UIS: Silly students, email is for faculty
Posted by: Anna Bank in News, Vox Populi, tags: Email, UISThe offending email that went out a few hours ago:
Dear students,
At the end of July and the beginning of August, University Information Services will be moving faculty and staff to a separate e-mail system. We will require two weekend long outages to accomplish this, scheduled for:
July 25 at 6:00 PM to July 28 at 8:00 AM
August 1 at 6:00 PM to August 4 at 8:00 AMDuring these outages, you will not be able to access GUMail e-mail.
If you have a critical need for e-mail during these outages, please contact the Student Help Desk for assistance…
What constitutes a “critical need for e-mail”? Weekend tasks from your Devil Wears Prada-esque boss? Love notes from your significant other? The secret code word for a Kidz Bop concert presale? UIS doesn’t provide any criteria for what makes an excuse legit. Everyone should apply for a dispensation just to see if they’re favored students.
It’s good that Georgetown is attempting to improve faculty and staff email service; students should be next. And for most students, any important messages of a non-Georgetown nature are probably going through Gmail anyway. But 62 email-less hours in a row, two weekends in a row? It’s going to be rough.
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You’re 100% right to raise concern over this.
It seems to me that this is just part of a larger issue: Georgetown as a whole has a pervasive tendency to address the needs of faculty/staff/visitors before they turn to the students.
Another example of this tendency is GUTS busses running full schedules on weekdays when faculty/staff/vistors need them but students have less of a need, and running cadaverous schedules on the weekend, when students actually have a chance to go out. Even getting the token weekend busses we now have required the like of severe dental surgery on the Administration.
Georgetown as a whole needs to move students up the priority ladder. The point of a University is to educate students. Period. The needs of the faculty are relevant only insofar as they impact the ability of the faculty to educate the students. We pay the bills. The faculty are the ones getting paid. Thus, we ought to have the privilege of dictating the terms of our arrangement. In other words, as the check-writers, we have every right to demand that our needs come first. Thus the students ought to be a (the?) priority, at the center of the University’s exertions.
The other thing I wanted to comment on was the malfeasance on the part of UIS that this issue highlights. The University considered Google (Google, for god’s sake!) as our e-mail provider. For reasons passing understanding, that proposal was shot down. In spite of its success at other Universities. In spite of the superiority of Google technology. In spite of the fact that we already use Google to power our website’s search function.
This is exactly why I depend on Georgetown for as little as possible, and especially not e-mail.
I hadn’t considered the bus schedules that way, Matthew, but good point. They’re so bad on weekends.
We wrote an earliest post about Georgetown possibly switching to Gmail. I wish they had.
There’s no question that our email system and GUTS bus schedule leave much to be desired, Matthew, and I’m glad you agreed with the post.
But I’m not sure I’m buying the rest of your “students > everyone else” philosophy of University administration. Georgetown is a major research school – although not as major as it could/should be – so while educating students should definitely be a top priority, it’s not true that faculty are only relevant because of their ability to lecture at us twice a week. And sure, I want more than hourly bus schedules on weekends, but not at the expense of people who work on campus and need frequent busses during the week to get here and get home.
I’d like to think it’s possible for Georgetown to do (somewhat) right by everyone.
Although you pose a good point Anna, that we are also a research university that depends on our professors, one of georgetown’s top priorities is making our endowment larger through increasing alumni donations and if I’m going to part with my hard-earned, non-business-school-degree dollars I’d like to feel a little pampered every now and then. I agree with Matt that we, as students, often do get the short end of the stick.
Plus, if University security is gonna make walking around on weekend nights so dangerous as to constitute a health hazard (library steps, ahem) they should at least let us bus out to dupont where my biggest concern is if my friends are gonna be carded. COLEGE WOOOH!
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Thanks for this