Date: Mon, 7 Mar 2005 22:43:17 -0600
Subject: Re: Support Graduate Students, Vote Josh for Trustee
To:
Dear Josh,
Below is your delightful, unsolicited message encouraging me to vote for you in the upcoming election for Student Trustee. It appears that you registered your site, voteforjosh.org, with Go Daddy Software (www.godaddy.com) just a few days ago in order to explain your platform and provide some information about yourself. At first glance, it also appears as if you sent these unsolicited emails from your site. As I'm sure you know, it is against University policy to use University property and resources for political activities:
http://www.fs.uiuc.edu/cam/CAM/viii/viii-1.3.html
Therefore, I am hopeful that you did not use any University resources to acquire my email address, or the addresses of any of the potentially thousands of other students on campus that you may have emailed. As I said, it appears that you did not
use your University email address to mail me, although from the header information on the email you sent, I cannot tell conclusively that you did not just simply change the 'reply-to' field in your email and send from a University account. However, I have every reason to believe that you followed all applicable University policies.
Anyway, it was with no small amount of shock that I read your message asking me for my vote. Now that I have sufficiently recovered, I feel prepared to enumerate the reasons why I will intentionally vote for whoever opposes you.
First and foremost, you have unapologetically spammed me and probably hundreds of other graduate students. I wonder if you had even a second's worth of hesitation before hitting the 'send' button on all of those messages. Discounting the possible infringements of University policy that I mentioned above (and assuming you acted in complete accordance with University policy), do you not have ethical issues with such a practice? This medium is not your personal advertising space. I also wonder if that same sense of entitlement you feel which gives you a 'right' to better health care benefits is also what makes you think you can inconvenience others with
your email messages.
Secondly, you actually boast of your previous endorsement by the GEO! If you had taken a little more time in whatever process you used to gather hundreds (maybe thousands?) of graduate student email addresses, you would have been wise to remove such information from messages for non-liberal arts graduate students. It's actually not shocking to most of us that there are often insufficient funds available to support research on Celtic poetry or 18th century French literature. This is clearly a debate for another place, but the time you just wasted in reading my arguments (that you clearly would disagree with) is no less than the time I wasted reading yours, and you brought yours to my inbox with no provocation.
Josh, even if I am the only person to take the time to mail you back, you cannot believe that I am the only one who has similar thoughts about the message you sent. It is clearly the case that your email is ethically the same as the spam we all get for Viagra or better deals on a mortgage. I have something you want (a vote) and you were just going to ask me for it whether I was interested in hearing about it or not. I ask you to reconsider your campaigning tactics for the future, and I'm sorry to say that you will definitely not receive my vote this week.
---- Original message ----
>Date: Mon, 7 Mar 2005 07:36 -0600
>From: "Josh Rohrscheib"
>Subject: Support Graduate Students, Vote Josh for Trustee
>
>My name is Josh Rohrscheib and I am the only graduate student
running for student trustee (www.voteforjosh.org). I am an
experienced student leader and would appreciate your vote this
Tuesday and Wednesday. In order to recruit and retain the
highest quality graduate students, UIUC must support graduate
students in the following ways:
>
>*** Expanded Health Care Coverage. Health care is a basic
right and health care coverage should be extended to graduate
students to include better coverage of children, contraception
coverage, domestic partner benefits, and dental benefits for
all graduate students. I will make this a top priority on the
Board of Trustees.
>
>*** Support the GEO. I am a proud member of the GEO and was
endorsed by them in my campaign last year. I am currently
seeking their endorsement this year and will work to expand
union rights and university recognition of the GEO while on
the Board of Trustees.
>
>I encourage you to take a look at my website for more
information on my positions, www.voteforjosh.org, and to cast
a vote for me for Student Trustee online this Tuesday and
Wednesday:
>
>http://www2.uiuc.edu/election/vote
>
>Sincerely,
>
>Josh Rohrscheib
>Candidate for Student Trustee
>www.voteforjosh.org
>
6 comments:
On point as always, The Dude.
"Celtic poetry"? I got some celtic poetry the other day watching Paul Pierce, and that was free.
I'm gonna sign Josh up for every email newsletter I can find.
Bravo, The Dude, Bravo. Your wit and humor are a brutal weapon, my friend.
Beautiful Teej. Just beautiful.
Do you remember when those GEO fools physically tried to stop us from going to class (senior year)?...on the quad anyway.
Puh-lease.
Hey Hey, Ho Ho, that GEO has got to go!
~Teresa
Oh my goodness…I couldn’t help myself and I went to his website. Aside from being amused that this Josh character was president of the campus ACLU, I found this quote hilarious that was listed under his issues heading:
“Campus Safety - The number of sexual and physics assaults on campus is appalling”
Physics assaults?? What are you engineers doing to the GEO libs!?!
Teresa
"Dink-dink-dink-dink.." Is that the sound of liberal self-esteem bouncing on the linoleum?
Nicely skewered.
And I second oneway's celtic poetry comment. (You know where Paul Pierce went to school, right? Just checking.)
I know this post is pretty old, but I thought I might as well respond.
While I disagree with you about the GEO, and I stand by my position, you're right that my anti-spam mail was more than a little bit ironic. While I'll take full responsibility for my campaign, that email was sent on behalf by a friend of mine who was helping run my campaign. I gave him an earful when I found out he spammed the email with an anti-spam message. It obviously looked silly, and you're right to point that out.
Anon - regarding the physical assualts, those are a persistant problem on campus, particularly over the summer. At the time of this campaign, there were several assaults on campus, even though you might not have heard about them. At the time there were a series of assaults on asian women, most of which involved theft of some kind. In the last month there were a series of assaults prompting a mass email by the Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs. These tend to rise over the summer when there aren't as many people around, and often they are committed by nonstudents who live in Champaign year round.
One way - unsubscribing from all those newsletters was a real pain in the ass. I'm not sure if it was you or some other likeminded person. Still, it was funny.
Regarding the GEO - they should never try to keep people out of class. While I've been critical of the GEO leaders in the past, they do play in important role. We need to offer competitive pay/ healthcare benefits if we want to be able to compete for the top talent. The best grad students attract the best professors. Even if you are conservatives, you can buy into that basic philosophy.
Even if you guys didnt vote for me, I'm glad you bothered voting. I served for a year as the Pres of the Student Senate, even if you didn't agree with me on everything, I genuinely did my best for students here. Best of luck to all of you in the future. If you'd like to attack me on things that I was more directly responsible for, feel free to check out my blog: www.rohrscheib.blogspot.com
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