May 17, 2002

E-Privacy in Academe

To the Editor:

I'm astonished that anyone at Virginia Tech is astonished that the campus police can search professors' hard drives ("Virginia Tech Police Seize a Professor's Computer in Vandalism Case," April 26). The fact that corporations (and, like it or not, universities are corporations) own all e-mail generated using corporate machines, software, or networks is a long-established point of law that has been well reported by the mainstream media over the last decade.