BLACKSBURG -- The Virginia Attorney General's Office has ordered Virginia Tech to copy the hard drives of every Tech faculty and staff person who had contact with gunman Seung-Hui Cho, and some professors are not happy about their methods.

So far, one-quarter of 130 hard drives have been copied, including the computer files of every English professor who taught Cho, according to English department chairwoman Carolyn Rude.

The reason, say Rude and other professors, is to preserve data -- both for the investigation and in anticipation of possible lawsuits, which would presumably be filed by victims' families. "Because these are state-owned computers, they have a right to do that," Rude said.

But in the midst of an ongoing investigation -- and a little more than three months since Cho killed 32 people and himself -- the stakes are high, and the mood is tense.

"It sounds like a clash of two cultures that are not usually in contact with each other," said University of Richmond law professor James Gibson, an expert in computer law and privacy.

Some professors in the department initially objected to the request, citing privacy issues involving personnel matters, sensitive health records and confidential tenure deliberations.

Responding to their complaints, Senior Assistant Attorney General Ron Forehand sent a memo that came across to some as a threat: "If in the event the employee is not cooperative, I suggest the university simply confiscate the equipment, take appropriate action in respect to copying and then take appropriate personnel action against the resistant employee."

Gibson said Forehand's approach was akin to "trying to cure dandruff with decapitation." Faculty members had every right to feel threatened, he added. "While you do want to take care to preserve information that may be relevant later, there are more sensitive ways to go about doing it."

In an e-mail sent earlier this week to the other English professors who had taught Cho, professor Lucinda Roy urged her colleagues to argue for a compromise: Documents having nothing to do with the shooting should not be copied. "If an administration under pressure copies the hard drives of faculty and staff in their entirety that administration will hold the virtual 'keys' to faculty and staff offices and homes indefinitely," Roy said.

This could make professors vulnerable to future actions and lawsuits, she added, "not just those pertaining to the shooting, and that this 'future' could be decades long."

Roy could not be reached Friday, and the attorney general's office refused to comment.

Tech spokesman Mark Owczarski described the copying of the hard drives as "simply a procedural and precautionary step" for the purpose of the investigation. Should a new lead develop, it's important to have information that could be relevant backed up, said Owczarski, whose hard drive is among those being copied.

"No one's looking at any of this stuff unless the attorney general's office asks for it down the road," he said. "And then they'd be looking at specific pieces of information, not just any old thing. As I understand it, they cannot just peruse your computer."

But the heavy-handed communication was not easy to swallow for tenured academics accustomed to robust academic freedoms. English professor Edward Falco, who taught playwriting to Cho, called Forehand's memo "crudely worded."

"We're tenured faculty; I don't think he can just fire us," Falco said.

Falco was reassured when university technology employees stressed that personal material not deemed pertinent to litigation will not be made public. "There is material on the hard drives the university should have no right to see. I'm a writer, and all my manuscripts are on there," he said.

"There is personal e-mail between me and my kids. So the position that everything on the computer -- that the university owns it all -- seems unreasonable and should be worked through and considered with more subtlety."

Students need to feel confident that their conversations with and e-mails to professors will remain confidential, especially material that's deeply personal, added Valerie Hardcastle, Tech's faculty senate president.

But some professors, including poet and activist Nikki Giovanni, believe the scope of the April 16 tragedy trumps concerns about academic freedom.

"I say, 'To hell with your computer. Somebody's in the ground,' " argued Giovanni, the first professor to alert the university to Cho's behavioral problems in 2005.

"We need to throw it all out there in the open because 32 people are dead," she said. "What if Cho had e-mailed from someone else's computer, and we could find that? We still don't know what all there is to know.

"I know we're all jumpy right now. ... But the more information we put out, the better it's going to be."

beth.macy@roanoke.com 981-3435 greg.esposito@roanoke.com 381-1675

Staff writer Mike Sluss contributed to this report.