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Printer-Friendly ModeDirectory should be accessible off campus
September 10, 2007 —
Don't look now - Because you won't be able to see anything. Recently, the online directory listing the faculty and staff at SVSU has changed so that faculty e-mail addresses can only be viewed from on campus; if you're trying to contact a professor from off-campus, you'll have to send him or her an e-mail using a Web form. This is a well-intentioned, but misguided idea.
Why?
Well, because you can get e-mail addresses and phone extensions on the site anyway - just head over to the departmental page that you're looking for and click on the "staff" link. You won't have to deal with a Web form that thinks you're a spambot.
If anything, the security measure is an all right idea - it might cut down on the amount of junk mail SVSU e-mail addresses receive. But so would a better spam filter, and smarter Web-browsing practices on the part of everyone. The implementation of this feature was simply not very well thought-out; to us, the benefit of using your own e-mail client to send messages and attachments to staff members by simply clicking "lookup" is simply priceless.
The directory lookup is probably one of, if not the most often-used tool on SVSU's Web site. The Vanguard uses it religiously, and it's a real pain when someone is trying to send a staff member an attachment and can't find their e-mail address in the lookup (the Web form doesn't support attachments).
Not to mention that any e-mail sent this way does not get saved in your sent folder, so you have no record of it. And let's not forget that the form does not support mass e-mailing multiple parties at once, making the simple task of arranging a meeting somewhat annoying.
These complaints are all relatively minor, and more frustrating than debilitating. But one might ask: if faculty and staff are receiving unwanted e-mails from off campus, why not just prompt users looking for contact info to login using their SVSU name and password, just like it is for the student directory? It makes more sense than having some silly form getting in the way of doing work.
E-mail has been and is still one of the primary methods of communicating with colleagues and coworkers. That little form between you and the e-mail address you need is like picking up the phone and calling your grandma, only to have someone in Dubai pick up the call in between and ask you to enter in a sequence of random numbers and letters on order to talk to her. Not the end of the world, but more than a bit frustrating. There's got to be another way to do this.
Unfortunately, if a spammer ever wanted to collect some SVSU e-mails to try and sell Viagra, all he'd have to do is head over to the departmental pages and jot down some names under the staff listing, without logging in at all. Perhaps that's what the real problem here is: a simple, silly case of institutional ignorance. Departments and cabinets in organizations as big as colleges are often run like little fiefdoms, ignorant of one another when they're not warring, and usually run in the pursuit of self-interest.
That kind of characterization may seem crude in a discussion concerning access to staff e-mails. But little problems can be indicative of bigger ones. And where there's a bureaucracy, there's a chain of command - so let's hope there aren't any big problems resting at the top.