Editorial All-student e-mail for all?

Author: [no author name found]

Maybe we should blame the Admissions Office for continually admitting smarter and more ambitious students into our community. Or maybe we should blame the hacker-internet culture for warping the minds of innocent Middlebury youth. Whatever the reason, it was this time last year that a scattered group of MiddKids, all too smart for their own good, decided to make an end-run around the student and administrative gatekeepers who held the all-student e-mail privileges.

The Outlook directory, these students discovered, allowed them to address a single message to each of the more than two thousand individual student e-mail addresses in the system. Suddenly everyone was free of their dependence on the special privilege that allowed administrators and select student leaders to send all-student e-mails by simply addressing messages to students@middlebury.edu.

But when the all-student e-mail power was seized by the masses, chaos ensued. Random language coffee house announcements and unheard of student band performance notices were sent out at anyone's whim. Every time someone sent an e-mail, five other people wrote back to say how stupid the original e-mail was. And of course they cc'd the entire campus on their reply, provoking more angry replies. E-mail programs crashed under the stress of receiving messages with headers containing thousands of unique addresses. The whole affair only ended after one student sent an exceptionally candid photo of her underwear-clad friend to the entire student body, and most of the College deans as well.

This little anecdote explains the current all-student e-mail predicament. The College does not trust students to send mass e-mails, and rightfully so. But now student organizations have no clear means of making effective, far-reaching e-mail announcements. Today the policy for students wanting to publicize an event or send a notice is to beg an administrator or the Student Government Association to send out the announcement. For students on the receiving end, the e-mail system offers no way to tailor what sorts of mass e-mails they want to receive, or how often they want to receive them. As a result, many important events or notices never get announced, and those that are announced are often simply deleted.

Students cannot be forced to read important e-mails, but if the College established an expanded listserv system that allowed students to control the mass e-mails coming at them, greater respect and attention would likely be paid to those messages that did get through. All-student e-mails from a student's course and major mailing lists, alerts from Public Safety, important reminders from the registrar and special notices from Old Chapel should all continue to go to all students without option for blocking these messages. But students should have the option of turning off or receiving only daily or weekly digests of e-mails from all other groups - including the Student Government Association, Middlebury College Activities Board, the Commons and intramural sports that are today all inexplicably exempt from all-campus e-mail policies. With a listserv system, students could sign-up through a website to receive announcements on whatever club, Commons or event lists they want, and then control how often (weekly, daily, or every time someone sends something) that they receive a message from that list. Students and administrators could even get creative and build interactive discussion lists for dorms and Commons.

Nationally our society has yet to fully define the role of e-mail as a means of communication. In many workplaces and communities, both work and leisure time have been subsumed by the demands of answering and managing a daily stream of e-mail. At Middlebury, students, professors and administrators all spend hours each week responding to e-mails, and students are understandably prone to lose or not notice important messages in their inboxes. Through a comprehensive listserv system the College could turn the problem on its head, and give all students some control over all-student e-mails.