Future of SB Info Threatened in Latest Challenge to Student Autonomy
CORRECTIONS AND UPDATES, OCTOBER 11
Last week’s issue of the Quest included an article entitled “Future of SB Info Threatened in Latest Challenge to Student Autonomy,” which detailed recent communications between student senate and administration about moderation of SB Info, Reed’s student body newsletter.
In the article, the Quest quoted a senior CUS staff member as saying that the Mass Email Policy does not apply to SB Info. Following a communication from Director of Public Affairs Sheena McFarland on Tuesday October 8 requesting a correction to the article, the Quest reached out to Computing Planning and Policy Committee Chair Alex Montgomery, who told the Quest that the Mass Email Policy applies to SB Info. The Quest regrets the error.
Karnell McConnell-Black, Vice President for Student Life, also responded to the Quest’s original request for comment on the morning of Thursday, October 3, saying, "This summer, we learned that SB Info was not in compliance with college policies and guidelines. We had previously believed that SB Info operated on an external network, independent of the college. Once this was clarified, we communicated to the Student Senate that if they wished to continue using the college network for SB Info, the list would need to be moderated, like all mass email list-serves [sic]. Prior to 2022, I moderated SB Info, which involved approving messages through the college’s distribution system. In doing so, I ensured that no messages were released that violated any laws or college policies."
The Quest will strive to continue reporting on SB Info as the situation develops.
ORIGINAL STORY BELOW
This is a rapidly developing story. The information in this article is current as of press time, Wednesday, October 2. Email quest@reed.edu with any pertinent information.
On the morning of Thursday, September 26, Student Body President Andee Gude ‘26 sent out an email informing the student body that SB Info, the student body government’s long-standing biweekly newsletter, would be ceasing email circulation effective immediately due to what Vice President of Student Life Karnell McConnell-Black and Dean of Students Chris Toutain alleged were violations of the Reed Mass Email Policy. The Mass Email Policy states that all “mass emails” sent to Reed students must be reviewed by the Vice President for Student Life or Dean of Students office before ultimately being released by Public Affairs. To preserve student editorial control over SB Info and to ensure continued timely publication, Gude subsequently decided to move SB Info to a Google Doc hosted on a non-Reed account and viewable by anyone on the internet, which the student body government will update on Wednesdays and Fridays in lieu of email.
Despite McConnell-Black and Toutain’s alleged claims about policy violations, Associate Director of Computer User Services Ben Salzberg ‘94 told the Quest that the Mass Email Policy does not apply to SB Info. Salzberg explained that the policy only applies to a specific set of email lists maintained and used by the college’s administration and staff, which is available for reference online. While enrolled@reed.edu, which goes out to the entire student body plus several administrative staff, is on the list of mass email lists, any lists potentially derived from its membership are not. Additionally, the sole authority for enforcing any policy set by Computer User Services is the Computing Planning and Policy Committee, which has its first meeting of the year on October 3, and of which McConnell-Black and Toutain are not members. This means, Salzberg said, McConnell-Black and Toutain have “no authority” to enforce any CUS policies.
Salzberg said that rather than a matter of policy compliance, he viewed the demand to moderate SB Info as part of an ongoing, yearslong effort by the Office of Student Life to “grab any piece of student autonomy they can.” According to him, one of admin’s targets is the Student Body President’s ability to communicate with students.
SB Info, in its most recent iteration, was created by former Student Body President Safi Zenger ‘24 during the March 2022 Paul Currie protests. In a March 31, 2022 announcement email titled “sb info is.. unmoderated?” Zenger announced that “some senators and I made [the new listserv] today as a response to the long-held administrative moderation of our poor little student newsletter.” Zenger and her colleagues reported that they went through the student directory in IRIS and added each student’s email to the new email list one at a time in a painstaking process that lasted hours.
When Salzberg found out about Zenger’s new SB Info listserv, he believed students should be “up in arms about loss of autonomy” over administrative moderation of SB Info, but told Zenger that scraping student emails was a potential violation of the Computer User Agreement and offered to have CUS provide the Student Body Government with a modified list based on, but not identical to, the enrolled@reed.edu list in order to distribute an uncensored version of the listserv. In particular, Salzberg explained that enrolled@reed.edu includes certain staff members, while the list CUS provides to the Student Body Government, studentbody-newsletter@groups.reed.edu, does not. He said CUS has continued providing this list at the beginning of every semester since, including this semester, and considers doing so to be consistent with its policies, including the Mass Email Policy. Salzberg also emphasized that CUS has internal documentation describing similar technical support for SB Info going back roughly twenty years.
Student Body Vice President Jefferson Ratliff ‘25 told the Quest that McConnell-Black became aware of SB Info’s supposed policy violation during a review of Student Life policies and communications over the summer, and reached out to Senate on September 19 or 20 to request an urgent meeting. On Monday, September 23, Ratliff and Gude met with McConnell-Black and Toutain, who told them that SB Info could only continue email circulation with review and approval by professional staff in the Office of Student Life, due to its alleged misalignment with the Mass Email Policy. Prior to hearing from McConnell-Black and Toutain, Ratliff said “I don't know if those [policies] were ever outlined directly to Senate.”
The summer policy review preceded Reed’s Fall 2024 Policies, Regulations, and Financial Review for its accreditor, the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities, although the Mass Email Policy itself does not have any identifiable connection to NWCCU’s accreditation criteria. Ratliff could not comment on what specifically precipitated McConnell-Black’s policy review, citing legal sensitivity.
Ratliff further highlighted the importance of having SB Info as a student-run and moderated forum, first citing the differences in administration schedules versus the general student body. Referencing issues with administrative moderation during Zenger’s presidency, Ratliff explained, “Sometimes it would take two or three days for [SB Info] to get approved… approving those emails is low-priority to any staff members, and they operate on a 9-5 schedule and students do not.” Aidan Mokalla ‘25, a former member of Senate, says that he understands moderation of the pre-March 2022 SB Info listserv “took a long time,” leading to some emails not being sent out, and that “some emails were pocket-vetoed with little or no communication.”
Further, in citing his September 29 meeting with McConnell-Black and Toutain, Ratliff explained, “we tried reminding both [Karnell] and Chris that autonomy is something that, obviously, us as student government are sensitive about, but also the student body is very sensitive about.”
Ratliff noted that McConnell-Black and Toutain were not solely concerned with enforcing the Mass Email Policy. “They were concerned that without moderation, there could be content in SB Info that could be in violation of the college's policies,” said Ratliff, adding that McConnell-Black and Toutain have concerns that “pertain much more to the college's own liability than necessarily the most efficient way to get out student engagement, which I think is disappointing, because they are the department of Student Life.”
Another potential issue with the end of SB Info’s email circulation centers around the way Reed Student Body Government elections work. SB Info has traditionally been used to send out voting information and links for elections. Ratliff said, “hopefully that information can be posted around campus as well as updated within the Google Doc.” In the event that the Student Body Government cannot restore an unmoderated SB Info list, Ratliff said, they are “trying to include a student body section within OSE-related emails sent by professional staff members. So basically having to set up a liaisonship with them and trying to task them institutionally with distributing that information if it can't be distributed through SB Info directly.”
As of right now, the fate of the MCs, Reed’s very own Missed Connections, remains uncertain. “Part of that is how we distribute them. The other part of it is that administration…told us very directly that it's likely that we could not have MCs anymore under college policy and they view the information that's been distributed in them to be a violation of college policy,” Ratliff explained. “So that is something we're working on that's a little bit more on the sort of tentative legal side of it as well, which is why it's been really difficult to navigate what we can or cannot say about that currently. But that is sort of why there's also been a delay in them after we had hired the editors.” Ratliff said that he and Gude outlined recent reforms to the MCs in their meetings with McConnell-Black and Toutain, but they remained “unclear [about] what exact reforms they would want to be done to the MCs to be able to keep them,” and “it's been very difficult to get direct answers or communication from them, I think partially because they're unsure themselves, but also not necessarily most willing to give [information].”
One of SB Info’s other main uses has traditionally been allowing student researchers, especially but not exclusively thesising seniors, to recruit fellow undergraduates as research participants. "The IRB does not collect statistics on how many students report using SB Info for recruiting participants on campus. However, anecdotally, our impression is that the majority of thesis students do report posting to SB Info when Reed students form part of the sample population for the study,” said IRB administrative coordinator Kayla Johnston. “While in general this is outside our purview, we see how the proposed change could have a real negative impact on recruitment for student-driven research projects on humans,” said IRB chair Sameer ud Dowla Khan. "The IRB is specifically charged with ensuring that Reed research on humans is conducted ethically, but of course we also want to see those research projects succeed. Taking away this student-run message sharing practice that has long been used for thesis research recruitment would prevent these well-designed projects from reaching our most frequently seen subject pool– fellow students."
This is not the first time that admin has put SB Info under the spotlight. When late former Student Body President Aziz Ouedraogo ‘21 sent out her first SB Info message on March 10, 2021, she included a joke about charging non-Black students for SB Info submissions that McConnell-Black and then-Dean of Institutional Diversity Mary James allegedly took offense to. This prompted them to announce to the student body two days later that McConnell-Black would moderate SB Info from there on out, an arrangement that persisted until March 2022. When Zenger created the unmoderated SB Info list, McConnell-Black told the Quest in an April 15 2022 article, “We informed the SB President and Vice President of ways that they could move away from being moderated. One of those ways was that they would have to create it on their own, which is what they opted to do.”
At press time, McConnell-Black and Toutain had not yet responded to a request for comment for this story.