In her first comment on the matter, Harvard’s president, Drew Gilpin Faust, said that she did not know about the searches at the time, but that having been apprised, “I feel very comfortable that great care was taken to safeguard the privacy of all concerned.”

Faculty responses revealed a gap between expectations in academia, where privacy is often seen as integral to academic freedom, and the corporate world, in which employees are often told to assume that workplace e-mails are not private. Some professors wondered aloud whether they had been naïve to think that things would be different at a university, and said they were forced to re-examine assumptions about confidentiality.

“It’s disturbing because I don’t know what it means about whether they could look at my own e-mail,” said Oliver Hart, an economics professor. “We need to have a discussion and a better understanding of the policy.”

He and other professors said the searches would prompt him to conduct more business through private e-mail accounts outside of Harvard’s reach.

Most professors who agreed to discuss the matter on Monday insisted on anonymity, not wanting to run afoul of the administration. Several of them, conceding that the university had a legal right to conduct the searches, said the problem was, as one put it, that “we never thought they would — we never thought about it at all, and we probably should have.”