Nonrandom Acts of Absurdity

Up The Down Staircase has a 1964 copyright.  I read it a few years later, though I can't remember when.  I also saw the movie with Sandy Dennis, though I believe only on TV, not in a theater.  The title is a knock on the bureaucracy in the schools.  Though if truth be known, at Benjamin Cardozo H.S. in Bayside Queens, NYC, when I attended it back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the school was over crowded, I believe about 4500 students then, and operated on a split session, so during the change between periods several thousand students would be taking the stairs.  Under that circumstance, it actually makes sense to have one staircase for up, the other for down, and to enforce that the foot traffic flows only in one direction on each staircase during the change over.  (In other words, this particular regulation actually encouraged efficiency.) Nevertheless, the book became something of a hit for telling a compelling story about how the bureaucracy sometimes impeded the sensible solution from taking hold, and then doing so with a touch of irony and a tad of humor.

The U of I bears a vestige of this earlier era in the Foreign Language Building, where the stairs between the basement and the first floor are labelled up and down.  Elsewhere on campus, however, there is one stairwell only and the rule of thumb is that traffic flows to the right, though I will note that there is often only one handrail, so for somebody like me who takes some assurance from holding the handrail, you can end up on the wrong side of the stairs for that reason.

It is now almost 50 years since I started high school.  One might think with all the online technology that's been introduced in the interim that would have dramatically reduced the consequences of bureaucracy.  In some cases that is true.  But in other cases, it seems to have made things worse.  Here I'll focus on just one example.

But first, let me note that technology is not the only source of absurdity.  Some of it stems from human decision making.  This semester, we started a week later than we have done in the recent past, not a bad idea given how hot it has been in late August.  (I don't know that was the reason for the change, but I want to note starting later was okay with me.)  The sensible accommodation to that change would have been to end the semester when it typically ended, meaning the semester would have been shortened by a week.  Everyone I know would have responded, Hallelujah, to such a sensible change - the semester is simply too long.  Of course, if you've been teaching the same course for several years, you'd have to figure out what to cut from your class.  That might take some consideration and effort.  Overall, however, the shorter semester would win out in the cost-benefit calculation.  Unfortunately, it seems the length of the semester is set in stone and it would take an act of God to change it.  So if we start a week later, we also end a week later.  That is a human decision, not due to the technology.  This decision then conditions the absurdity to which the technology contributes.

The university has an incredibly expensive Student Information System, but in many ways that system doesn't do what we want it to do, so we now have two different ways to upload course grades.  The one I used this time around is called Enhanced Grade Entry.  It offers a modest feedback to the person uploading grades, relying on a traffic light type of analogy as to whether the task has been completed or not.  A big deal issue with this is who else gets the feedback, aside from the person who uploaded the grades.  For example, does the Econ Department get to see if I uploaded my grades.  I am not sure of this, but signs point to no and/or there was a glitch at the Registrar level and that impacted what the Econ Department could see.

So this morning, a bit after 10, I received an email from the Econ Department about uploading final grades.  For those reading this well after I've written it, today is December 27.  It is after Christmas and I'm on holiday, though I check my campus email pretty regularly.  On December 19, I did upload my grades and got the Green Light.  Was that the final word on the matter or not?  The email from the department didn't included the recipients, who were Bcc'd.  So I can't tell if it went to only a few instructors or all of them. 

A little more than an hour later I got this email from the Registrar, which indicated that at least for some students, I still needed to upload their grades.  Twenty minutes after that I received this Emily Litella-like message - NEVER MIND!  The second sentence of this message is entirely mind blowing - their phone line wasn't working.  We're using phone lines for transmitting grade data?  I didn't think we had phone lines for any data at this point.  We went to Voice Over IP at around the time I retired.  But when there is a glitch, as there sometimes will be with technology, then there is a need to communicate about said glitch.  And in the heat of the moment, that communication might not be carefully crafted.

I really don't want to pick on the Registrar or on that part of the administrative process.  Given the size of the U of I they have their work cut out for them.

So let me close with a lesson I learned long ago.  Murphy's Law tends to favor large technology implementations with a lot of moving parts.  So one absurdity is we don't have have safeguards in place when Murphy's Law does its thing. But the real absurdity here is that somebody in authority approved having the last day to submit grades be after Christmas.  That makes no sense whatsoever and yet that's what we have now.