Columbia College President Warrick Carter found out last week that you’re never too old to embarrass yourself in front of the whole school.
He accidentally forwarded a personal e-mail to hundreds of faculty and staff of the college in the Loop. He was writing to his lawyer about being fired from a corporate position, a fact that he had tried to hide from the college’s Board of Trustees.
He was trying to forward a copy to himself for personal records when a glitch in the system made the message public.
Debacles such as this are becoming more common as schools increasingly rely on large-scale e-mail to communicate. At Northwestern, only a few administrators in each school can send mass e-mails, and Information Technology Director Thomas Board said those administrators are well protected.
“The process of sending mass e-mail is not easy,” Board said. “It’s a very deliberate process, and it doesn’t involve standard programming like Eudora.”
An NU policy makes it impossible for students to send bulk e-mail. If NU students want to send out class- or universitywide e-mails, they must do so through the Office of Student Affairs.
“It is rare, but occasionally we do receive requests from various organizations to send out all-school e-mails,” Board said. “There has to be some kind of criteria for what kind of messages can be sent out, so Student Affairs is the arbiter of what’s appropriate.”
Such a policy did not exist on the University of Iowa campus last year when “UI Students for George W. Bush” sent an e-mail to 40,000 students and administrators. Reactions caused members of the UI Student Government to propose protecting students from unwanted e-mails, UISG President Andy Stoll told the Daily Iowan. The new policy, initiated this year, allows students to choose the categories of e-mail they receive.
But this filter system is not being as widely used as expected, Daily Iowan reporter Andrew Bixby said. For an article about the new policy, he failed to find a student who felt strongly about it.
“Asking students how they felt about the new policy, whether they would use the filters and if they were annoyed by bulk mail,” he said, “I couldn’t get a single person to tell me they were thrilled with the new system. I’m a student and I choose not to use the filters because I’d rather just delete e-mail I don’t want.”
After the Bush e-mail, the university also instituted a policy requiring administrative approval for all e-mails to more than 1,000 people.
“Even though I don’t use the filter, I don’t feel like I’m getting swamped with pointless e-mails from student groups — mainly because it’s gotten tough for student groups to send them out at all,” Bixby said.
NU’s listserv is a common means of communication for student groups. It operates differently but achieves the same result as filters.
“Our e-mail policy works because you sign up to be on the listservs that you want,” ASG President Adam Humann said. “Nobody has talked to me about any e-mail issues, and that generally implies that not too many students are unhappy or concerned.”
