It was great when people who were directly connected to the primary academic processes – the reason why we exist – had something to say about these primary processes, but that is not the case anymore. While my alma mater, the University of Bologna, still has an academic senate to take certain decisions, the UT is managed precisely like an enterprise. Some people do not realise that, even though we definitely need proper management, academia is not an enterprise. Our mission is not to make money, but to contribute to research and graduate qualified engineers and scientists.
I used to be on an ICT board advising the LISA service department and spent a lot of hours discussing various issues in the past. One of the topics discussed was the ‘grace period’ for receiving emails on the utwente.nl domain for ex-employees. People who are actually involved in the mission of our organisation know that when they publish a paper, they include their email address so they can be reached if people are interested in their research. And like many of my colleagues, once the UT kicks me out because I am too old, that does not mean I will stop doing research or stop caring about the work of my life. I want to remain reachable and help younger researchers who may have questions about my research results until my brain function and my heart beats.
And yet, somebody – certainly not a scientist at the ‘UT level’ – decided that after one month, emails will stop working, because that is what all enterprises do. Besides being a decision which clearly is not in the interest of how we function, no defendable reasons are given on this decision and no debate has taken place on such issues. This is not really a very transparent action, but transparency does not seem an overall strength of our organisation. On this specific problem, not only is it about being reachable after your contract ends. It’s also problematic on a more pragmatical level: if a contract of a PhD student ends, it does not always mean that their thesis is done. Or their papers could still be under review – with a corresponding UT email address. For PhD students, it’s said: ‘PhD candidates can extend a one-time grace period of one year, upon the supervisor’s request. The supervisor can submit a request to the HR assistant.…Emeritus professors can request an extension of the grace period themselves via the HR system. Other exceptions from the grace period are not allowed.’
As mentioned before, we are not an enterprise. When this discussion took place when I was involved at the ICT board I was part of, an extra argument was that the UT cannot provide facilities for people who no longer work for the UT and that, for security reasons, ex-employees should not be connected to the UT anymore. I understand such arguments, but the solution is not difficult: when employees retire, they provide LISA with an alternative email for forwarding. This way, they remain reachable but can no longer send emails on behalf of the UT or access the UT network. Problem solved, employees and PhD’s happy.
When this was discussed with LISA, the former management director of EEMCS asked how long such a change would take to implement. A senior person at LISA responded: ‘A YEAR.’ When I heard that setting up an email forward would take a year, I decided to step down from the ICT board and invest my time in more useful things. Anyone with even basic knowledge in ICT, operating systems, networking, or Linux would probably start laughing at the statement that a simple email forward, even in a large network – nothing else – would take a year to implement, unless we lost complete control of our ICT infrastructure thanks to the monopoly of Microsoft.
And yet, ‘somebody at the UT level’ has decided that after one month, students or scientists will no longer receive their emails. It would be quite strange if, after selling my house and moving elsewhere, the new owner – despite legally owning the house – burned all my letters after a month or a year. Unlike a house, an email address is a purely personal reference that, under any decent privacy policy, should never be reassigned to anybody else.
If this decision taken ‘at the UT level’ is implemented, many of us will likely start using unprofessional Gmail addresses or email addresses from other universities that remain active permanently, ensuring we remain reachable even after leaving UT. Moreover, the additional burden on secretaries, who will have to beg ‘the powerful people at UT level’ for email extensions just to allow PhD students to complete their theses, is something completely unforeseen by those who made this decision and an unnecessary overhead. Unfortunately, I know very well that our secretaries will have to waste significant time handling such requests.
A simple email forward is easy to implement, does not take a year, costs merely a few megabytes in a lookup table, does not compromise security in any conceivable way, ensures that former PhD students and employees do not ever lose important communications, respects decency and privacy, and aligns with the needs of researchers and the goals of our organisation.
It would be great if such decisions were made in the interest of primary academic processes rather than creating unnecessary overhead. But who am I? I am just a professor who loves doing research and loves teaching. But does that still matter?
