We hope all of you have heard that Harvard has decided to not deactivate our alumni email forwarding addresses! An email was sent to alumni today by HAA and the FAQ has been updated: https://alumni.harvard.edu/help/email-forwarding/forwarding-faq
However, we believe there is still work to be done. We need permanent, full alumni inbox email accounts to be made available to Harvard alumni, as they are at almost all of the other top 35 US universities; and we need alumni email accounts to be offered to all alumni of Harvard University, past, present, and future, whether their email is active or inactive.
We need all of you to continue to push to share our petition with all your Harvard connections and ask them to sign it to ensure our alumni email addresses are permanent: https://www.change.org/KeepEmailForwarding
Below is the response we received from Harvard President Bacow, and our response, pushing for a complete and permanent solution. We also reached out to the HAA Directors we have emails for, who will be discussing this topic during the HAA Directors meeting agenda this Friday and Saturday, and implore them to advocate on our behalf to completely resolve alumni email services for all alumni:
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President Bacow and Harvard senior leadership,
We want to thank you for hearing and listening to the call to continue alumni email from all the Harvard alumni who have spoken both from self-interest and from concern for the University. Though we have heard that many alums felt wounded by this plan we know we can come together and restore trust. We appreciate all of you recognizing our importance as alumni in the life of our University and our desire to remain connected to one another and to our alma mater.
As we move forward, and as Harvard reviews solutions, we collectively request two things:
- We ask that permanent, full alumni inbox email accounts be made available to Harvard alumni, as they are at almost all of the other top 35 US universities. Again, attached is a list of links to each of these institutions’ alumni email information for reference as Harvard searches for solutions. Alumni Email Services Link
- We ask that alumni email accounts be offered to all alumni of Harvard University, past, present, and future, whether their email is active or inactive, to include the Harvard graduates of 2021, 2022 and beyond.
A number of alumni from the high tech, legal, educational and other relevant sectors have expressed interest in collaborating with HAA to find a solution to alumni email services – please let us know if we may provide you with a list of volunteers.
We look forward to hearing the results of discussions about alumni email at the HAA Directors meetings this week and hope we can come to a more complete resolution to this problem quickly.
With gratitude,
Harvard College alumni Helen Fairman ’91, David Huang ’97, Chris Nicholson ’97, Jason Shanker ’95, Clay West ‘97, Sally Wolf ’97, and the 4,192 petition signers to date
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From: Bacow, Lawrence S.
Sent: Thursday, October 27, 2022 11:57 AM
Subject: RE: HARVARD LEADERS: PLEASE HELP SAVE ALUMNI EMAIL!
David,
Thanks for writing. We have heard you (and others) and have also listened to you. Our alumni who have been using this service should receive a message today informing them about changes which I suspect they will like. Stay tuned if you have not already received this message.
All the best,
Larry