U. of Illinois Chief of Staff Resigns Over Anonymous E-Mails

January 7, 2012, 7:06 pm

Lisa Troyer, chief of staff to the University of Illinois’s president, Michael J. Hogan, resigned on Friday after a computer-science professor discovered that two anonymous e-mail messages sent to a faculty-senate group on December 12 appeared to have been written on Ms. Troyer’s computer. According to the Chicago Tribune, Ms. Troyer intends to return to teaching at the university’s Champaign-Urbana campus, where she has tenure as a professor of psychology, but the university’s interim provost said he thought Champaign-Urbana administrators would want to review results of an investigation into the e-mails before deciding on her role. Ms. Troyer has been a trusted confidant of Mr. Hogan, accompanying him to his current post after working for him when he was president of the University of Connecticut and, before that, provost of the University of Iowa.

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11173183

This story seems incomplete. What was the content of the e-mails?
lizgibbons

Click on the link in the article, “According to the Chicago Tribune”, which will take you to the article in that publication giving more detail.
barbarashell

For someone who served as the Chief of Staff for the President of a major university, this was not a very bright move…especially when the issue was dealing with ethical behavior!
Guest

I am curious about when it is kosher for universities to track email origins. I received two emails from an anonymous yahoo source, calling me an “asshole” and a racially tinged epithet, but the campus police wouldn’t do anything because they said there was no direct threat. They would not trace the email. Strange that in my case they wouldn’t, but in this case, they would.
jwr12

As I understand it, the initial inquiry began when a member of the receiving list — the Senate’s Conference — got curious about who had sent the anonymous e-mail, a breach of protocol in these discussions. It happened that this person is a world-famous expert in computer science (and IT in particular), so he knew that when you write a document in Word, and paste it into a field, Word leaves all kinds of traces in the text that you can examine and consider pretty quickly. So he did that — as, of course, he had every right to, since in fact he received this information delivered to him in his mailbox. For someone who knew what he was looking for, the probable origin of the e-mail jumped out rather quickly. He then reported it to the authorities, who, given the questions of process and shared governance at hand, have followed out the investigation since. I guess the basic answer to your first question, though, is that when you send people an e-mail, you can’t blame them if they read all the information you send them, which they can if they know what they’re doing.