Ever since its invention, e-mail as we know it has been connecting people across the world. In the blink of an eye, I can update my best friend in France on life at the university, ask my mother in Atlanta to please send money or remind my dad that I'll be home this weekend. E-mail has definitely revolutionized the way the world communicates. I am at a loss when I imagine how anyone did without it.
However, as much as I love e-mail and appreciate the convenience it provides, there are a few e-mails I can certainly do without: the weekly updates from Ohio University administrators.
I know that these e-mails were a response to the loud minority of students who cried out for shared governance
and I appreciate administrators' trying to find a solution. However, I wish they would understand that these students will never be content until they impeach every member of the administration and just run the school themselves. A weekly e-mail is just a nuisance for the rest of us who love our university and are busy going to class, work and organizations. It is one thing for students to demand to know what is going on, but it's another thing for these same students to demand the entire student body be inconvenienced.
There has to be another solution. Maybe if I care that much about what is going on, I will attend Student Senate meetings, read The Post daily and check news updates online. If I have to demand a generic e-mail from the president every week in order to stay abreast on university affairs, how lazy am I as a student and why should I be babied?
I have to believe that these e-mails are a total waste of time. President Roderick McDavis, Dr. Kent Smith and Dr. Kathy Krendl have more to do than pat whiny students on the back with a long, general e-mail. How many students actually read them, anyway? Sure, there is the small number of students who peruse every e-mail looking for something to oppose, but then there are the large number of students who delete the e-mails without even opening them in order to avoid those pesky Mulberry over-quota pop-ups. And when those students want to know what is going on, they click on the Ohio Student Web site and read the exact same information online.
It's not that I don't read the e-mails. Personally, I always do. And it's not that I never want to receive an e-mail. (One of the ways students can be notified about emergencies is through e-mail, and that is an e-mail that all of us should read.)
And I also like the welcome back e-mails we get every quarter, but the weekly or monthly updates about virtually nothing are extremely unnecessary. Maybe there should be some listserv or something. And those that need an e-mail to feel in control of their university, well, they can just keep receiving them. And for those of us who trust that our administrators have the university's best interest at heart and don't need their e-mailing us to prove it ' maybe we can be taken off the list. Or, maybe it's just me.
Alissa Griffith is a junior journalism major. Send her an e-mail at ag180505@ohiou.edu.
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Alissa Griffith
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