It is easy for anyone at Wabash to email everyone. Students. Freshmen; Sophomores; Juniors; Seniors. Everyone. By addressing an email in any of these three ways, anyone at Wabash can easily send the dreaded ‘all-campus email’ to all students. It is very rare for undergraduates at a higher education institution to have this ability. While there is incredible value in our ability to contact one another so effortlessly, the abuse of this awesome freedom fills our inboxes with emails that we do not want to see.
On average, Wabash students received 10 all campus emails per day in September. The daily flood typically began around 8:00 A.M., relying on students’ tendency to wake up and check their phones. Students received the most emails around noon. This lunch rush capitalized on the one hour during the school day when all students are out of class and free to check their emails. After noon, the number of emails decreased throughout the day. In the month of September, however, the only hours of the day when students received no all campus emails were between 2AM and 5AM. Students received all campus emails every day in September. Unsurprisingly, few emails were sent out on Saturdays and Sundays. (But students could expect about three each of those days.)
These numbers do not include any emails sent to a single person, class, grade level, sport or club. This dataset is composed only of the 304 emails sent to every student on campus. The issue with receiving so many emails targeted at everyone is that students might miss an email targeted individually to them.
Professors often communicate instructions for their classes via email. Students communicate important, often time-sensitive information via email. It becomes a problem when these emails are hidden among notices for callout meetings or lunch talks. Students, faculty, and staff are all responsible for blasting inboxes day and night with a myriad of messages.
If the purpose of an email is to inform as many students as possible about something, then an all campus email admittedly serves its job well. However, many of these emails are not simply intended to inform students. The goal of most all campus emails is to bring students to events. These emails should not be sent to every single student’s inbox when very few students actually engage with them.
Wabash’s current emailing standard is clearly problematic. There are better ways to distribute the same information. In fact, a better system already exists. From the Student Life page on the Wabash College website, Engage is “a comprehensive platform where you can find information about clubs, events, and more at Wabash College.” This is true. Clubs and committees are already required to upload information about their events to Engage. Much of the same information that crowds student inboxes already exists on Engage. If students truly want to clear their inboxes, it is important to shift the standard to Engage as the location for event information.
Another possibility could be to consolidate many of the similar event emails into a single bulletin. If event coordinators are hellbent on their information appearing in inboxes, the student body could coordinate a single weekly email that details upcoming events. This would not only reduce the number of emails students receive, but it would also direct students’ attention to a more regular location where they could receive the same information.
A second option would be to move information for all of campus out of the email and into the physical world. There are currently public bulletin boards in Detchon, Baxter and Lilly Library. Use them. Hopefully the bulletin boards that currently exist can be utilized more in the future. Admittedly there is literally a big hole in the middle of campus, but with the addition of the new community center comes more opportunities to take communication out of the digital realm and into the physical world.
As a final–perhaps radical–solution may be to simply talk to each other. When you email everybody it feels like you are emailing nobody. Taking the time to invite a peer in person is an easy change that promotes brotherhood and greatly enhances the chance that they will listen.