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Cornell Prepares for Impact of Potential Federal Government Shutdown
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In an email to the Cornell community, the University shed light on preparedness plans in the case of a federal government shutdown.
The Cornell Daily Sun (https://cornellsun.com/tag/email/)
In an email to the Cornell community, the University shed light on preparedness plans in the case of a federal government shutdown.
One would expect email — like landlines or flip phones — to have become outdated with time, ultimately giving way to modern forms of communication like social media or texting. Yet, email has sneakily blended in amongst modern social media, even though its core principle remains largely unchanged from its inception in the 20th century.
Cornell will begin the spring semester online and extend the move-in period with an expanded testing scheme, as it expects large numbers of cases during the first few weeks of the term, the University announced Thursday.
In an email to students on Friday, President Martha E. Pollack said that commencement will not be canceled, although it will be postponed from its typical date on Memorial Day weekend.
In an email to students on Wednesday night, vice president for student and campus life Ryan Lombardi outlined plans for sweeping reforms to student mental health services. Some students, however, questioned whether Lombardi’s promises would result in meaningful improvements to Cornell’s frayed mental health support system.
“Although we must be circumspect in communications with students, I can be brutally blunt with you: I believe it will be a disaster in the long run if unionization occurs — an existential risk to Cornell’s graduate program,” the email read.
So as many of you already know through reading the Sun or word of mouth, Cornell WebMail has now been skinned with Gmail to form Cmail. Curious, I decided to take it for a spin and try it out.
Once I had set up the account, the resulting page looked a lot like my iGoogle home page, only with a giant banner on the top of the page reminding me that I’m looking at a Cornell-run page instead of my own.
Certainly this is a general improvement over the fiasco that is Cornell’s own server (remember when course enroll started and the server went down several times?), but it’s not perfect, and I’ll tell you why: