On Friday afternoon the Alliance for the CSU sent out this action alert via email. Links have been modified to lead to their ultimate destination, rather than going through the marketing company's site:
ALLIANCE FOR THE CSU
"ACTION ALERT"
- Your Email Needed to Win CSU Funding
- State Leaders Now Making Final Budget Decisions
Click Here to Email Your Elected Leaders Now
July 11, 2008
Final decisions on state funding for the California State University in the 2008/09 budget year are being made.
As a supporter of the CSU, please send an email today calling on state leaders to provide the funding the CSU needs to educate California's students.
Right now, the "Big 5" are meeting to decide what will be in the budget that goes to a vote in the state Assembly and Senate.
The Big 5 are Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Senate Pro Tem Don Perata, Assembly Speaker Karen Bass, Assembly Republican leader Mike Villines and Senate Republican leader Dave Cogdill.
While the budget plan they are considering does contain the money restored to the CSU when the governor revised his budget plan in May (after some 25,000 faxes and calls from the Alliance for the CSU), the plan still assumes a student fee hike and leaves out more than $288 million in necessary funds - the minimum promised in the governor's Compact for Higher Education.
The Alliance for the CSU continues to fight for the inclusion of all $288 million in promised funding in the final budget. Please act today.
ACTION: Send an email...
...to the "Big 5" to let them know that the proposed budget cuts to the CSU are unacceptable.
Go to http://www.allianceforthecsu.org/send_message.php, where you can quickly and easily send an automated email to all five of these key elected leaders.
THE MESSAGE
While we appreciate the restoration of $97.6 million to the CSU budget, we urge you to fully fund public higher education by restoring the CSU budget to a level that will remove the need for the latest student fee increase and will fund access to the university with enough classes for all eligible students.
Proposed cuts would have a destructive long-term impact on the state's economy.
California badly needs more college-educated people in the workforce. The CSU grants half of all four-year college degrees in California. Cuts will make the shortage of educated workers even worse.
Higher education is part of the solution to our state's troubled economy. These proposed cuts to the CSU will undermine California's economic infrastructure and future revenue.
Privacy Warning
Expect the personal information you provide on the Alliance cards and web form to be provided to others without your knowledge or consent. The Alliance had said, when asked, that they might release people's personal information – without notice or permission – to the CSU administration, but stated they would not release it to anyone else, including unions, outside vendors, or marketers. In fact the Alliance has released information to at least one union and one outside marketing firm. The Alliance does not allow you to opt out of having your personal information released. As of this morning, the Alliance still does not publish a privacy policy on their web site, or otherwise disclose how they will use your information or to whom they will release it.
If your chapter collects cards, or urges people to sign up on the Alliance web site, please warn people that their personal information may be released to others without notice. Employees should not provide any information they don't want given away to unknown third parties, including home or personal cell phone numbers, or personal email addresses. We suggest providing only your work contact information: campus mailing address, campus phone, and campus email address. An alternative would be for a group to select someone to act as a primary contact, who provides his or her personal information to the Alliance and forwards the action emails to the rest of the group.
The (small, low-contrast) privacy policy
link in the footer of Friday's email goes to the outside marketing company's privacy policy, not that of the Alliance for the CSU.
We will post Alliance email messages here as we receive them.
Links
- Send a pre-written message to the
Big 5
(Alliance for the CSU) - Alliance for the CSU
- CSU Budget Central (Chancellor's Office)
1 comment:
Fun fact: If you're subscribed to the Alliance alerts using a calcsea.org Exchange e-mail account, you probably didn't receive it.
E-mail to calcsea.org is routed to a contractor (AppRiver) who performs spam/virus filtering before being delivered to CSEA's Exchange server. There were several keywords in the Alliance's e-mail message that triggered a spam quarantine by the contractor.
CSEA account holders who are missing that e-mail need to go to my.appriver.com (if necessary, register your calcsea.org account), login with your xxxx@calcsea.org address, click Spam on the menu bar, and look in your spam quarantine to find the Alliance message.
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