Just a few months after a controversy surrounding Harvard's secret e-mail search, Evelynn M. Hammonds announced that she will step down as the dean on July 1.
In March, Hammonds was in the spotlight for conducting a search of e-mail accounts of resident deans in order to find the origin of leaked information that resulted in a cheating scandal that more than 100 students of the University were involved in. The school officially apologized for the way that it conducted its investigation into the cheating scandal, with particular regard to the secret e-mail search.
Hammonds said in a statement, that the controversy was not a motivating factor in her decision to step down from her position as dean.
"I was never asked to step down," she said. "I have been in discussions to return to academia and my research for some time."
However, despite the claim, the proximity of this resignation to the scandal in March seems to indicate that one is the result of the other. The scandal centered around a secret search of administrative e-mails.
Although content of the e-mails was never seen by any of the people investigating, as the search was specific to subject-lines, it caused many at Harvard to question their privacy. After all, many claimed that a secret targeted search of faculty bylines was just a hop skip and a jump away from the university administration taking it upon themselves to search either subject lines or even content of student e-mails.
It's worth noting that the e-mail search that raised so much controversy at Harvard did successfully identify the resident dean who had forwarded a confidential e-mail. However, school officials determined that the dean in question had committed "an inadvertent error and not an intentional breach" by sending the message to two students, according to CNN.
Hamonds, who was named the first African American and female dean of Harvard in 2008, will not be returning as dean in the fall of 2013 semester.
