 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. 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. “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. 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. “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.
– 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.