Dartmouth's Dean of Admissions Karl Furstenberg expressed concerns about allegations by Yale University that Princeton University admissions officials may have hacked into a Yale Web site which told applicants whether or not they had been accepted there.
He remained hesitant to comment closely on the situation, though, as many details remain unknown.
"In general, it's unfortunate that one school would feels that another is doing something that violates students' confidentiality," he said.
Furstenberg said that he doubted that Princeton logged onto the Yale Web site in order to obtain information that might have changed their admissions decisions.
"All the Ivy schools do business independently, very independently," he said.
"We don't ask where else students apply," he added. "It wouldn't make any difference to us if we did know."
Furstenberg was not worried that the security of Dartmouth's own Web site giving admissions decisions was or could be similarly compromised.
A Yale applicant needed to enter his/her name, social security numbers and date of birth to access his or her admissions decision online. Dartmouth applicants, by contrast, were given a randomly generated User ID and a randomly generated password, which they needed to use in order to view the outcomes of their applications.
Furstenberg declined to say whether or not he thought Yale was negligent for not coming up with a better way of protecting its site, but he did say that "the security they set up was not very sophisticated."
Furstenberg was present at a conference of Ivy League admissions officials in mid-May where Princeton first announced, according to the Yale Daily News, that they had accessed the Yale site.
However, neither Furstenberg nor any other admissions officers from Dartmouth present at the conference learned that Princeton had said anything about getting into Yale's site until the end of June.
He did not attend the particular meeting in which Stephen LeManager, an associate dean of admissions at Princeton, first announced that Princeton officials had first gotten into the Yale site.
Furstenberg declined to say whether or not Princeton's institutional credibility or prestige might suffer as a result of this incident.
"Any violation of confidentiality is serious," he said, but he thought that accessing into the Web site as "a matter of curiosity" is less serious than hacking into it to gain admissions information for unethical purposes.
In other developments related to the "Princetongate" scandal, the Washington Post reported this weekend that Lauren Bush, niece of President George W. Bush, and Ara Parseghian, grandson and namesake of a well-known former Notre Dame football coach, were among those whose Yale application decisions were viewed by Princeton.
Princeton University has also hired a lawyer, William Maderer, a partner at the Newark law firm of Saiber, Schlesinger, Satz & Goldstein, to conduct an independent internal investigation of the matter, according to a press release sent out by Marilyn Marks, media relations director at Princeton.
