By the summer of 2012, the problems of her early deanship would confront Hammonds head on. As international scrutiny descended on the College and the cheating investigation she would lead, the dean who aimed to protect saw her students come under unprecedented levels of scrutiny.

ON THE DEFENSIVE

On Aug. 30, Harvard made headlines when it announced that it was investigating approximately 125 students for inappropriate collaboration on a final take-home exam. Although the University took the unusual step of publicly announcing the case, as usual it did not release the names of the students in question because the disciplinary proceedings of the College’s Administrative Board are kept strictly confidential.

But that did not stop more information about the case from getting out. On Sept. 1, The Crimson printed portions of an advising email that Ad Board Secretary John “Jay” L. Ellison sent to resident deans suggesting that athletes under investigation consider taking a year off for eligibility purposes. After a Crimson reporter approached Ellison with a leaked copy of his advising email, Ellison emailed all resident deans asking if anyone had shared it. Upon receiving that email on September 1, Senior Resident Dean Sharon Howell reached out to most of the resident deans to talk personally, but no one had an explanation.

As the leaks continued, Hammonds and her College administrators were growing increasingly worried that new information could threaten the confidentiality of students.

On Sept. 9 the college news and gossip blog IvyGate published information about a potential tiered punishment scheme for students convicted in the case discussed at an Ad Board meeting.

Two days later, on Sept. 11, The Crimson approached Ellison with a leaked copy of assistant Government professor Matthew C. Platt’s original complaint letter, sent to the Ad Board the previous May. The letter, which showed that a typo was at the root of the case, identified two groups—graduating students and members of the baseball team—implicated in the scandal.

Later that night, the fears of Hammonds and other administrators were realized. In a development unrelated to the leaked Ad Board information, Harvard basketball players Kyle D. Casey ’13 and Brandyn T. Curry ’13 made headlines in Sport Illustrated—but not for their widely admired athletic prowess. The year before, the team co-captains had helped the squad earn its first NCAA tournament appearance in 66 years, but now the media was reporting that the two were withdrawing from the College in connection with the Government 1310 scandal in an attempt to preserve their athletic eligibility for the 2013-2014 season.

With students in the headlines, Hammonds and Smith proceeded to secretly authorize an initial round of searches that probed the email accounts that the deans used for administrative work. When in September those searches occurred is unclear.

Months later, on March 9, the Boston Globe broke the story. On March 11, Hammonds and Smith offered an explanation of the searches in a statement to the Harvard community. Although neither leak contained information that could be used to directly identify an investigated student, the statement invoked the confidentiality rules that govern the Ad Board in defense of what Smith and Hammonds portrayed as limited probes into the deans’ administrative accounts.

THE GUARDIAN

In the faculty meeting on April 2, faculty members sat in stunned silence as Hammonds revealed that account to be incomplete. After the first search identified a single resident dean, she told them, she ordered an additional round of queries into that dean’s administrative and faculty accounts. Although she consulted with a lawyer in the Office of the General Counsel, Hammonds admitted that she did not get the necessary authorization from Smith, therefore breaking faculty email privacy policy.

Hammonds’s remarks suggested that concerns over the personal identification of students in the media—an outcome faced by Casey, Curry, and a few other athletes—had influenced her actions.

“I might just say parenthetically: many of you are parents, and I ask you to imagine that it was your son or daughter who showed up on the front page of the newspaper,” Hammonds told the gathered faculty. “We needed to act in order to protect our students and the integrity of our Ad Board process.”

But that concern for student confidentiality, some said, led Hammonds to violate the privacy of and abandon her defense of another constituency at the College—the resident deans. Howell and three other College administrators have challenged portions of Hammonds’s and Smith’s narrative of events, claiming that the resident dean who had been targeted was threatened with severe sanctions, even though that dean forwarded the email to two investigated student for innocuous advising purposes.