Julia Garrison
News Editor
On the morning of Oct. 29, President Anne McCall sent out an email update to faculty and staff on how ZWD lists will be utilized moving forward. In her email, McCall said that ZWD lists will now be limited to “official, administrative communications,” including but not limited to major administrative offices, APEX, student affairs and facilities. Faculty and staff no longer have the option to utilize these lists as a form of communication.
ZWD lists –– which have been a mainstay at Wooster for over a decade –– provide staff, faculty and student groups the opportunity to send mass communications to the campus community as a whole. The campus is broken into three listserv groups: ZWD Students, ZWD Faculty and ZWD Staff. Correspondences were not regularly monitored and included a policy that was “self-enforcing,” which has been contested since January.
McCall said the change has been in the works for months during a meeting with the Voice on Nov. 4 in her office in Galpin Hall. Conflicts between members of the faculty and the administration began over a Jan. 29 email sent by associate professor of French and francophone studies Laura Burch.
“The conversation started [earlier than January] because of the concerns that were being voiced about things that had already come out,” said McCall. “I think the context [of the email deletion] is unfortunate but I think the end result is actually one that I would have loved, which I never had –– which is: faculty and staff, do your thing, let people join, let people leave.”
Last semester, McCall made the decision to remove Burch’s email, which was sent via the ZWD system and promoted a gathering for a cease-fire in Gaza. The specific policy violated by Burch’s correspondence was never shared.
McCall’s campus-wide email from Feb. 14, 2024 stated that some individuals might feel “offended or feel excluded” by the messaging in emails –– especially since they cannot “opt-out” of them. In an interview with the Voice at the end of February, McCall explained that “several” people had expressed offense to Burch’s email directly to administrators.
Since then, the administration has been working with Information Technology (IT) on how to streamline the ZWD list process –– which is why students might have noticed a temporary difference in how the emails were sent and formatted.
“We enabled a message verification workflow on September 26th, but this alternative quickly proved unmanageable, so we removed it on Oct 4th,” said Vince DiScipio, senior director of IT, in an email to the Voice. “We returned to a message workflow similar to the original, while we consider the need to cleanly separate the channel for administrative communications from other communications of broad campus interest that could be shared through a non-mandatory channel like a Microsoft Outlook group distribution.”
McCall discussed the message verification experiment as well, noting that the process was difficult, time-consuming and generally unhelpful to their goals. Responding to the administrative experimentation of ZWD listservs, Burch presented a resolution to attendees of the Nov. 4 faculty meeting in an Oct. 24 email.
The resolution states that the experiments done by IT and the administration were in violation of the current listserv policy –– which states that ZWD lists are “self-enforcing.” The resolution also claims that new moderation of the lists have “produced racist and misogynist outcomes, harming two Black women faculty members.”
The resolution calls for the immediate “cessation of all administrative and technological efforts to moderate faculty/staff use of ‘ZWD’ lists.” McCall was also present at the meeting and discussed the change with faculty.
In her email to faculty and staff, McCall offered eight alternatives to ZWD lists –– all but two require a submission and regulation process. The outliers included “[v]erbal announcements at departmental and other group meetings” and Microsoft Outlook email groups.“We are a rights-based society and everybody is clamoring about their own rights,” McCall said. “One of the things that I’m required to do in my position is to think really hard about countervailing rights.”
