CO-PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE Your newsletter choice: by email or post? 2 DO YOU HAVE A FAVORITE SEASON? Mine is spring, and it just so happens I’m writing this message on the very first day of spring this year. It’s a beautiful day, with the buds literally “bustin’ out of bushes” (thank you, Oscar Hammerstein). It seems hard to believe that we have just two more events in our RAPS programming this year: the annual President’s Luncheon on Monday, April 16, and political science professor Christopher Shortell talking about Trump and the media on Thursday, May 10. (Both of those days are outside our usual third Thursday so please make note.) Back in the fall your RAPS Board decided to send the RAPS Sheet out via bulk mail instead of first class. We try to be careful stewards of the funds allocated to us by the Provost’s Office and we figured we could realize significant savings by moving away from first class postage. Our RAPS Sheet editor, Eileen Brennan, has been diligent about gathering copy by a certain deadline every month and quickly transforming it into its proper format. Our office manager, Rebecca Butterworth, has been equally diligent about getting the RAPS Sheet to the printer and back in a timely way and getting individual issues put in envelopes. There, alas, our efficiency ends. The post office can sit on a bulk mailing for several days, sending it out only when postal workers seem to find the time. The result is that delivery is unpredictable and often delayed. Of course, every RAPS member with an email address receives the RAPS Sheet electronically as soon as it’s ready for the printer. Yet many of those same RAPS members wait until their print copy arrives in the mail to read it. I am slightly embarrassed to admit that I am one of those members. Given that we are going back this month to mailing the RAPS Sheet out by first class mail, wouldn’t it make sense for those of us with computers to opt out of receiving the RAPS Sheet by mail and instead click on that link that allows us to see it in living color when it comes in the email message from the RAPS Office? Those of us who like to hold a newsletter in our hands when we read it can print it using our home computers. Think about this: if just 12 members opted out of receiving the RAPS Sheet by mail, our organization would save about $50 on postage that month. That amounts to $500 a year – quite a chunk of change. My message this month is an appeal to RAPS members to choose receiving their monthly newsletter in electronic format only. How about it? My hand is in the air. All you have to do is call Rebecca at 503-725-3477 or – better yet – send an email to rapsmail@pdx.edu. —Dawn White PSU Opera students perform excerpts from Benjamin Britten’s comic opera Albert Herring, at the March member meeting. Tickets for the April 20-29 performances are still available through the PSU Box Office at 503-725-3307. —-Photograph by Larry Sawyer
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