Email Correspondence Policy

Policies

There is an ever-increasing reliance on electronic forms of communication among faculty, staff and students at Rhode Island School of Design. In particular, e-mail has become an efficient, fast, and cost-effective method of communication that has many advantages over printed communication.

Because of the importance of this type of communication, email is considered one of the official forms of communication at the University. This policy outlines the student’s responsibilities in having such an account, and establishes expectations for communication between faculty and students for educational purposes and between the University and students for university business purposes.

RISD’s Use of Students Lists
Requests to send mass e-mail of a non-specific nature will generally not be supported on RISD students@list.risd. Routine non-urgent messages for all students will be sent via Notices of the Day or as approved by the Associate Provost for Student Affairs. General messages to the student population will be posted on Word Out or All-Nighter.

All uses of students.list for official communication should be consistent with the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA).

Communication with students by University offices
Offices such as Registrar, Public Safety, Residence Life, and Student Life can send selected official communications to students via the students.list. Such e-mail might include individually-addressed messages as well as “group mail’ messages such as registration appointments, crime reports, water outages, etc. These communications are for the purposes of conducting official university business. The University has the right to expect that those communications will be read in a timely fashion.

Departmental Communication with students
There are times when departments need to communicate directly with students for the purpose of conducting official university business. These communications are usually sent through academic affairs or student affairs.

Other Group Mailing Lists / Listservs: (From Computing Website) (https://intranet.risd.edu/Departments/oitpages.aspx?oitID=4310)

It is acknowledged that the membership of a particular group belongs to the offices that maintain the list for that group. As such, these list owners have the right to communicate with their constituents as they deem best, and may send out bulk email to those groups without further authorization. In addition, these offices can delegate to other offices or individuals the authority to communicate with these groups. In general, it is expected that this delegation will parallel the existing delegation models of paper-based mailings.