Harvard University administrators are dealing with criticism after they secretly searched 16 residential deans’ e-mail last year in order to track down a leak about a cheating scandal.

IT experts say that the school would benefit by adjustment in policies. Ry Rivard of Inside Higher Ed has the details:

University information technology experts said Harvard’s action was troubling and should prompt a re-evaluation of policy there. The university confirmed elements of a Boston Globe report that it had gone through employee e-mails to find the source of a leak about last year’s cheating scandal. The administrators said it was a “fair question” to ask why Harvard never told 15 of the 16 residential deans until the Globe found out about the search.

The university defended the decision Monday and said officials had only looked for the subject line of an e-mail that had been shared with the student newspaper. “To be clear: No one’s emails were opened and the contents of no one’s e-mails were searched by human or machine,” the university said in its statement. The sender, one of the campus’ residential deans, was not punished because the leak turned out to be inadvertent.

But despite the limited search, Harvard’s actions could remain troubling, said Michael Corn, the chief privacy and security officer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

“I think in an environment like a university, which is founded on the principles of open exchange and communication, the notion of covert surveillance is unnerving to people that live in that environment,” Corn said.

Corn said he had trouble remembering a case where Illinois looked at any employee’s e-mails without telling him or her, unless the university was complying with a warrant or subpoena that prohibited that sort of disclosure.

At Illinois, Corn said there is a process officials have to follow to look at an employee’s e-mail to prevent the “unwarranted examination of content.” Typically, a department head and dean have to come to him with a written request for him to vet. He then makes sure the request is reasonable and adheres to university procedure. If the search happens, in most cases Corn informs the employee.

One noted free speech advocate weighed in on the school’s action.

Greg Lukianoff, the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, which advocates campus free speech, said the university’s actions were a symptom of the “over-bureaucratization of universities and the corporatization of universities.”

“When it comes to an overzealous attempt by a university to protect its brand – we see those cases all the time,” Lukianoff said.