In the earliest days of the Internet, there were no Internet Service Providers other than colleges, universities, and government entities. I remember thinking at that time (around 1990) that as long as I remained a professor,at home I would have a fairly reliable dial-up connection to the Internet through Occidental College and my oxy.edu e-mail address.
Nowadays, of course, most professors pay for broadband Internet connections at home, and many have an e-mail account in addition to their “work” account. I’ve moved further in that direction. I own a domain (traiger.net) and host much of my courseware on it. I have a Microsoft Exchange e-mail address that is hosted off-site, and I have all of my college e-mail forwarded to that address. Anyone can write to me at my college address, but the actual correspondence takes place off-site.
Why do this? Let’s begin with courseware. Several years ago I discovered moodle, the now very popular open-source content management system. At the time, Occidental College used Blackboard, which I detested, and didn’t use. Oxy didn’t run moodle, and so I simply installed it on traiger.net. It was not hard, and it gave me this great tool and total control over it. Today Oxy is just catching up. Next year it will switch to moodle, which is great. Will I move to allowing Oxy to host my moodle content? Probably not. I would have to give up a lot of control.
I also run this blog on traiger.net, as you can easily tell. It seems obvious that one would not want to blog on one’s institutional server unless one restricted blogging to college business. Again, setting up a blog like this one is not hard, and the flexibility and customizability are well worth the slight effort it takes to manage the software.
Taking e-mail off-campus may ultimately be the most important move. In California, a federal appeals court just ruled that employers may not read employees e-mail without a court order if that e-mail is stored on a non-corporate server. Take a look at the e-mail policy for Occidental College, and you’ll see that Oxy makes it clear that they own your Oxy e-mail, and they retain the right to read it. By forwarding all my mail off-site, I retain privacy rights for my e-mail correspondence that I wouldn’t otherwise have. I also do not use College resources for non-college business. Anyone who is using their institutional e-mail account for non-institutional business is giving up the privacy of their correspondence, and also is making inappropriate use of an institutional resource.