Maggie Smet |
Until March 19, an Information Services filter blocked emails containing the terms “Redefine Purple Pride” and “RPP” between UP email addresses.
Redefine Purple Pride , the student movement that urged the inclusion of sexual orientation and gender identity in the Nondiscrimination Policy, used an online petition, social media and mass emails to faculty and staff to rally support last spring.
According to Jim Ravelli, vice president of University Operations, those emails violated the University’s mass email policy, which states that emails sent to the entire University or sub-groups must be official University-sanctioned communication.
When contacted by The Beacon last week, Chief Information Officer Curt Pederson had not heard of the problem, but later said the block was taken down by that afternoon. Ravelli said it was not lifted sooner because of an oversight.
“It wasn’t an issue of permanently banning that. It was an issue that we had not remembered to take it off,” Ravelli said.
Ravelli said the University has had problems with realtors and other vendors sending mass emails to the UP server email addresses.
“Regardless of the the type of business or the type of thing they are sending, if they’re sending large amounts of mail that is unsolicited, we tend to block those,” Ravelli said. “In fact that it is our policy to block that.”
Ravelli said that it was the mode of communication, not the subject of the emails, that warranted the filter.
“Regardless of the subject line, we’re trying to stop these mass mailings,” said Michelle Sunderland, director of Technical Services.
According to junior Maraya Sullivan, who was involved in the Redefine group, the first mass email was sent to faculty on Feb. 26, 2013, about the Redefine Purple Pride petition that was posted online Feb. 24., 2013. It also linked to videos about the movement, media coverage and faculty quotes about the movement.
2013 alumna Janie Oliphant, another Redefine activist, remembers after that email, they had problems with the UP email system for RPP announcements. They started using a Gmail account instead of their personal UP email account.
“We started using a separate email because professors were saying they weren’t getting the messages,” Oliphant said.
However, on April 8, 2013, an email about Redefine Purple Pride did go through again to another large portion of the campus community. The email gave an outline of the movement’s actions, including its petition, protest and a link to a video, which read a letter the group sent to President Fr. Bill Beauchamp.
Oliphant said she and others in the group never heard from administration that they were on a block list, but heard about it from other students. After members of the group became aware of the block, the group focused their attention on social media such as Facebook to get their word out, rather than through UP email.
For Sullivan, it was her friend’s reaction that led her to talk to John Julius Muwulya and Quin Chadwick at Meet the Candidates night on March 5.
“I showed (my friend), just for jokes, and he didn’t believe me, so I did it to prove it to him it was true,” Sullivan said. “And his reaction kind of startled me of how much he cared and how much it bothered him.”
ASUP President Quin Chadwick investigated the block, and now that it’s down, is considering what steps ASUP want to take in reaction.
“The next step is we’re going have to discuss in our Executive Board meeting and see if there’s plans that we’d like to take,” Chadwick said. “I would just love for the University to let us know when it does things like this, so that students are aware why it’s happening.”
Sullivan doesn’t understand why the block was put in place.
“RPP was never meant to be an attack,” Sullivan said. “It was meant to spark dialogue and a different way of thinking to push UP to be a more diverse and inclusive community.”
“It felt like Big Brother, like censorship,” Oliphant said.
On Sept. 27, 2013, the Board of Regents added sexual orientation to the Nondiscrimination Policy.
Ravelli said regardless of the content of messages, the school upholds its mass email policy.
“I don’t know who was actually doing it, (someone) was spamming the campus with mail,” Ravelli said. “As we do with anyone who sends large amounts of unsolicited mail through the campus, we have a policy to block that.”
