Students in the College of Arts and Science (CAS) at Miami University have been bombarded recently with a flurry of emails regarding decidedly non-academic topics. Most of these topics are housing related, asking if people are interested in taking a sublease.
This has raised confusion among students and faculty.
CAS Director of Communications Nancy Arthur gave some clarification to the students. The CAS "listserv" emails people are getting aren't actually generated from the listserv. They are being sent from the Blackboard organization sites "College of Arts and Science," which any student has the ability to send announcements and emails from, according to Arthur.
The major problem is that there are approximately 1,200 sites for the College of Arts and Science on Blackboard for each major, minor and subgroup. A lot of these sites were never used, and IT Services has made some of these unused sites unavailable, but not all of them, according to Senior Director of Strategic Communications and Planning for IT Services at Miami Cathy McVey.
"According to the Responsible Use of Computing Resources Policy, using the Miami email system for mass unsolicited messages (sometimes referred to as spam) is not allowed," McVey said. "The students who used the CAS Blackboard email lists were using those lists for personal gain in the cases and that is strictly prohibited."
Brooke Katchman, a junior in the College of Arts and Science said she was upset when she got five emails in one day about housing from the college's account.
"I was annoyed because I take the email system from the College of Arts and Science seriously and now probably won't open those emails," Katchman said.
There has been a miscommunication between IT Services and the CAS when it comes to taking sites down.
"IT Services had polled all owners of Blackboard organization sites this summer, in preparation for the move from the Blackboard version of MyMiami to the new MyMiami," McVey said. "CAS communicated that they did not want to duplicate those sites in the new portal, and were told that the organizations would be deleted by the end of this semester."
All of the blackboard sites are being handled this way, and the reason the spam occurred is because the blackboard problem wasn't addressed sooner.
It is the college's plan to remove the unused sites. Because of student inquiries regarding the emails, the College of Arts and Science is planning to resolve this issue by November, according to Arthur.
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