College curtails club e-mails

Author: Zamir Ahmed

Most student organizations are no longer permitted to send out student-wide e-mails, as administrators work to reduce the number of all-campus e-mails. The policy change was made this year after dozens of campus-wide messages were sent at the end of last year's fall semester, clogging student mailboxes and slowing the College server.

"We are trying to cut down on the number of repeat messages that students receive," said Ann Hanson, dean of Student Affairs. "Occasionally, more than one person or more than one office mails the same information to students, so we are trying to reduce those repeat messages so that students will receive fewer unnecessary e-mails."

The policy change does not affect many student groups as most did not have the ability to send all-campus e-mails in the past and instead relied on other organizations to send messages for them or used other means of publicity. Student groups still have the opportunity to use e-mail to generate publicity for their events but must have their e-mails approved and forwarded by the Student Government Association (SGA).

"While the SGA has an obligation to communicate campus activities, we also recognize that mass e-mailing frustrates many students and causes many to simply ignore all e-mails coming from 'SGA,'" said SGA President Alex Stanton '07. "As a result, we are making an effort this year to combine multiple student organization announcements into a special section of our mailings. Any appropriate message of potential interest to the student body can be included in these e-mails, but I would encourage student groups to find other, more traditional forms of communication as a supplement."

While the e-mail decision was made without input from student organizations, most group leaders supported the College's decision. Many believed that student-wide e-mails actually hindered their publicity campaigns and their efforts to get students to their events.

"In the past, we have found that too many e-mails to too wide a group sending has resulted in decreased e-mail reading, so even if we had the power to send all-campus e-mails, I'm not sure we would use it much," said Arielle Weisman '07, co-president of Hillel. "Word of mouth and flyers seem to work pretty well for us."

"We have plenty of effective ways that students can send out information to the campus community," said Carlos Beato '07, president of Alianza Latinoamerica Y Caribeña. "When clubs submit information for events on time to CCAL, the events are featured in the weekly or bi-weekly newsletter that students read in the cafeterias. I would say that this process has allowed for club board members to act more responsibly when it comes to sending out information and advertising their events."

Not all student leaders expressed support for the College's decision, however.

"Trying to organize a performance in which all students are encouraged to participate is extremely difficult as we have no way of communicating with them," said Nirvana Bhatia '07, head of the ISO Cultural Show. "You can have the email approved and sent out, but you can only send one e-mail for each event - this means no follow-up e-mails and no corrections. Posters don't work - they are usually just ripped down or pinned over. How can we be expected to add to the diverseness of the College community if we have no way of getting our message out there?"

Despite these concerns, Hanson stressed that students will benefit from the decision because they will not be overwhelmed with messages they are not interested in.

"There is no huge change," said Hanson. "We are just trying to make the all-student e-mail list more streamlined and more effective."