Staff Editorial | Cell number requests troubling

In a letter sent to all Vassar students on Wednesday, Nov. 8, the College requested that students provide the College with their cell phone numbers by returning an enclosed form to the Office of the Registrar. The letter stated, “The purpose of this memo is to ask for your assistance in providing us with essential contact information for you. The widespread use of cell phones has almost completely replaced use of campus provided phones in residence hall rooms. In order to meet the communication needs of the College in reaching you and responding effectively to the changing ways in which we communicate, we write to ask you to provide us with a phone number by which we will be able to reach you.”

While the College might have a conceivable need students’ personal information, we nonetheless find this letter unsettling. Whatever the good intentions of the College were, the letter did not convey why giving out this information was necessary. The letter merely stated, “The cell phone number you provide will be stored securely with the other contact information that the College has on file for you.”

Many students are uncomfortable with the idea of giving the College access to cell phone numbers that they would normally distribute only to their friends and family members, especially since the letter did not explicitly state where this information would go and what would be done with it.

To clarify this ambiguity, Dean of the College Judy “JJ” Jackson said in an interview that cell phone numbers would only be used for “any number of emergency-type situations [that] arise. We need to be able to get in touch with students quickly, and we thought that cell phones would be the best way to immediately do this.” Jackson clarified that cell phone numbers would only go to the Office of the Registrar. By not mentioning this in the letter, some students were concerned that their cell phone numbers would be given to the Office of Development for fundraising purposes after graduating.

We cannot, however, conceive of an emergency situation when the College would need to contact students via cell phone, and the collection of this information raises issues of privacy as well. E-mail is the way the campus communicates now (even for timely or emergent matters), and cell phones are a much more personal form of communication. If the College must collect personal information from students, any correspondence requesting it should clearly indicate its intended use, and students should be assured that their personal data will be secure and protected from potential abuses.

The Staff Editorial represents at least a two-thirds majority of the Editorial Board.