So today we sent an email request to senior Harvard leadership to cease deactivating our alumni email accounts and to continue alumni email services. We also forwarded it to a large number of contacts that we had emailed last week, to update them on the progress of our efforts, all HAA College Appointed Directors, Harvard College Class Secretaries from 1960 to the present, Harvard Clubs from Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, the Middle East, Canada, the United States, and all Special Interest Groups. We also forwarded it to the Board of Overseers President, the Harvard University VP for Alumni Affairs, and the HAA First VP.
Please continue to share our petition with every Harvard alum you know who might care about this issue and ask them to sign our petition, via Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, text messages, and emails with your Harvard friends and networks. https://www.change.org/KeepEmailForwarding
Below is the text of the email we sent:
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Dear Harvard University President Bacow, Harvard Senior Fellow Pritzker, Harvard College Dean Khurana, Harvard Alumni Association President Mendenhall, and Harvard Alumni Association Executive Director Philip Lovejoy,
We, the undersigned, along with over 3,400 signatories to our petitions as of today, request that Harvard University and the Harvard Alumni Association cease deactivating post.harvard.edu and alumni.harvard.edu email addresses and continue to provide all alumni email access.
Many alumni have recently learned that Harvard plans to delete our post.harvard.edu and alumni.harvard.edu email addresses, with the first wave of addresses to disappear in December 2022. We understand the Harvard Alumni Association will be discussing this topic at its October 28-29 Board Meeting.
Summary:
Support –In just one week, we have garnered 3,438 signatures from alumni on two petitions in support of Harvard keeping alumni email addresses.
Impact – Harvard alums will lose countless email contacts and account logins that they will not, in some cases, be able to replace. Even for those accounts that can be updated, it will be an extremely time-consuming process.
Trust– Harvard promised its graduates that we would have “lifetime” alumni email addresses. We ask Harvard to keep its promise.
Equity – Harvard Business School alumni will be able to keep their alumni email accounts, why not the rest of the Harvard alumni?
Parity – All of the other Ivy League universities and all other top 35 U.S. News & World Report universities will continue to offer alumni email addresses to their graduates, why not Harvard?
Detailed Information:
Support – Last week we launched two online petitions at https://www.change.org/KeepEmailForwarding and https://change.org/postharvard. Since then, we have garnered 3,438 signatures from alumni requesting Harvard continue to offer email services. Our alumni care deeply and passionately about keeping their email addresses. We have attached the comments from amongst the thousands who have signed.
Impact - Tens of thousands of us – potentially hundreds of thousands – have been using these as our primary email addresses and account logins for 25+ years. The time and expense of changing our accounts on hundreds of sites and our email addresses with thousands of professional and personal contacts should not be underestimated. Inevitably, many will be missed, resulting in lost business, lost friends, and lost access to accounts. All because our “lifetime” accounts are being revoked. Many alumni have submitted comments about the effects this change will have on them. We have attached the comments from our petitions, including some heart-wrenching testimonials of how this change will severely affect alums’ professional and personal lives. Two of the more poignant ones:
“I have multiple sclerosis, which has meant that I've had to create an "alternative" academic career to accommodate my disability. I used my post address as a permanent contact address for everyone in the far-flung network I've built for myself as an independent scholar -- colleagues, editors, journalists. I am devastated by this decision to end Post forwarding. It's really, really hard to be an independent scholar. I had to work for every bit of the network I built. I feel like I am being erased.” Lara Freidenfelds, Harvard College ‘93
“I put this email address on my business card, on my web site, and in many other places it would take quite a while to update. Since I’m an independent author who works with different media companies, theatre companies, and publishers, this address gave me a consistent virtual home base. Since it was supposed to be “permanent” i thought it was more reliable than other e-addresses. If this system of forwarding emails vanishes, many people who will fall out of contact with each other and presumably with Harvard too. Lists of “lost alumni” will grow. But it’s not just alumni who will be lost. Trust will be lost.” Jenny Lyn Bader, Harvard College ‘90
Trust - When the alumni email forwarding program began, we were promised that we would be able to use our @post.harvard.edu email addresses for the rest of our lives. Many of us saw early dot com email providers come and go, and while it was difficult to trust any company for decades, we believed we could trust Harvard, so we adopted the forwarding service to minimize changes to our email addresses. In addition, a harvard.edu email address provided a connection with our alma mater that kept it in the forefront of our minds, surely germane when donation appeals arrived. We believe Harvard should continue to maintain this email forwarding service as promised or give us an alternative that allows us to maintain our Harvard addresses.
Equity – We have learned that Harvard Business School continues to offer email addresses to their alums, including email inbox service, with no plan to discontinue the service. We appreciate that Harvard has been taking a closer look at its own history around equity and inclusion recently. This decision to eliminate some alumni email addresses and not others leads us to ask why the university would choose to create another inequitable structure.
Parity - While the university has cited liability and technical concerns, Harvard could surely overcome those to keep the alumni email addresses active, as all seven of the other Ivy League universities have, as well as the top 35 universities on the U.S. News & World Report list. Almost every school other than Harvard continues to offer full lifetime email inboxes to alumni. Some universities have recently migrated to full email accounts due to issues with email forwarding. If all of these other universities are able to do this, we believe Harvard can and should be able to as well. Harvard stands alone in many ways, but this should not be one of them.
Link to list of the top 35 U.S. News & World Report universities with a link to each university's alumni email services Alumni Email Services Link
On behalf of the numerous alumni signers of our petition, we plead with Harvard University, Harvard College and the Harvard Alumni Association to hear our call for action and change course on this misguided, detrimental decision that will undermine the connections of thousands of alumni to Harvard University and to one another.
Sincerely,
Harvard College alumni Helen Fairman ’91, David Huang ’97, Chris Nicholson ’97, Jason Shanker ’95, Clay West ‘97, Sally Wolf ’97, and the 3,438 petition signers to date