Moronic bureaucracy

One of the main things that I hate about the academic sector is its completely uncontrollable bureaucracy. There are dozens of examples every month. But this one may be a representative one.

One of the students in the Fall course was ill and could not attend the final exam. A trivial thing that is likely to happen in most courses with more than 30 students. Mark Trodden was very nice and helpful and supervised the exam of the student at home in Central New York, assuring the same conditions. Everything worked as it should and the student could receive the grade with others. The grade included the score from the final exam - the same exam as others had solved.

I submitted the full grade sheet. But since that time, I have received letters, e-mails, and complicated forms roughly from 10 different places at Harvard - a genuine attack of the dragons - "informing" me that the student's grade is incomplete and I should prepare a new exam in March and all this bullshit. I have tried to explain everyone that the grade is complete and that there can't be any new exam because there has been one and the student already knows the problems, but to no avail.

The final grade sheet they just sent me has an "ABS" on it, after roughly 10 or 20 hours spent on this special "project". It's like 50 blog articles of time ;-) completely wasted just on this single stupidity. Guess which one I consider to be a better and more enjoyable time investment. I think that under normal circumstances, the bureaucrat who is primarily responsible for these repeated errors should be immediately fired. This could happen in the commercial sector.

At the university, there are obviously hundreds of bureaucrats who are used that their main job is to annoy everyone else and waste the time of others. They are not responsible to anyone, no one really knows their names, and no one has the tools to criticize them. And dozens of new bureaucrats are being added (and transformed from scholars) every month. Various diversity committees that are designed to irritate and intimidate everyone are ones of the most recent examples.

Of course, at the university, no one can really fire these people because once you show that you want to fire them, you immediately face protests from the unions, left-wing lunatics, and all these segments. When a powerless person like me gets caught into a bureaucratic hole like one described above, which is very often, it is an unlimited time sink and an unlimited source of frustration. A bummer. And you can guess how many similar pseudoproblems one must permanently solve.

Moreover, the radical Left is designed to increase the amount of these pseudoproblems. Uncontrollable bureaucracy is not just an unpleasant by-product of their policies and ideology; it is the very purpose of it. The number of people who have behaved in a completely inappropriate way in this seemingly innocent story all but destroys any hopes that these problems could be corrected in finite time. The only solution is to escape because these things just won't go away.