Posted on 07/25/2002 7:56:48 PM PDT by GeneD
At the height of the college admissions season in early April, the director of admission at Princeton and possibly others in his office improperly and repeatedly entered a Web site set up to let Yale applicants know if they had been accepted as students, officials at both Ivy League universities confirmed yesterday.
Yale officials filed a complaint yesterday with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Princeton officials apologized for what they called a "serious lapse of judgment" by the director, Stephen E. LeMenager. Princeton placed him on administrative leave pending an investigation of the incident, which was first reported yesterday by the online edition of The Yale Daily News, the undergraduate newspaper.
Mr. LeMenager acknowledged that he had entered the Yale site by using the birth dates and Social Security numbers of Princeton applicants who had also applied to Yale, the Yale news report said.
Yale investigators found that their computer site had been improperly entered 18 times and that 11 applicants' records had been called up without authorization.
The temporary site, new this year, was designed to flash a congratulatory message if an applicant had been admitted. Those who were not accepted received a simpler message. The site also included links to admissions information and personal data about the applicants. It warned that only prospective students should use the site. Not even their parents were permitted to log on.
Neither university was willing to comment on what might have been Mr. LeMenager's motive for entering the site. He has been with the Princeton admission office since 1983 and was promoted to associate dean and director of the office in July 2001. He did not respond to e-mail or telephone messages yesterday, and the university said he would not be available.
But the Yale news report said that Mr. LeMenager said he had gained access to the Yale site because he was curious about its security. "It was really an innocent way for us to check out the security," Mr. LeMenager was quoted as saying. "That was our main concern of having an online notification system, that it would be susceptible to people who had that information — parents, guidance counselors and admissions officers at other schools."
Princeton officials did not learn of the intrusion until late Wednesday evening, when Yale's president, Richard C. Levin, called Princeton's president, Shirley M. Tilghman. She and other Princeton officials spent much of yesterday trying to learn more about what had happened and discussing what to do.
A Princeton spokeswoman, Marilyn Marks, said yesterday, "We deeply regret that information provided by students in good faith was used inappropriately by at least one official in our admission office."
Princeton officials said the university plans to hire an outside independent counsel to investigate whether anyone other than Mr. LeMenager had misused the Yale Web site and other aspects of the case, including the motive.
The report stunned and puzzled other college officials. Some saw it as a disturbing sign of how frenzied the college admissions process has become, particularly at elite institutions like Yale and Princeton, which receive more than 10 applications for every place in their first-year classes. (Yale had 15,400 applications this year for a class of 1,300, while Princeton had 14,521 applications for a class of 1,160.)
"This report reflects the heightened craziness about admissions decisions," said James O. Freedman, a legal scholar and the former president of Dartmouth. "It probably wouldn't subvert the Constitution, but it is competitiveness taken to a dastardly length."
Robert Schaeffer, the public education officer for the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, who follows college admissions closely, said this case illustrated how the competition by selective colleges for a handful of top students had become "an arms race in which each side tries to one-up the other."
It was not clear yesterday if there was anything that stood out about the applicants whose records were looked up. The two universities would not identify them or reveal their admissions status. The editor in chief of The Yale Daily News, Chris Michel, a history major from Dublin in northern California, speculated that Princeton officials could have been trying to learn more about the students' interests or other personal information available on the Web site.
"That could have provided informational advantage to Princeton beyond just whether a student was accepted or rejected," Mr. Michel said. "As a student, it's especially disturbing to find that a university would exploit information like this. We put a lot of trust in universities."
Some legal experts said that the behavior appeared to cross both ethical and legal lines. Jeffrey Rosen, an associate professor at George Washington University law school, said that if the allegations proved accurate, "there is a decent case that Princeton was guilty of a federal misdemeanor under the federal computer fraud and abuse act that prohibits anyone from intentionally accessing a computer without authorization or exceeding authorized access."
Stephen Gillers, vice dean at New York University's law school, called the actions a betrayal of student trust. "The only antidote is serious discipline of those involved," he said. "Treating the incident lightly would compound the harm."
Yale officials learned of the unauthorized activity on the Web site in June, and then conducted their own investigation, but the university said yesterday that it would not release the internal report. Yale officials said that they had reported the incident to state and federal law enforcement authorities and to the applicants whose information was looked up.
One report went to the F.B.I.'s New Haven office. "We're in the process of assessing the situation to determine if there was a federal violation," said Lisa Bull, a spokeswoman for the office. She said that the division's computer investigation squad was likely to investigate it first.
"We have also notified Princeton and expect that they will follow up appropriately," said Dorothy K. Robinson, Yale's vice president and general counsel in a statement released yesterday. "We are deeply concerned about the privacy of our students."
Yale is one of a growing number of universities that allow applicants to learn electronically whether they have been admitted, without waiting for notices to arrive by mail. Some of these systems require a special pre-arranged password. Yale's Web site, set up last winter, did not require that.
Mr. Rosen, the George Washington law professor, said that that was not enough protection for securing confidential information. "It's quite remarkable that Yale set up Web site with only a Social Security and birth date as passwords," he said. "These things are so easily obtained."
Harvard also used the Internet to provide prospective students with quicker notification of admissions decisions this year, but it sent e-mail messages to applicants rather than requiring them to log onto a Web site.
"Our computer science people advised us to use e-mail because it would be more secure rather than setting up a special Web site, which they said would be possible to break into," said William R. Fitzsimmons, dean of admissions and financial aid at Harvard.
The University of Pennsylvania, like Yale, used an Internet Web site for the first time this year to allow students to learn whether they had been admitted on April 3, but students had to have a specially assigned number to gain access.
"We had about 12,000 inquiries to the site in six or seven hours, from among almost 19,000 applicants," said Lee Stetson, Penn's dean of admissions. "We avoided using Social Security numbers for confidentiality, and because of the potential for their misuse."
Thomas Conroy, a Yale spokesman, said Yale planned to use a Web site again, but with "additional security."
You know, Princeton may have needed to steal applicants with a right profile. There is a rumor that there are a short supply of applicants which can fill certain quota spots. The oft-cited example is "a female African-American engineer for MIT". Princeton may have needed some rare token like that.
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