Club recruitment fails to reach NCW students amid communication breakdown

Members of New College West (NCW), one of Princeton’s seven residential colleges, have not received HoagieMail emails since Aug. 18.

HoagieMail, the primary mode of communication between clubs and the student body, is known to be particularly active at the start of the academic year as organizations recruit prospective members and provide application information. The platform enables members of the University community to send emails to all seven of the residential college listservs at once. Emails typically include club announcements, student sales, and lost and found items.

The 827 student members of NCW from the Class of 2025 through the Class of 2028 are the only students affected by the error. Of the seven residential colleges, NCW has the smallest number of first-year members — representing 13 percent of the Class of 2028 with 192 first-years. HoagieMail correspondences from clubs and organizations are crucial for first-years looking to join new activities as they start their college experience.

In a statement to The Daily Princetonian, Co-President of the Hoagie Club (which runs HoagieMail) Windsor Nguyen ’25 wrote, “This is an issue on westwire’s end as they periodically purge hoagie[at]princeton.edu from their listserv.”

“There’s a history of this happening where residential colleges sometimes block emails. We’re always sending them on our side, but they’re blocking them from their side,” Co-President of the Hoagie Club George Chiriac ’25 explained in an interview.

He cited a similar incident in 2023 that also only impacted NCW students. It took two weeks to rectify, during which “a lot of hoagie email users emailed the NCW administration and pressured them to unblock the whole email again.”

“NCW may not be voluntarily blocking us. They may have just made a whitelist of college admin email addresses that are allowed to send and forgot to include hoagie[at]princeton.edu,” said Chiriac. “I think it’s easy for University administration to forget that students are really using this app, and it’s pretty important for many clubs on campus.”

The ‘Prince’ was unable to reach NCW staff before publication.

According to Chiriac, it could take up to two weeks for the Hoagie team to look through the code on their end, and restore access to members of the NCW listserv.

Until this problem is sorted out, Chiriac recommends NCW students ask their friends in other residential colleges to forward them HoagieMail emails.

Meghana Veldhuis is an assistant News editor for the ‘Prince.’ She is from Bergen County, N.J. and typically covers faculty and graduate students.

Please send any corrections to corrections[at]dailyprincetonian.com.