When you are the head of a student organization at school, you sometimes have to work with administrators to come up with good policies for the students.

What would you do if a new administer was always trying to implement policies that made her job easier at the expense of the student’s learning experience?

That is what happened to the student in this story, so just before graduation when an already settled policy was sent to her with updates, she made sure the proper stakeholders knew about the trouble the administrator was trying to cause, and got it reversed.

“Recall that email” – law school compliance

The trite wisdom is that in law school “1L year they scare you to death, 2L year they work you to death, and 3L year they bore you to death.”

Every student has a different experience.

Not so for me. 1L year I was scared as hell and 2L year I worked my butt off, but I also worked my butt off 3L year, thanks to my role as President of a large student club.

I ran for the the position of President with lofty goals in mind. I was friends with the Assistant Dean who was the adviser to the club, having worked with her for the last year when I was on the board.

The best plans often fall through.

All my big plans were dashed to pieces when she stepped down and the law school incarnation of Dolores Umbridge replaced her.

The outgoing Assistant Dean would come to student competitions to watch, would interact and fight on behalf of students. She was a queen.

Oh boy, this would be awful.

Her replacement, Ms. Umbridge, was a busy mid-level administrator with bigger fish to fry. It became clear her mission was 1. to reduce her workload 2. to reduce the budget and 3. to do those things regardless of how it impacted student learning opportunities.

In the fall, she unilaterally imposed a rule that students would only be permitted to travel once per year with school permission. We challenged and held a meeting, and voiced our discontent. She kept the policy.

She only changed when she was forced.

We retaliated by getting stakeholder attorneys outside the law school together to write a letter to the Dean of the School. Then she rolled back the policy. This sort of thing happened all year – she would reduce student opportunities – we would push back.

Suffice to say we were both fed up with each other by the end of the year, but we had also reached compromises on most of the friction-points.

She’s hoping the students are just focused on the finish line.

Finally, April rolled around, and with graduation around the corner, I think she was under the impression that she could sneak one more policy change through the gates and I would not care.

She shot me an email a few weeks before graduation “formalizing” the policy changes we had fought over all year. Except she rolled back the travel policy the administration had agreed to.

Don’t let her get away with it.

This was completely her style – no conversation – no discussion – just a top-down unilateral change that would make our lives difficult. I was vexed extra because we had already hashed this policy out earlier in the year and reached a compromise.

I don’t know if she thought I wouldn’t notice or would be too tired to fight that close to graduation, but I figured I had nothing to lose.

She really doesn’t want to do her job, it seems.

It should be emphasized that the policy she had created hurt students by restricting them from travelling, benefited her by allowing her to do less work, but otherwise did not benefit the law school in any way.

The school was not bearing the cost of travel. They policy adopted merely denied students permission to travel.

Hopefully they can get this figured out fast.

I hit the forward button and typed an email to the group of attorneys who had written the letter earlier in the year, explaining that the administration had just adopted the policy they had the Dean about earlier. In the email I included the policy she had written. I hit send.

I then typed her an email explaining that I had just sent the policy along to the attorneys, and left it like that. Less than a minute later, I receive an email from her.

This isn’t exactly how emails are recalled.

“That is an internal policy and I did not give you permission to release it outside the school. Please recall the email.”

So, I hopped onto the email chain with the attorneys and typed out a recall message. “Dear Attorney Stakeholders, please note that Ms. Umbridge has requested this email be recalled. Please do not read the attached policy, as she has indicated it is an internal document and does not want anyone outside the administration to have access to it or know its contents. Please consider my previous email recalled.” Send.

I’m sure she won’t be happy with this.

Then back to Dolores: “I’ve sent an email recalling my previous email and let the coaches know that they are not to open the policy, since it is an internal document.”

Umbridge back to me: “There is a feature in our emails that allow you to recall a message after having sent so it does not reach the intended recipient. Please recall the messages immediately.”

It’s a pretty simple feature. But it has to be done

Now, maybe I’m technologically obtuse, but it took me a few minutes to google this feature. By the time I did, I learned that an email can only be recalled in a short amount of time after it is sent (~ 30 seconds to a minute).

To Umbridge: “I see now what you meant. I just googled how to do that, and it seems the time frame necessary has passed and the written recall I sent the coaches will have to suffice.”

The cat’s out of the bag now.

In the meantime, one of the attorney stakeholders responded: “Thank you for your email. Unfortunately, by the time I received your recall I had read the policy. Thank you for the update.”

All was quiet on the Western Front for few days, when I received another email indicating she would like to meet with me the following week. I gladly acquiesced.

How unprofessional.

That meeting was the first time I have been screamed at by an adult professional in a white collar environment. The meeting lasted an hour. She asked me if I saw anything wrong with sending the internal policy to our external attorney stakeholders.

I told her I did not. She then tried for a good five minutes to trap me in an honor code violation by getting me to admit I knew I was in the wrong. I stuck to my guns.

Yes, clearly the attorneys are leverage.

If she had nothing to hide, then she should not have minded the policy getting out. She accused me of using the stakeholder attorneys as leverage.

I agreed that that is exactly what I was doing, but that she was the source of her own pain since she was the one creating the policies.

It is a good reputation to have.

She then berated me for being unprofessional and asked if this was the reputation I wanted in the community. I told her I absolutely wanted to have the reputation of not rolling over when faced with a bully, fighting with passion for causes I believe in, and being a creative strategic advocate for my cause.

After an hour, I got up and thanked her for her time and we parted ways.

Oh, if only she did record it.

To give you an idea of how bad the meeting was and how degraded our relationship was, she emailed me a few days later asking if I had recorded the conversation. Unfortunately, I had not.

The stakeholder attorneys ended up requesting a meeting with the Dean. He agreed, and they all went out and had a beer. Umbridge went along.

So, it was all a waste of time.

The policy was rolled back. The attorney stakeholders are satisfied. The administration is satisfied, but the Dean certainly was not happy to have to deal with this petty bureaucratic nonsense.

I have a job lined up after graduation. My boss knows I’m a fighter, and it turns out that’s a desirable trait in litigation. Turns out I’ll be alright after all. And it’s good to know about that recall feature. That might come in handy some day.

Some people are willing to spend hours working on something just to try to avoid work.

Read on to see what the people in the comments have to say about this story.

You can never be sure that the email was recalled.

It wouldn’t surprise me.

Here is a commenter who has a great way to handle these situations.

This would have been too funny.

She will make a great attorney.

Don’t let her get away with hurting the student’s learning experience.

If you liked this post, you might want to read this story about a teacher who taught the school’s administration a lesson after they made a sick kid take a final exam.