When Cal does something better than Stanford, there’s something wrong — not just for rivalry’s sake, but also because our bankrupt neighbors should rarely outperform us, given that we are endowed with greater financial resources and blessed with a nimbler administrative structure. So students should be incredulous to hear that Cal offers each of its 7,000 undergraduates email forwarding for life, while Stanford cannot promise the same. Preserving our digital identities is a core concern. By working collaboratively with the administration, students can forge an acceptable solution to all parties, but we must approach such a negotiation firm in our resolve that permanent loss of our email addresses is unacceptable.

Last year, former ASSU President David Gobaud appeared to have secured lifelong email forwarding, only to have higher administration officials reverse the decision the following summer, citing miscommunication. Student outrage was fleeting, and the issue disappeared. The problem is that only seniors faced with the impending prospect of severed University affiliation realize how important continuity of email address is. But it will take a concerted effort by every single student, especially elected ASSU officials, to sign petitions, write letters and negotiate with the President and Provost to preserve that continuity.

Take a moment to consider the consequences of losing your @stanford.edu address. Think about the prospective employers, former Professors, fellow students, community contacts, friends and family who might for any reason try to email you, only to have their messages bounce. Many of them will ignore your mass entreaty to modify their address books, and you won’t even know to contact others. Over four years, Stanford students build formidable networks of contacts around their email addresses; a deactivated address could stymie the next start-up collaboration or preclude a lasting friendship.

The disadvantages to the University of providing email forwarding pale in comparison to the massive benefits of retaining email continuity. The administration feared that alumni might masquerade as Stanford students. Setting aside the obvious point that all kinds of administrators and University employees get @stanford.edu addresses as well, students proposed a simple fix in a letter last year to the administration: set up an automatic reflector that alerts the sender to the recipient’s new alumni address. The administration subsequently balked at setting up a massive “spam relay.” In reality, such a solution sounds much more intimidating than it actually is — it is technically trivial to set up such an automated system that does nothing more than forward emails and send a reflector message.

University officials also appeared uncomfortable about providing a service in perpetuity, because it limits Stanford’s flexibility in providing future email services. Perhaps one day email will become obsolete and the continued guarantee of forwarding email will become onerous to the University. Most students are probably fine with the idea of the University canceling its commitment to email forwarding in that unlikely contingency. It is likely that most students would even be amenable to paying some nominal fee to defray the expenditures of email forwarding. (Senior Gift Committee, take note: donations would pour in if you convinced the administration to change its mind.) In fact, most students would probably celebrate a University statement that it would try its best to forward emails but reserved the right to cancel the service if it became too cumbersome.

Ultimately, most students would bend over backwards to work with the administration on a solution that does not devalue Stanford’s brand, consume technical resources, or bind the University into an uncomfortable commitment in perpetuity. The problem is that University officials haven’t taken the issue seriously — there has been no data collection on what students’ views and needs are. It’s about time we students took that into our own hands.

Now is the time for our tech-savvy ASSU Executive to espouse this issue and collaborate with the administration on building a solution. Student concerns like this one can quickly gain traction through petitions and letters, and then languish over the summer when everyone goes home. Therefore, this Board finds it incumbent upon our elected representatives to survey the student body and bring the relevant data to the attention of the Faculty Senate, the Board of Trustees and the highest University officials. In three short weeks, Stanford will celebrate Commencement with much pomp and circumstance. Forcing new graduates to cut ties with their professional and personal networks only makes this transition more bitter than sweet.