GSC Email List Policies

Letters

Dear graduate students,

Following two letters recently published on the Tech, we write to you in our role as Directors of the Graduate Student Council to address concerns about the moderation of the gradstudents@caltech.edu mailing list, which we manage.


We intend for the mailing list to be a useful tool for anyone wishing to disseminate information to graduate students. We have no desire to censor any single person or idea. At the same time, for the communication to be effective, a minimal degree of moderation is required to prevent spam and promote positive conversation. We want to explicitly outline our current moderation policy:



* Only messages sent from @caltech.edu addresses can bypass the filter and get sent to us for approval;
* Messages that contain personal attacks, bullying, harassment, trolling, violent/inflammatory language will be rejected;
* Reply-all messages will generally be allowed through, unless in rare instances that lead to personal back-and-forth, where we follow up with the sender to see if the conversation can be continued in private. 

For any message that is manually rejected, the sender is notified and they are free to send a new email. Note that if the message was not sent from a @caltech.edu address, it would not get to the moderators for approval, hence it will not go through and the sender would not be notified of the rejection. If your message was not sent out and you were not notified, please reach out to the moderators, either the Strategic Communications Director or the Co-Chairs.


We appreciate the chance for transparency and clarity regarding the GSC’s  policies for the graduate student mailing list and we hope this makes it clear that we do not wish to censor anyone.


If you wish to have the GSC Steering Committee consider any policy amendments or new content moderation rules, please feel free to reach out to us at gscbod@caltech.edu. We welcome the opportunity to further involve you in our governance decisions. As always you are also welcome to join the GSC Board of Directors if you object to any organizational directions, administrative decisions, or seek to be a voice for students! 


The GSC Board of Directors