I’m not going to get into a whole huge thing about this, but in the grand order of the universe it does seem to me that snooping on your employees’ email to find out who’s been talking to the press is a more serious ethical violation than cheating on a college exam.
Update | Okay, one more thing. This…
“Several Harvard faculty members speculated that the administration had felt free to search the e-mail accounts because it regarded the resident deans as regular employees, not faculty members; Harvard’s policies on electronic privacy give more protection to faculty members.”
…is pretty messed up. As is this:
“Some of the resident deans said they considered the lack of notice — and even the searches, themselves — a violation of trust, but they refused to speak for the record because they lack job protection.”
studentactivism.net 
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March 11, 2013 at 11:48 am
Badger Pundit
I recommend the blog of Harry Lewis, a well-connected Harvard professor, for more insight. He’s quoted in the NYT article; on his blog he calls Harvard’s e-mail snooping “dishonorable” and “sad”:
http://harry-lewis.blogspot.com/2013/03/email-privacy-at-harvard.html
Snippets:
[T]he thing that most needs to be controlled in the modern university is information itself. Our communications offices have grown while our library staff has shrunk. The faculty finds out about things by reading press releases and Gazette stories. In the information-control university, an email gone astray is grounds for a witch hunt.
. . . I have long had a statement on my home page to use the address lewis@harvard.edu, which only I read. That will go now. I have always taken pride in being able to assure upset students and angry parents that no staff intermediary would process their message — it would go straight from their fingers to my eyes. . . . If something as innocuous as the leakage of the August 16 email justifies reading the email of a dozen faculty members, it is hard to know how low the threshold might be for invasion of our in- and out-boxes.
* * *
[I]t seems to me that we have taken another step away from the old feeling that the university was a family, benevolently disposed towards its members and even lovingly indulgent. It has taken a step toward becoming instead a bristling corporation, with adversaries within who must be spied upon using all available tools, or perhaps an authoritarian government.