HBS Dean Kim B. Clark ’74 issued a statement on March 7 pledging to reject all 119 applicants who had tried to learn their admissions status early.

“This behavior is unethical at best—a serious breach of trust that can not be countered by rationalization,” he wrote. “Any applicant found to have done so will not be admitted to this school.”

HBS spokesman David R. Lampe affirmed Clark’s statement.

“Legally, what they did was trespassing,” he said. “This is an area where you know you’re not supposed to be.”

University President Lawrence H. Summers offered his support for HBS’s decision.

“It was a statement that actions have consequences,” he said at an HBS faculty meeting on March 17.

But HBS also bore a substantial amount of criticism for its decision.

A group of the rejected applicants, calling themselves the “Infamous 119,” condemned the school’s reaction in anonymous statements released to the press.

Faculty Co-Director of Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society Jonathan Zittrain called HBS’s move “unduly harsh.”

Lauren Weinstein, co-founder of People for Internet Responsibility, said that HBS had made a “fundamentally unfair” decision.

“The Internet is an enabling technology that makes all kinds of things easier to do in the spirit of the moment and with detachment from reality,” he said, adding that HBS should have considered the “human side” of the applicants’ actions.

BEYOND BOSTON

While the business schools at Carnegie Mellon, Duke, and MIT also chose to reject all applicants who had tried to see their admissions files, Stanford’s and Dartmouth’s schools took a different tack, electing not to take action until considering each applicant’s explanation.

Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business announced on March 17 that it had admitted an unspecified number of the 17 prospective students who had attempted to access the site.

“We believe that integrity and accepting responsibility for one’s actions are the cornerstones of leadership,” said Paul Danos, Tuck’s dean. “We also believe that each person must be respected and valued as an individual.”