I came of academic age with the advent of email. I remember during my graduate school years being amazed that by adding a complicated suffix ending in “edu” my email would somehow make it from Ann Arbor to Pasadena in seconds. During those years, my emails became very long and often were an extension of my conversations with others. The Michigan Terminal System (MTS) had a command-line email interface which was quite convoluted and the modems we used for dial up (2400 baud) often resulted in a long email spilling out across the screen like little yellow “pac-men“.
Later, during my years at NIH, I learned that email was a bit more complicated than my previous notion. It wasn’t simply an “extension of conversation”. It was also indexable and potentially of interest to record keepers. I remember laughing with my fellow postdocs at an order that came down from on high to print out and save all emails. We thought the idea was ridiculous.
Of course emails are now viewed by courts and the law in the same way that paper memos used to be. They are certainly much more than an extension of conversation. They are in fact discoverable. Nowadays, we all, at some level know, that there is no way to ever really delete an email. They are all there, in some data warehouse, waiting for some lawyer to e-discover what we wrote about whatever, at some point in the past.
This is of particularly relevance to academia. Particularly because most current faculty members “grew up” with the “extension of conversation” notion that I did. When combined with a strong belief in academic freedom, there is perhaps a tendency to put in an email something you might not be entirely comfortable seeing on the cover of say, the NY Post.
When this small indiscretion pertains to sensitive issues like faculty searches, evaluations, student information and the like, then modern academic email can bite in a really big way. An email that ends up as evidence in a law suit can have consequences that reach beyond your own career and affect your institution.
And that’s where discretion comes in. I have one simple rule for my email: never put anything down in writing, that I wouldn’t mind reading in the newspaper tomorrow. Everything else flows from that. The obvious dangers of forwarding, blind carbon copies, and going into specifics when pronouns work just as well all come to mind.
Jim
Discoverers and Discoveries 