A gang of masked men burst into Russell E. Bryant’s apartment late one night, guns drawn, demanding his and his roommates’ wallets and phones. They missed the fourth-year Spanish student’s laptop; it sat hidden in his basement. Thanks to the novel magic of “Find My iPhone,” the burglars found themselves in handcuffs within 15 minutes of taking off.
That incident unfolded nearly 15 years ago; Bryant says it set him on the path to his current career as a real-estate lawyer. But a far more recent “theft” has him on a legal journey having little to do with wills or deeds — and everything to do with trust.
In December, Temple informed Bryant and thousands of other alumni of a plan to close their institutional email accounts by May, routine maintenance often undertaken by organizations seeking to cut costs and reduce security risks.
Unlike those groups, however, the university once promised students “lifetime access” to their inboxes. Graduates needed only occasionally update their passwords and personal info, the story went, and they could keep using their “temple.edu” destinations ad infinitum. Fed blessed assurances of eternal e-messaging, Bryant and others say they kept TUMail in their lives.
“It’s not just a matter of creating a new email address and using it,” Bryant said while seated in Charles Library’s cafe for the first time ever.
He’d need to figure out what, exactly, he’d linked to that account through the years — subscriptions, professional contacts, cloud storage, payment methods — and find virtual refuge for it elsewhere in a process that could literally take days.
So, Bryant sued Temple for breach of contract, asking a Pennsylvania judge to hold the university to its initial agreement.
Bryant, a first-generation college grad, also said the email offered him inroads with Temple-linked clients and colleagues. He’s not alone among them in what he described as shock and dismay at the school’s decision to cut them off.
Neither is Temple. Colleges and universities across the country once let alumni keep their .edu emails open indefinitely, according to Stanley Horowitz, who spent three decades in Temple’s information technology department. But those inboxes hung as but twinkling constellations in a vast firmament of cloud computing services, like Microsoft365 and Google Workspace.
Years passed; universities’ computers grew intertwined with — inextricable from — the cloud. And once tech firms had their hooks in the ivory tower, schools had little recourse against unchecked price spikes, Horowitz said.
If a tech corporation ever tries so aggressively to squeeze a single customer, one can — in the immortal words of Dwayne from “A Different World” — drop them like a bad habit. But the task of dropping a service for several hundred thousand students, employees and alumni could prove far more daunting than just ponying up or cutting costs piecemeal.
“They know where their money comes from,” Horowitz — who says he’s no longer privy to Temple’s decision-making on email — said of cloud computing companies. “It’s not from selling IT alone. It’s from selling increasing prices.”
Still, Horowitz believes the school should strike a semi-honorable compromise with alumni, giving them the option to keep their inboxes open in exchange for an annual donation large enough to offset the cost of doing so.
A fellow Fox School of Business grad hired Gregory Fanarisios not long after he completed his studies in 2014. Even to this day, Fanarisios remains unsure he would have his job without the school address. He even has it embossed on his business cards — a way to tell scores of Philadelphians they have something in common without uttering a word or lifting a logo.
“It definitely contributed to my success,” Fanarisios said.
The university’s decision, he said, stands to jeopardize his personal and professional lives alike.
“Any sort of services — you know, my Netflix, Spotify, my gym membership, my student loans, my banking — all of that is tied to the Temple email,” said Fanarisios, who now works as a retirement planner for Merrill Lynch. “I can’t even fathom how many hours it’s going to take me to switch all that over.”
Fanarisios says he had no idea Temple broke its word to the students of yore before reading a Reddit post decrying the account cull from earlier this month. Nor did he know that in 2022 the university quietly altered the agreement governing its accounts.
Alumni looking to update their TUMail passwords after a post-pandemic switch from Google’s cloud to Microsoft’s found themselves asked to relinquish their right to lifetime access in a check-box-please agreement — one Fanarisios didn’t read in its entirety at the time. He now thinks Temple deliberately tried to lay the groundwork to break its promise to alumni undetected.
Temple has yet to respond to The Temple News’ requests for comment on the changes to its agreement regarding alumni emails.
Joseph Habersham, a television reporter in Iowa’s Quad Cities region, graduated from Temple’s Klein College of Media and Communications nearly a year ago. Habersham doesn’t regularly check his temple.edu inbox anymore, so he wasn’t sure how long his account had left to live. But it’s still linked to some of his accounts, like Apple Music, and many of his old contacts from college.
“Initially I was like, ‘Oh, you know, it’s just a Temple email,’” Habersham said. “Who cares? But losing it kind of sucks. It’s one of those things you don’t think about not having until you don’t have it.”
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