"This is going to be the best semester ever."

[mandolin]

So I was going through the archives of MacHall and cracked up when I hit comic #149:

It wouldn't be half as funny if it didn't make me think of Dr. Petersen near semester's end.

...well, I don't know about office hours at the bar, but still. :)

Comments

[jonathlee.livejournal.com]

... the chair died, so they're cutting the major? ... *blinks* That makes about as much sense as cutting, say, English, because the department chair dies. As in, it doesn't.

And $3k a semester? That seems a little... excessive...

[alex-garg.livejournal.com]

It's a strange, strange world down here in nowhere Virginia. These things eventually make a kind of morbid sense...

...which scares me to no end.

[jonathlee.livejournal.com]

I have... no words. Like, seriously. I have no way to reply to this. It is completely outside my experience.

... I realise that universities are private institutions, but... shouldn't they at least TRY to do something for the students?

... it just doesn't make sense. Like, what about all the other professors in the department?

[alex-garg.livejournal.com]

shouldn't they at least TRY to do something for the students?

They probably should, but they don't.

The administration of this college Emory & Henry College (screw anonymity) doesn't give a rat's ass about us as students. We're cash-cows to them.

In four years the tuition has gone from $8k/semester to now $19.5, grants and scholarships have not been inflated, professors have been forced out, and the college purchased 100 acres of land for the sole purpose of preventing the state from developing that interstate exit; our money (well, they *say* that the purchase was from a separate fund, but that's horseshit) went neither to us nor our faculty but to buy empty farmland to keep it empty farmland.

I looked to transfer my freshman and sophomore years when these problems came to the surface, but the admins kept bribing me back in with grants (in hindsight not so much because they cared about me as a person but because they just couldn't stand their retention rate getting any lower).

Also my majors (PoliSci and MassComm) are staffed by some brilliant and determined professors (who are also being treated like shit by the administration, so the departments probably won't be so staffed in a short while); so though the school is essentially wasting what money I do have to pay in as many possible ways as I can imagine, I am getting a good education - at least in my fields - not to mention getting a hell of a character building experience.

As far as the other professor for computer science, he's been relegated to teaching introductory computer classes to fill students' general studies requirements - which most students test out of (I didn't because it's an easy, three-credit-hours A).

This place is truly insane. If ever you hear of somebody looking to apply here, stop them.

...And if you have any friends at the IRS, please ask them to review the college's files.

[violetbloom.livejournal.com]

My technology/engineering driven alma mater would jump at the oppurtunity to drop English and all of those other pesky fine arts majors. Until they arrive at that kind of excuse, they just made us painfully aware of the fact thay they did not respect our existance... I had more required English classes in the old funky basement of the chem building than I care to remember. Not to mention the creative writing class in the converted broom closet... while they were building a new physics building... Sigh.