Apparently the Harvard applicants who surreptitiously peeked at their admissions status aren’t willing to concede they did anything wrong. In fact, who’s fault is it, according to them?

One applicant questioned how it was unethical to view information that was intended only for you, if you have no intent or ability to change it.

He argued that Harvard and ApplyYourself, a Fairfax, Virginia-based online application and notification program company used by all the schools, are also responsible because they did not adequately protect the information.

I hate to inform this MBA Wannabe (which would probably explain his irrepressible idiocy), but making something easy to do doesn’t make it legal or even ethical to do so. For example, if I leave my keys in my car with the car running and the doors unlocked, and you see this, you don’t have a right to steal my car just because I made it “easy” for you.

Just because the information may have been easy to obtain, doesn’t mean you had a right to obtain it. Even the shiftiest among us would have to agree that Harvard’s stance on this is common-sense correct:

It seemed to us you would have to have pretty bad judgment or pretty bad ethics not to know you were doing something wrong.

Amen. But then again, these guys are MBA’s, and most MBA’s in the business world really don’t know a hell of a lot about anything anyway; a fact people who have dealt with them fully understand. At least some of these prying eyes can take comfort in the fact that they were accepted before they were rejected. I hear that’s standard process in Massachussets anyway.

Source: The International Herald Tribune via Techdirt