This university is incredibly annoying in terms of any paperwork or administrative details.
I am very, very glad that this week is over.
Somebody pour me a beer.
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Historian of science, technology, agriculture, and the environment.
This university is incredibly annoying in terms of any paperwork or administrative details.
I am very, very glad that this week is over.
Somebody pour me a beer.
Welcome to the world of state school bureaucracy. It’s the same, if not worse, at Berkeley, believe me.
Seconded!
I would not be misunderstood: I do know and have expressed my similar dissatisfactions with academic structure (call it “government of”), but this entry underlines for me one outstanding difference between the present generation of scholars and (not without exception) my own:
That while we “felt” no differently, we both understood and accepted the situation as it was found: an effective (if not efficient) way of moving the process forward. The current crop of our fellows seems differently postured on the intolerant (if nonetheless fujlfilling) side.
The overall diffference MAY be a small one, but here is what I have come to understand about it:
In the age of the typewriter and (at best) card printing/reading computer ware WHEN and WHERE that was present, which was not a commonality until well after 1968, we tolerated the situation because it seemed to us, despite its faults and long long lines of registering students — and chasing after faculty signatures for EVERY gd course into which we wished to be enrolled — that no other option seemed apparent or likely.
In t he age of the supercomputer in a laptop, accompanied by superfast communication that obviates the need for “transportation” (that running to and fro on a paperchase), and skilled in the many uses and applications of all the powers of this technology that might be released upon the world, students today are far far less tolerant of regulated “signing in.” completion (that might just as well be done tomorrow or may have already been done just once in another context), and lines of any length no matter how smoothly processing forward.
Seems about right to me that one might feel that way, just as it feels about right to me to consider it curiously impatient behavior by otherwise insightful persons.
But…I sure like that title: Administrivia — just brilliant!