Professors suggested that the email searches could be symptomatic of a larger shift in the balance of power away from faculty and toward the administration. Though they were careful not to tie the email searches too closely with that perceived shift, they said that a recent string of top-down decisions have left faculty uncertain about their role in the University hierarchy.

“The concern that I think many faculty members feel has to do with questions of trust,” Jasanoff said.

Government professor Theda R. Skocpol, former dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, put it more bluntly.

“Whoever designed this entire cheating scandal in all of its many investigative aspects fits better at the Hoover era FBI than at a modern university,” she wrote in an email.

In their statement on Monday, Smith and Hammonds justified Harvard’s actions by saying that administrators were “operating without any clear precedent for the conflicting privacy concerns,” and ultimately based the decision not to notify all the resident deans of the search to protect the privacy of a resident dean who had made an “inadvertent error.”

“We understand that others may see the situation differently, and we apologize if any Resident Deans feel our communication at the conclusion of the investigation was insufficient,” the statement said.

Faculty members interviewed for this story said they were uncertain how faculty might react to the incident, but that any formal discourse will likely come at April’s faculty meeting.

Though it is not on the agenda, Jasanoff and classics professor Richard F. Thomas said they expect the searches will be discussed in the biweekly Faculty Council meeting scheduled for Wednesday.

—Staff writer Nicholas P. Fandos can be reached nicholasfandos@college.harvard.edu. Follow him on Twitter @npfandos.

—Staff writer Samuel Y. Weinstock can be reached syweinstock@college.harvard.edu. Follow him on Twitter @syweinstock.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

CORRECTION: March 12, 2013

An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified the second piece of information that led administrators to decide to search the emails of resident deans. That second leak was a report of a tiered punishment scheme that administrators had allegedly devised for the cheating cases, not Government 1310 instructor Matthew B. Platt’s original May 14 complaint letter to the Administrative Board.