Letter to CIO Brian Cohen Re: Email Forwarding

December 29, 2014

Dear Vice Chancellor Cohen,

I am writing to you in my capacity as the Officer for Library & Technology at the Doctoral Students’ Council at the Graduate Center. As you may well know, the Graduate Center is in the process of migrating all student email accounts to the Office 365 email environment. With this change, the option to forward emails to one’s personal email accounts (Gmail, Yahoo Mail, etc.) has been ‘switched off’. The Graduate Center IT office, when asked to clarify this, cited CUNY Central’s policy restricting this option: “CUNY Central Office CIS has restricted the Office 365 environment to preclude automatically forwarding email from your GC Office 365 email account to an external email account. You will be able to forward individual emails from your Office 365 email account, but you will not be able to configure your Office 365 email account to automatically forward email to another email account”.

Many GC students have begun using their new email accounts, and many have expressed frustration at the restriction of this option. As you can well imagine, forwarding emails to an external account which many graduate students consider to be their primary email account makes life a lot more easier for many of us who adjunct at multiple CUNY institutions, work on various projects and communicate with numerous people in our roles as teachers, students, mentors, academics, and researchers. Not having the option to forward emails may discourage many students from sharing and accessing their GC email accounts altogether. Hence, for many, it is not only more convenient to have emails forwarded to a singular email account, but also enhances their connectedness to the Graduate Center and to CUNY as emails sent from these institutions announcing events, projects, news, fellowships etc. stand a better chance of being seen by many more students and not just those who access their GC email accounts.

Therefore, I, along with the Steering and Executive Committees of the Doctoral Students’ Council that represents some 4,000 graduate students, implore you to reconsider the policy restricting the forwarding of emails to students’ personal email accounts, a practice that has become a norm in contemporary communications technologies.

Thank you for taking the time to consider this, and we look forward to hearing back from you.

Sincerely,

cc

Claudia Wald, USS Vice Chair for Technology

Robert Campbell, Vice President for IT, Graduate Center

Stephanie Evans, IT Project Specialist, Graduate Center