smith – whose office authorized the search along with the Harvard general counsel’s office – released a statement to the Globe on Friday. 
 
 The statement did not specifically acknowledge the administration’s actions or say who had initiated them. But it appeared to defend them on grounds that the leak might have compromised the Administrative Board’s confidential disciplinary process. 
 
 “Harvard College would take all necessary and appropriate actions under our procedures to safeguard the integrity of that process, which is designed to protect the rights of our students to privacy and due process,” the statement read. 
 
 It further said that Smith – a computer scientist with expertise on privacy issues—“would agree entirely with taking steps that found the right balance between our needs to respect the privacy of our employees and to protect the privacy of our students.” 
 
 The leaked email, which was written by the head of the Administrative Board, Jay Ellison, on Aug. 16, mostly offered innocuous advice for deans counseling students implicated in the cheating case who were concerned about punishment. It did not name any students. 
 
 However, it did contain a passage in which Ellison noted that student-athletes might consider taking voluntary leaves of absence in order to preserve NCAA eligibility if found guilty. 
 
 That passage brought Harvard some mild media criticism (http://cognoscenti.wbur.org/2012/09/19/harvard-cheating-peter-may), after two star basketball players withdrew from the university. 
 
 Sharon Howell, Harvard’s senior resident dean, said she was dismayed to learn that the email accounts had been accessed. 
 
 In September, she said, she and the dean of the college, Evelynn Hammonds, had briefly discussed the possibility that administrators might search the deans’ email accounts. 
 
 “I told her that I thought looking at our email records was sort of drastic and problematic,” she said. 
 
 Howell said she did not hear anything further from administrators about the matter until Friday, when she was called in to discuss it with Hammonds and two other college officials, who were hoping for advice on how to tell the other resident deans. 
 
 “They don’t seem to think they’ve done anything wrong,” she said. “[I told them], if you want to repair this with the resident deans, it would make sense to talk about why you thought this was the right thing at the time, and apologize for not notifying us after the fact.” 
 
 Howell and other officials interviewed by the Globe said they had no reason to suspect any other email accounts were examined as part of the probe into the leaked message. 
 
 Harvard spokesman Jeff Neal added that “any assertion that Harvard routinely monitors emails – for any reason – is patently false.” 
 
 Some Harvard policies do allow administrators to freely access email accounts and other electronic records without notifying the holders or owners. 
 
 One policy, which appears designed to ward off potential attacks by hackers on school networks, states that authorized administrators may access accounts in order to “prevent harm to the University.” 
 
 Another policy, aimed at non-unionized administrative and professional staff, states that electronic records “may be accessed at any time by management or by other authorized personnel for any business purpose.” 
 
 The resident deans, however, may qualify for more protection than that policy provides. They are not only administrative and professional staff; they also hold positions as lecturers. That means they may be considered members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, who work under a separate policy that all but assures them that their emails and other records on school computers will remain private. 
 
 Under the FAS policy, administrators are allowed to access faculty emails and documents in “extraordinary circumstances such as legal proceedings and internal Harvard investigations.” But they must notify the relevant faculty members in writing, ideally in advance. If “circumstances make prior notification impossible,” faculty are to be “notified at the earliest possible opportunity.” 
 
 That FAS policy was drafted in part because some professors feared that previous president Lawrence Summers was monitoring their correspondence. 
 
 Howell said she expected to be granted the same level of privacy as FAS members. She noted that she and another resident dean serve on the college’s 18-member Faculty Council. 
 
 During her meeting on Friday, she said, “I challenged them on this. They seemed to think [the faculty] policy didn’t apply and that it was the staff policy that applied. But we’re faculty.” 
 
 Greg Morrisett, a computer scientist who heads the FAS standing committee on information technology, agreed that the resident deans would qualify for protected status and said that a lot of faculty are going to be “pissed off.” 
 
 “Speaking for myself, I would certainly include instructors, preceptors, visiting faculty, a wide range of people,” he said. “And I would be extremely upset to learn that somebody is [searching electronic records] without following the policy.”
– 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.