By Bruna Lobato
Around 12:30 a.m. on October 26th, a bogus email was sent out to the entire Green Mountain College community from someone pretending to be President Paul Fonteyn. The email read that the school is to create new policies that will drastically change our community by 2017. The letter stated that President Fonteyn decided to turn GMC into a school exclusively populated with rich white people, that does not really care about the global environmental crisis. It proceeded to say that white professors and students would eliminate students of color, that we would not provide accessibility to students with disabilities, or tolerate those who are not heterosexual, and that the school would “continue to support perpetrators of domestic and sexual violence.” At 3:20 a.m., administration sent a campus-wide email informing us that the message was not sent by the College President, but by a fraud.
This is not the first time a fake email was sent to the GMC community by someone pretending to be a staff member, in response to recent incidents on campus. On these couple occasions in the past, they did not make the school administration change any policy or decision.
Many students and professors considered the satire caustic and offensive, while others considered it humorous and truthful. To read a whole discussion on people’s reactions to it, read the article that is going to be available on Monday, October 31, at themountaineer.org.
