When asked about his priorities for the upcoming year, Pfister said trust-building within the Harvard community is important, though he was not directly addressing the email searches.

For UC Secretary Meghamsh Kanuparthy ’16, “the first order of business for the dean” should be to regain students’ trust in the wake of the searches.

Although the searches did not target student accounts, undergraduates questioned their own email privacy following the revelations. And although an Office of Student Life official later said the rumors were untrue, students speculated in March that administrators had been searching email listservs the night of River Run, a prohibited tradition in which freshmen consume alcohol at the upperclassman River Houses the night before Housing Day.

“There are groups within the student body who are somewhat distrustful of the administration,” Leverett House UC representative Aaron E. Watanabe ’14 said, adding that he was not sure of the connection between this sentiment and the email searches. “Probably, if you polled everyone...you’d find that people were [leaning] a little bit more towards the distrust rather than trust side.”

Kanuparthy said students see the Ad Board, for example, as a “mystery.” And Currier UC representative Sietse K. Goffard ’15, who introduced UC legislation expressing “tremendous concern” over the email searches, said that this past year there was some level of distrust and skepticism toward the College administration coupled with doubts about its transparency.

“I think students want to see more communication, not only through something as impersonal as an email, but face-to-face communication,” said Brett M. Biebelberg ’16, who represented Crimson Yard in the UC this past year. “I think people want to know who their dean is, and I don’t know if that has been the case in the past.”

Hammonds, who officially left the deanship at the start of this month after her departure was announced in May, has been criticized previously for what some described as too-infrequent communication with undergraduates.

For his part, Pfister said that he will make an effort to reach out to students as dean, calling it a “priority.” To that end, he plans to eat in House dining halls, and although he said he has not yet worked out his schedule, he said he will aim to do so “certainly more than once a month.”

A TRANSIENT TENURE