Anyone who gets tired of responding to endless emails could probably identify.

Carl Straumsheim of Inside Higher Ed reported.

Don’t Email Me

A Salem College faculty member last semester took an uncompromising approach to curbing syllabus and inbox bloat: Why not ban most student emails?

“For years, student emails have been an assault on professors, sometimes with inappropriate informality, sometimes just simply not understanding that professors should not have to respond immediately,” Spring-Serenity Duvall, assistant professor of communications at Salem College, wrote in a blog post last week. “In a fit of self-preservation, I decided: no more. This is where I make my stand!”

Duvall’s frustration is shared by many in academe — or anyone with an email account — from faculty members beset by questions they have answered both in class and in writing to students inundated by university email blasts. This spring, when Duvall taught at the University of South Carolina at Aiken, she adopted a new email policy to cut down on emails from students telling her they would be late, or would miss class, or would have leave early, or any of the countless others that could be handled face-to-face.

Instead of wasting class time on walking her students through an increasingly complicated flowchart diagram of when they could and could not email her, Duvall stopped the problem at its core: No emails — unless you’re scheduling an in-person meeting.

“I suffer from syllabus creep as bad as the next teacher — where the syllabus just gets longer and longer and you try to account for everything — and I was laboring over the section on email policy, because that section of my syllabi for all my classes had just ballooned.” Duvall said in an interview. “What I realized, in my frustration, is what I was really trying to tell them is ‘don’t email me.’ ”