Bureaucrasaurus Rex

I absolutely don't have time to be writing this right now because I should be studying, but funny thing, it's pretty hard to study when there's a giant steaming turd on your kitchen table.

This particular turd takes the form of a letter from the university explaining that since I am under-enrolled this semester, with only three dissertation credit-hours, I am not eligible for an assistanceship and owe them a $1100 penalty for my underenrollment.

I don't feel underenrolled. In fact I feel less so than at any other time in my college career. I expressly didn't take the second job offered me this semester because I knew how busy I was going to be, what with having to demonstrate three years' worth of knowledge and also start writing a book and all. Even the university argues that a grad student has enough work to do between assistanceships and degree requirements without going looking for trouble by actually trying to pull down any kind of a living wage. Yet suddenly I'm underenrolled and therefore have to pay my tuition...despite rendering 20+ hours of service in the form of an assistanceship, ostensibly granted me to pay my tuition.

Didja catch that? According to the university, for having met my degree requirements thus far and for following the department-authorized trajectory for my course of study, I am to pay a penalty equalling the full amount I am costing them in tuition this semester, and continue to occupy the miserable assistanceship that hauls in a good $800 per student x 20 students in my class. Pop quiz: how much of this money ends up in my pocket? That's right, virtually none, nor does it spin itself into other benefits like health insurance or, in my case, tuition remission.

In essence, the institution that taught me my critical thinking skills would now have me accept that, since I'm costing them LESS this semester, I should do the same amount of work as before and pay them MORE for this privilege. I could just sign up for more credit hours and thereby cost them the requisite amount for THEM to pay ME instead, except that until I paid this penalty, I wouldn't be allowed to register for more classes anyway. Meanwhile, paying it would acknowledge that I owed it, basically anulling any chances I have at them reimbursing me once the dust settles.

Allow me to contextualize this for you. At the bargaining table last month, the university administrators explained to our teaching assistants' union (TAU) representatives that we are expendable and that, from an administrative perspective, we are first STUDENTS and only provisionally EMPLOYEES of the university, therefore any assistanceships they give us are largesse for which we should be unquestioningly grateful.

That's from an administrative point of view. Not from a parking perspective, as it turns out. I got slapped with a ticket for not having my employee parking permit the 2nd day of the semester. I thought there was a week of clemency at the beginning of the semester, I told the Parking Services lady. Sure, she said, for students. AHA, I said, surely I have you on this one, because the administration JUST SAID that we are primarily students and not employees. Maybe, she said, but WE consider you employees of the U and not regular students. That will be fifteen dollars.

I have been at this school for eight years, the last three of these in the same degree program with the same enrollment/assistanceship conditions, yet every semester it's as though the U has no idea who I am or how I got here. They can track my indebtedness to them minute-by-minute with a swipe of my student I.D. but the parking people can't link my license plate with my degree from one semester to the next and issue me a pass that lasts me the whole year. I have to announce my grad-assistant status EVERY TIME to the librarian in order to get an extended due date on my books even though she can press F2 and tell me how much I paid in late fees as an undergrad in 1999. Why oh why can't they tell I work here based on my student account? Why are there six separate operating systems in use on campus and I am not even exaggerating? Ask my students if I work here, somebody please. Even after a weekend of binge-drinking THEY seem to know where to show up for class three days a week, and that I am the teacher.

One of two things is happening here: either the University is a block-headed, utterly ineffectual bureaucracy in which no one sector has any idea of what happens in other sectors and therefore leaves it up to us students to straighten it out for them, since we don't have anything better to do with our time, or the University is a sinister organization POSTURING as an ineffectual bureaucracy in order better to gouge students at its convenience.

I'm not sure which of these I find more infuriating and frightening. At least if the U is posing as useless in order to get more of my money, I can count on its consistent efforts to gouge me and anticipate the ways in which this might happen. If it really is a matter of random irresponsibility, it could strike any time, anywhere. I'm picturing Bureaucrasaurus Rex, this creature with a gaping, screeching maw I feed with my money, and it responds by waving its puny forearms and dropping these glistening reeking monolithic turds on my kitchen table at the WORST POSSIBLE TIME, a time when I have absolutely no emotional or intellectual resources with which to address them.

Where are my minions??!! This is the kind of time a girl really wishes she had some minions.

One thing is clear to me: inept people and institutions never know they're inept. If ever they suspect it, they are nonetheless rotundly untroubled by it, because it's never their time that their incompetence wastes, it's always yours.