On April 18, 2024 Brandeis alumni received emails from Brandeis Alumni Relations, notifying recipients that the University will be eliminating former students’ official Brandeis emails, effective Jan. 7, 2025.  This news was paired with the announcement of the University's launch of My Brandeis Gateway, an online platform designed to help alumni to stay connected to the Brandeis community. In response to the University’s decision, alumni have been circulating a petition to keep their official Brandeis emails. 

According to the Brandeis Alumni Community Support website, “the university did not make this decision lightly,” and had considered alternative steps. The University cites that the decision to end lifetime emails for alumni was to better align with “industry best practices and improve email security.” According to the University, Over 75% or 33,000 of existing Alumni accounts are “not regularly used” and  “represent the primary source of recent security breaches.” The inactive emails, according to the University, are “especially vulnerable to cyber threats and increase the risk to the integrity and privacy of all Brandeis systems and data.” 

The elimination of official Brandeis email would impact all services that use Brandeis credentials including Google Suite — email, calendar, contacts, and drive — as well as Box. Any social media or other accounts that utilize the emails will also be disabled.Alumni have been  advised to connect such accounts to their personal emails. 

Following the April 18 email, alumni received an email on July 10 Chief Information Officer, Jim La Creta and Vice President of Alumni Relations, Patricia Fisher. Their email detailed the steps alumni needed to address regarding their  Gmail, Google Drive and Box.com data. During the“grace period,” recipients of the email were recommended to establish an alternative non-Brandeis personal email account, notify contacts of the new personal email, update all counts with brandeis.edu email to non-randeis emails and to download any needed files before the accounts are deactivated.They were also advised to refer to support website that the university has created to aid alumni during the transition. 

The University’s decision to discontinue  all alumni emails has been met with push-back. On Oct. 11, Jeremy Koob '17, MS '17 sent a petition on behalf of co-signed alumni and future alumni, to University President Emaritus, Ronald D. Liebowitz, Provost Carol Fierke and Meredith Ainbinder. 

The petition advocates for alumni to be able to maintain their Brandeis email addresses for six core reasons: Brandeis pride, utility, Brandeis memories, status quo, to avoid blindsiding alumni and faithfulness to one of the core tenets of the university: “Truth, even unto its innermost parts.” 

“We use our Brandeis email because we are proud to be Brandeis alumni” the petition states, adding that it's worth the investment to keep such emails active, as it is “spreading the Brandeis brand.” Alumni feel they were “blinded-sided” by the decision as they were not given a say and expressed that neither the Alumni Association nor Student Union were consulted. As of press time, The Justice can not confirm the claim.

The petition asserts that the Brandeis email address has proven to be beneficial with many alumni using their “Brandeis Google Workspace continually for decades,” mostly to access academic and research tools which allows alumni to “pursue new projects with the help of Brandeis institutions.”

On the Alumni Community Support website, the University says the decision to discontinue alumni emails aligns with other colleges who “have decided to end lifetime email within a few months of graduation,” including Boston College, Middlebury College and the University of Massachusetts. However, the petition questions this comparison from the University, saying “it is not accurate to say that they ‘ended life-time email,’” since “the three institutions cited by Brandeis either never offered long-term email access or had limited forwarding services that were discontinued.” . Instead the petitioners pointed to over a dozen universities and colleges that, according to them, allow students to keep their email address including Babson College, Cornell University, Columbia University, Boston College and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In response to Koob, the Interim Senior Vice President of Institutional Advancement, Nile Sorensen, said the “decision is final and will not be revisited.” Sorensen claims that when the University initially began using Google Suite for education, “the associated costs of including alumni accounts were reasonable.” However Sorensen says the cost is  “no longer the case” and that the Information Technology Services team “warns us that the exponentially increased sophistication of hackers and other bad actors over the past decade makes Brandeis vulnerable to attack.” 

In a Sept. 17 Letter to the Editor to The Justice, an organizer of the petition stated that “We hope that the university leadership will reconsider this decision, which will be a blow to Brandeis's reputation and relationship with its alumni.”

Another point of grievance for alumni is that many former students have used their Brandeis email addresses to create various accounts and throughout their professional lives. Alum Gary Wasserman ’78 remarked in a Facebook post on Nov. 7 that “I think there is a kind of insurmountable stupidity at work… I may never forgive the school for making so many hours of frustrating wasted time chasing down the endless places I’ve used that email.”

Alumni further expressed in the Letter to the Editor that “the university explicitly promised that alumni email addresses would be available for life. The university is now breaking that promise.” The erasure of alumni student accounts has left many former students disappointed. 

As of Nov. 19, 2024 the petition has received over 300 signatures. The alumni are demanding that Brandeis reinstate their Google Suites access for life. In addition to alumni, faculty have expressed concern. During the Nov. 8 faculty meeting, Prof. William Flesch (ENG) utilized the question and answer session with new Interim President Aurthur Levine ’70 to bring the concern up to new leadership. He explained that there is the potential for increased security, and also options regarding potential forwarding systems. Levine said that he would consider these solutions moving forward.