Outsourcing is hip. My inside sources in the Administration building tell me that a number of new and cool press releases will soon be hitting the quads. The Transportation Office plans to trumpet their news: “Campus buses will be discontinued to better enable students to purchase their own cars, faster and slicker than buses, from South Side dealerships.” The library, budget crisis looming, says, “We will no longer lend books to students, since better, shinier, less worn books are available from commercial bookstores.” Campus police is closing up shop, suggesting we all buy bodyguards and handguns on the free market. And Networking Services and Information Technolgies (NSIT), not wanting to be left out and not content with having closed down the Harper and Crerar computer labs last year, is shutting down e-mail services for all current students.
Wait, that last one isn’t a joke.
As everyone has surely heard, last week NSIT announced what it called a “transition” in student e-mail services (I hope you all have your critical thinking caps on so your scalps won’t bleed as you scratch your heads over this one). NSIT may call this a “transition”, but a simpler and, dare I say, more honest description would be a “closure.” It is closing down its e-mail services for students and offering us nothing besides a choice of where to have our University account forwarded. This forwarding service, of course, is nothing new. It’s been around for years. As the Maroon Editorial Board observed last week, the existing cMail web interface is wretched, and I can understand why thousands of people are already forwarding their University accounts elsewhere.
But if 49 percent of students (according to NSIT) currently use cMail, and there are 15,149 of us students here, that makes 7,423 people, me among them, who are still using the service. That’s a lot of people. NSIT’s announcement in effect says to these people, “Sorry, we just couldn’t be bothered to improve our current services, so we’ve decided to give up altogether. Bugger off.” Frustratingly, NSIT appears to have made this decision without consulting its users, and its official explanation is laughable. “Maintaining an e-mail forwarding service”—says its website—“streamlines e-mail use for students, provides students with state-of-the-art commercial e-mail tools of their choice, and allows NSIT to be efficient with university funds.” But a moment’s thought shows that the first and second statements here are bogus, because as I just explained, the forwarding service has been around for years. And the last claim about money isn’t much better: When I asked the support people how much they hoped to save, they said they weren’t even really sure themselves. No doubt they will save something, perhaps by laying off some IT personnel. But they’re still planning to provide e-mail to faculty and staff, so there will still be a campus e-mail service. And it will still be paid for by our pricey tuition. It just won’t be open for our use. My fellow students, we are getting the short end of the stick.
Now as for the proposed alternative, I’m not going to claim that Gmail isn’t, for the time being, much quicker and slicker than cMail. But can we again think more closely about this? 74 percent of University of Chicago people who forward their e-mail use Gmail. Google these days has a growing monopoly on Internet search and advertising, and is creepily accumulating billions and billions of e-mails, IM logs, and search queries. Its dramatic market dominance means that other sites are hard pressed to provide similar services. Its service is only “free” because it is supported by ads, and it is accountable to no one on our campus. Google has no obligation to keep offering free services, and can delete our accounts if it suits its bottom line. Today Gmail may be good, but tomorrow? NSIT makes no guarantees. But what’s our other option—the clownish Yahoo interface? A paying service? The smaller free sites that can’t even match cMail’s current options?
NSIT, where are your wits? Your values? Your loyalties? The closure of cMail means that those of us who care about privacy and civil liberties lose our main non-profit, reasonably secure option for electronic mail. It means a major nuisance for 7,500 people (have fun transferring your old e-mails to your new account!). It means our university is giving us less service for the same money, thinking it can get away with false advertising, lame explanations, and no consultation. But I have a counter-proposal. Take a survey to see what current users want. If thousands of them want to keep using University e-mail services, the same as faculty and staff, they should have the option.
— Eli Thorkelson is a fifth-year Ph.D. student in cultural anthropology.
This was a depressing example of why students from the Anthropology department have done so poorly in recent years in terms of attaining external funding, finishing the program in normative time, and producing high-quality research. This letter has neither logic nor style. I would say that it could easily have been written by a high school student, except for I don’t actually know many high schoolers who struggle as much with basic logical thinking skills as the author of this letter seems to.
I can understand your frustration to some extent, but your last line is simply incorrect. As a recent College graduate and former full-time benefit employee of the University I can assure you that faculty and staff do *not* use cMail. We were upgraded to an online version of a Microsoft product similar to Outlook. So, coupled with the fact nearly all employees of the University use Outlook as a stand alone program and its online counterpart, your argument about students using the same system as faculty and staff is frail.
Eli,
I think most of the points here are pretty weak. Your comparison between phasing out CMail and outsourcing the University’s bus and library services is unconvincing–getting rid of CMail does not similarly burden users. As far as the ads go, the University can pay Google Apps a very small fee to eliminate them. As far as potential improvements to CMail go, I have seen it suck for 7 years despite numerous promises from NSIT; I do not believe it will ever stop sucking
Lastly, while I would not oppose a poll of users, I think it’s pretty obvious that most CMail users use it only because NSIT told them to. Your reasoning here reminds me of the people who oppose closing high-rise project housing because some people inside are scared to leave. Obviously when an institution is entrenched in people’s lives and they have not been shown an alternative, they will be leery about change, no matter how much the institution sucks. This is not a sincere argument, however, for preserving blatantly shitty institutions.
I too fear Google’s monopoly, and I don’t like normalizing Google’s hegemony over information. But CMail sucks, and Gmail is awesome. While I agree that the University has a compelling interest in keeping the hands of third parties off our email, it should do this without compromising the users’ experience. For example, if a gmail-like frontend could be placed on CMail, I’d be all for it. But until such a thing NSIT implements such a thing, I think the University would benefit from using Gmail.
College Alum and Ex-Staffer, the University switched to Exchange around 2006-2007 for many of the staff members, though a lot of the lower-level staff still used NSIT’s IMAP/cMail(I can’t be sure anymore as I graduated in 2008). The reason behind the switch to Exchange/Outlook is actually quite simple: Zimmer wanted to get his @uchicago.edu email on his Blackberry. The reason that not all staff got switched over is that the per user fee for Exchange services was high enough so as not to be worth the cost. Anyway, that’s the story. I’m sure that you can verify it with anyone with knowledge of the matter.
I would also like to clarify here that cMail was never supposed to be the primary method of accessing @uchicago.edu email. You can use Outlook or Thunderbird (or whatever other email program you choose) to connect directly to the University’s IMAP servers. This service was excellent, had great uptime, and was extremely useful. At least, it was useful for those of us who used it. I’m all for getting rid of cMail, but it shouldn’t be confused with the University’s “email system”. It was simply the web interface.