Usually, the more complete form of this question is “why is the address of myUSI www.usieagles.org instead of something ending in .edu?”

Part of the reason is because our hands are tied. Registrations in the .edu domain are reserved for colleges and universities that grant degrees at the bachelor, master and doctoral level, or its non-U.S. equivalent.

The United States Department of Commerce awarded the management of the .edu top level domain to the nonprofit Educause Association in 2001 with a few stipulations. One of those stipulations was that each institution could have only one .edu domain name.

Many people point out that other schools have more than one domain and that is true. However, those domains are grandfathered in as they existed before the 2001 agreement. It should be noted that the wording of the agreement leaves the possibility that this could change in the future. The pertinent sections of the agreement state:

• All institutions holding names as of October 29, 2001 in the .edu domain will be allowed to keep them without regard to institutional eligibility requirements at this time.*
• Only a single name in the .edu domain will be assigned to any given institution.

*emphasis added

The rest of the reason hinges on sud-domains and email addresses. Sub-domains are extensions of the original domain. In the University of Southern Indiana’s case, the domain is usi.edu. A sub-domain would follow the form sub-domain.usi.edu.

The university already uses the usi.edu domain for its separate faculty and staff email system. Faculty and staff email addresses generally end in @usi.edu in regards to this configuration. In order to be able to route mail to students, however, a sub-domain would have to be used. If that were the case, then student mail would generally end in @sub-domain.usi.edu.

This can cause problems for receiving mail from a general Internet population that isn’t used to people having sub-domains in their email addresses. If someone sent a message and left off the important sub-domain part of the address, the message might not get delivered. This is probably part of the reason that an informal survey of students revealed that they preferred having their own domain of @usieagles.org rather than a sub-domain of usi.edu.

Since the 2001 Educause agreement, many other institutions have taken similar steps and moved some or all of their student email to .org addresses. It is very easy to verify that the university’s .org domains, which include usieagles.org and myusi.org, belong to the University of Southern Indiana using standard, well understood, tools that confirm domain registrations.