"Regular employees"

As blogger and historian Angus Johnston notes, one of the most striking aspects of the Harvard email story is the way in which it exposes the university administration's different standards for faculty and "regular employees," a distinction which matters here because of university administrators' contention that the residential deans whose email accounts they combed trying to discover who was leaking information about a student cheating "scandal" were the latter rather than the former.  That Harvard holds different standards of privacy and academic freedom for its noninstructional workers is not surprising.  Even at a heavily unionized campus like Harvard's, the labor regimes of the contemporary university are highly stratified: mental over manual, tenured over nontenured over lecturer over precarious.  What is interesting is the ways in which the division of labor is securitized, the way not having your employer search your email becomes a perk afforded only to a subset of those whose work the university valorizes as more than work, as what the president of my current institution has referred to as a "calling."

At every institution I've been at, students have organized with the presumption that administrators read our emails - there was one incident at Yale when the president's office contacted us about a space we had announced an action in and not reserved through proper channels that some of us were sure they could only have learned of through surveilling our communication.  At NYU, GSOC has used email sparingly since the end of the strike, but much of what we have done has been over non-NYU email accounts.  And this incident is reminiscent of the actions by NYU administrators during the 2005-2006 strike to use the proprietary instructional software Blackboard to determine which teaching assistants and language instructors were striking our classes and which faculty had moved their classes off campus in solidarity with the strike.  So administrative surveillance isn't novel - even at Harvard.  What's interesting is the ways in which Harvard's actions here expose a previously invisible faultline in the university's division of labor.  It will be interesting to see what develops from this news and the reaction to it both on and off campus.

PS: If any NYU faculty read this blog, GET IT.  (It being a Sextonless future.)