Smith and Hammonds seem to imply that outing the Resident Dean at fault would have resulted in his or her removal and the delay of his or her students’ Ad Board cases. Lewis finds it unlikely that other Resident Deans would have demanded the head of a colleague who had made an honest mistake. Besides, Lewis says, it’s only right to tell people that you are violating the privacy of their inbox, and to explain why. Hard to argue with that, especially since Howell told Hammonds in September that email searches would be “sort of drastic and problematic.”

Third: refuse to address the searches’ ethical implications.

Howell sent a letter asking Faust to explain her thoughts on the searches, Faust came closest to addressing the issue in her comment the same day: “Questions about whether more resident deans should have been informed sooner are fair to ask.”

So Faust’s personal opinion on the searches is…what? An answer would have been better than bureaucratic evasiveness.

In sum, the administration screwed this one up big time. It compromised the trust of both faculty and students. Faculty may now begin to eschew FAS accounts and students were swapping rumors that the Office of Student Life might have been monitoring list-serves for River Run festivities, which they have denied. Some worry that Resident Deans are no longer trusted confidants.

Faust appears bent on never saying anything unscripted or conceivably offensive (the ghost of Larry Summers haunts her, perhaps). But being a leader sometimes means having the guts to take charge. When will Faust?

Wyatt N. Troia ’14, a Crimson editorial writer, is an economics concentrator in Winthrop House. His column appears on alternate Fridays.