Out with cstudent, in with orgevents

by Alysse Schultheis

Executive Editor

Last year, the student government decided to limit the access to cstudent, the ability to send school-wide emails, due to many complaints about receiving an excessive amount of emails every day. This created many problems for student organizations since they could no longer advertise their events to everyone who may be interested; instead they were restricted to the select group on their email list. The President of the Craft Club, Sallie Carter (‘16), commented, “While it was frustrating in a number of ways, the real issue was that because we could only email those already in the club, we were not able to reach anyone who wasn’t already aware of our objectives”. Since a “large part of the Craft Club’s purpose is to try to bring in those who would not otherwise try crafting, we found it particularly vexing.”

Cstudent still exists, but the email is restricted to the police department for emergency notifications and others in the Executive Offices for important academic notifications. The new system created several email groups that would go to all students, but now there was the option to unsubscribe from those groups to limit the amount of emails students’ received each day. Although no one can unsubscribe from cstudent, the change last year limited who could send school-wide emails, but also hindered student organizations’ ability to alert students to events. This past month Dean Hagi Bradley announced the introduction of a new email group called orgevents in an effort to decrease this gap in communication. The new email group allows student organizations to email Barbara Banks (bbanks@sewanee.edu) their event information and she will send it to the entire school on Tuesdays and Thursdays, successfully letting students know about events they might want to attend but previously had no knowledge of. Always keeping student opinion in mind, students still have the option to opt out of the new email group if they would rather not receive information about organizations’ events.