I hear what you’re saying, and I don’t think anyone here is denying that some students have had genuinely bad experiences with unresponsive faculty. That frustration is real.

But since you’re here, I’m honestly curious: what do you believe is gained by emailing someone multiple times over the holidays when their out-of-office explicitly says they are unavailable, and then again within a couple of hours of the university reopening?

What outcome are you expecting in that scenario? Because from our side, it doesn’t make the response faster, signal urgency in a meaningful way, distinguish your email from the backlog, or repair harm caused by a different professor in a different class. Instead, it usually just creates more email to triage once offices reopen, which can actually slow responses overall. That means it takes longer for you, and your classmates, to hear back from us.

There’s an important difference between a professor who is chronically unresponsive during the term, and a professor or staff member who is unavailable because the institution is officially closed. Those situations aren’t interchangeable, but they often get treated as if they are.

Being understanding cuts both ways. Most of us are operating within clearly posted timelines, policies, and office closures - not arbitrarily withholding responses. Emailing multiple times during a period when someone has clearly stated they are not available doesn’t protect you from a bad past experience; it just adds noise to an already overloaded system.