In the forefront of technological advance
Trini often gripes about the blinkered, philistine, pig ignorance of the university officials with whom she must deal on a regular basis, and one common complaint is their failure to comprehend anything even close to the current state of the communications art: they’d much rather you went to point A, picked up a sheaf of paper, and transported it twenty-three miles to point B, instead of anything remotely convenient.
I might have thought that this condition was peculiar to schools in this state. And I would have been wrong:
The University of Idaho takes online payments. But it wants an additional $44.87 to receive the money faster and with no chance of a check bouncing.
Uh … no. I’ll mail it in.
Buena Vista University will take my money online, but they only accept credit cards, not bank transfers.
Pacific Lutheran University doesn’t take online payments at all.
I thought universities were supposed to be leading us boldly into the new century? My electric company is more progressive than this.
I am no longer surprised to find petrified wood in the groves of academe.
Addendum, 18 August: It may be worse than that. The Cranky Prof puts the blame on her university’s IT types:
They blew out the e-mail accounts and admin gradebook privileges for almost all of the professors. They must have taken off and nuked the whole site from orbit.
No on-line access to class lists or classroom assignments.
No on-line access to book orders or book lists.
No on-line access to enter final Summer II grades.
Maybe it’s time to bring back the abacus after all. With student discounts, of course.
fillyjonk »
17 August 2008 @ 5:45 pm
“they’d much rather you went to point A, picked up a sheaf of paper, and transported it twenty-three miles to point B, instead of anything remotely convenient.”
Classic university-bureaucracy behavior.
The graduate school I attended had the added insult of closing down university offices from noon to 1 pm, and closing them for the day at 4:30. So for those of us who were TAs and were taking classes ourselves, it could be very difficult to schedule the time to get things done.