Dr. Adele Sanders, who has also contributed these past years as a consultant to Economic Development, announced today that she is ceasing her Red Sea Newsletter. At 6PM, on Mondays, it was sent to some 900 community members. She began this voluntary effort independently to draw together useful information to help build KAUST’s community. We salute her and thank her for her contributions. The Irish are known for poetic farewells, as this excerpt conveys:
May the road rise up to meet you.
May the wind be always at your back,
May the sun shine warm upon your face…
We wish Dr. Sanders well, with gratitude, on her future journey, and encourage all who want a delivered news product to subscribe to The Lens, dynamically updated throughout the day. Please feel free to join us in thanking Dr. Sanders below in the comments.
16 comments
So you shut her down and then ask us to use your venue to thank her?
It seems more appropriate to use this opportunity to ask: why did you do it?
Dear Professor,
We did not shut her down. Quite the contrary. Our review was designed to allow for continued and supported publication.
We actually read with surprise that the Editor of the RSN had decided to cease publication although we respect her decision. We would take modest exception to her characterization of the pre-publication review we performed as arbitrary censorship however. What has been explained to anyone who has enquired is the following.
No one disputes the enormous effort, pride and energy Dr. Sanders put into the RSN and the role it has played.
That said, KAUST exists and operates in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and as such, despite her remarkable privileges and generous environment, is a Saudi institution which respects and observes national norms, culture and practice. At KAUST, the communications department exists in part to ensure that broadly disseminated messaging does not inadvertently violate or otherwise offend, even in an unintended fashion, elements of that culture in which we live as guests. We do so primarily to protect individuals and the institution from the adverse consequences which could arise were that to happen, innocently or otherwise. It is mistaken to characterize our efforts in such a harsh way, as they were meant, in fact, to allow the continued safe publication of the RSN. That the Editor’s conscience and integrity were felt to be compromised is indeed regrettable. Creating KAUST, her culture and community, can certainly be challenging and can require deep reserves of understanding and tolerance, and compromise at times, for all of us. Diversity is an amazing opportunity but not a piece of cake either. We assume good faith on the part of everyone who makes such sacrifices to contribute to her and are grateful when we receive the same benefit of the doubt.
Thank you for the explanation. I had not completely understood what happened until now.
Such a great shame it had to end this way. The RSN was a much loved publication that will be sadly missed by the Community. We as a family living at KAUST, thank Dr Sanders for all her hard work and effort in providing us with such an useful and informative publication which I doubt can ever be replicated in the same way.
I am saddened by this news – I loved getting the Red Sea Newsletter as it gave me community information in a very readable format – I didn’t have to hunt through long lists on other websites to find news of sporting activities or the cinema guide. For example I always used the RSN for cinema listings as the formal website were cumbersome to use. Although I like the Lens I also find it slightly cumbersome as I have to trawl through past entries for pertinent information. The RSN was also a perfect way to get my lost and found pet notices widely circulated – I now don’t have a good distribution list for this any more.
Perhaps you can prevail upon Dr. Sanders to provide you with her mailing list for your lost pet network and work with Facilities & Community to add a “lost pet” page. As far as cumbersome-osity (LOL) goes, you needn’t trawl through the site, just use either the “search” function or the tags or categories.
although I never directly contributed to RSN, i always took it for granted that it will arrive end of the week, in my in-box; i would read it, just like one would the local newspaper (on a friday), and catch up on events, notices and various local activities, which I would never have known took place otherwise.
i am truly sorry that this well put-together, focussed and to me, an unbiased newsletter, which only reflected the pulse of the community is no longer published. thank you to dr. sanders for what it was.
G
The RSN did have a homely quality that many will miss.
If you subscribe to The Lens, you will find yourself effortlessly notified of community events and more. As to unbiased, although we may visually appear corporate, we hope you have noticed a diversity of entries from humor to poetry and give us a chance to enrich your day similarly.
I think that The Lens has a long way to go until it is able to match the relaxed and ‘homely’ feeling that was so prominent within the RSN. The Lens is a good source of information regarding community events and the like. However the Community perhaps want more. Its a bit like comparing driving A to B in a Ford or a Lamborghini. Both will get there but one is a bit more exhilarating than the other.
The Lens is a great addition to our community, but it does not serve the same purpose as the Red Sea News. The Lens is (and should be) focused on the happenings at the university itself. The Red Sea News was entirely community centered.
Maybe you could add a community forum section where we can share casual news, pictures, sales, descriptions of trips, lost and found, group events, and the other miscellaneous items. Otherwise, we are now missing an important source of casual interactions.
I think you’ll find that F & C is preparing a forum for purely community news and events and we would encourage you to reach out to them if you would like to contribute.
TheLens is a step in the right direction for communicating information with the KAUST Community. It does however still have a very strong corporate feel.
As others have mentioned, the RSN was very focused on the Community. We had people from various backgrounds contributing articles related to travel, healthy eating, anything they wanted to share with the community.
The words describing what types of articles can be submitted “core to the University’s mission and values and relevant to our broader audience” are very open to interpretation.
Hopefully all of us in KAUST can benefit from taking the strong points of the RSN and incorporating them into theLens.
Best of luck to Adele in her future community activities.
I find it very sad that the RSN has stopped circulating. I truly believe that the Lens and the RSN served two very different purposes and audiences. As for myself, I find it hard to follow things on the Lens, and I don’t think I will be able to use it to replace the RSN (yes I know, I’m “old school” :D). I wish someone takes the lead sometime in the future to make a weekly as the RSN again… I enjoy having more than one source of information.
That said, thank you very much again, dear Editor Adele, for all the energy you invested in keeping us informed in such a comfortable way! Way to go, and best of luck in your future projects!
I started reading RSN right from the time it first came out on October 6, 2009. KAUST was barely over a month old, people were hungry for information, and coming together to build a sense of community. It was great to find stories about people, news about restaurants opening, safety information, and other facts in a wonderfully crafted newsletter. Adele’s warm writing style and wit made it something special. The paper was always respectful in tone and enjoyable to read. I had hoped that RSN would become an established tradition since it was part of the historic birth of the university. It is disheartening that a resource that was valuable to the community is gone. I will miss RSN greatly and thank Adele for keeping it going for as long as she did.
The reason this is so devastating to the KAUST community is that it’s hard enough for all of us to move here, whether from Jeddah or from somewhere halfway around the world, and figure out how to build a community from scratch where learning about each other’s cultures and overcoming the daily challenges of a start-up university isn’t always a positive experience.
RSN was one of those examples of why KAUST “works” – it demonstrated how staff, students, and faculty, across the community, could have a common platform to share/express community needs. It wasn’t political, it wasn’t threatening or offensive in any way to members of the KAUST community, and it was fulfilling the need of spreading information to develop a spirit of camaraderie to make our campus feel welcoming.
What a shame that the communications department felt the need to make this grassroots publication’s existence so difficult to maintain that the editor no longer felt able to deal with the bureaucratic pressure. The idea for a student publication never took off the ground for the same reason – the communications department made the process for approval of a newsletter painstakingly slow, too slow for the student organizers’ schedules. Couldn’t the communications department figure out a way to satisfy KAUST-the-university’s need for control of information AND KAUST-the-community’s need for trust?
Dear Holly,
Thank you for writing. We can’t actually account for the Editor’s decision. Your characterization of events is inaccurate in any event. The turnaround promised to the RSN was one hour provided it was submitted by 4pm on the day of issuance, in the event we needed to get any answers to her readers’ queries for her to publish. We are not sure what the bureaucratic pressure was. We requested only a very few changes, politely. You state that you know that it wasn’t threatening or offensive in any way to the KAUST community. This is an ethnocentric misperception that does not reflect the facts, and is one of the reasons we felt it helpful to give a quick review to the newsletter to avoid repetition of language that could offend or hurt. This is, among other things, one of the responsibilities of the department in order to contribute to just the kind of camaraderie and neighborliness you, and we, desire. The student newspaper was submitted by Nathan Ball once at the end of the school year and approved immediately, while he was still in the room. When he tried to pass the editorial responsibilities on to the next year’s class, we never heard from them again, but certainly created none of the “painstakingly slow” hurdles to which you refer. We would hope that our attempts to respond and clarify in the face of the diverse comments are an indication that we are not unresponsive or control freaks. This is an idea that is perpetrated contrary to most peoples’ interaction with us. In the environment and context in which we exist here, as the American Benjamin Franklin said, an ounce of precaution is worth a pound of cure. Our goal with the RSN, and all of our other efforts is to protect the individual’s effort and the institution from unintended yet grave consequences that do not necessarily occur to the average KAUST resident, privileged as we are on our campus.