First Person

Life at BSU

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By Graham Bennett

The straw has won: The camel's back has broken, snapped cleanly beneath the accumulated weight of tedious bureaucratic obstacles and mundane problems here at Big South University.

I heard the vertebral crack yesterday, and I can pinpoint the precise moment it happened. It was in the department bathroom, in front of the second sink, the one with the infrared motion sensor that regularly fails to register the existence of my hands. Yesterday, miraculously, the sensor worked, raining down water on my tentatively probing fingers. Delighted with this watery gift from the bathroom gods, I reached out for a dollop of soap, finding instead a broken and empty dispenser.

I would have cursed the heavens, but I have a strong suspicion that the deities charged with the oversight of BSU belong to that other realm.

I have never considered myself particularly camel-like. In my own mind, I am more of a mule: determined, stubborn, and capable of bearing even the most burdensome of institutional loads. So you can imagine my surprise when I gazed into the bathroom mirror and saw a broken-backed camel gazing back.

Big South is obsessed with raising its public profile and becoming one of the top universities in the nation -- the flagship of the Kudzu League and the envy of the Ivies. And yet, somehow, in the midst of multimillion-dollar research campaigns and an administrative cheerleading machine that churns out endless messages of faculty support and institutional excellence, BSU's classrooms are without adequate supplies of chalk, and its bathrooms are soapless wastelands where top scholars claw in vain for paper towels and water.

Lost in the shadows of the administration's grandiose vision are the basic necessities of professional life. The real work of the university takes place on the ground -- in the classroom, the library, and the faculty office. And those of us on the ground doing the work should be equipped with the shovels and boots our dusty work requires.

One of my colleagues has explained away the many privations as the result of state budget cuts. If only we could blame the heartless conservatives in the state legislature. Alas, the source of the problems lies much closer to home, in the hands of an administrative machine so focused on the distant vision of institutional grandeur and national recognition that the mundane minutiae of everyday operations is utterly overlooked.

Threatened with massive budget cuts, our brave leader, President Damocles, wields his mighty Sword of Enthusiasm, issuing morale-building proclamations of "BSU's commitment to Excellence!," the extent of our "achievements in Diversity!," and our "rise in the national Rankings!"

And there you have it, the list of vague values that propel this institution forward, punctuated with the ubiquitous exclamation point that is the hallmark of BSU's proclamations: Diversity, Excellence, Rankings.

What do any of those labels really measure? And what do they really mean? How do they translate into the material conditions of my professional existence? The buzzwords stubbornly resist embodiment in mundane -- yet crucial -- items like adequate supplies of departmental letterhead, functional furniture, clean corridors, reliable e-mail systems, and, yes, soap in the bathrooms.

When my classes are at full enrollment, there are so many students and so many desks that my instructional space at the front of the room is reduced to a rectangle -- no more than a foot in width and 3 feet in length -- in which I pace like a caged animal back and forth before my students. I could gain another foot of space by moving the overhead projector, but that easy solution evades me as the projector is literally chained to the front wall.

Next to it is the large cart bearing the television and video cassetter recorder. There is no DVD player in most of our classrooms, so I can't share with students my collection of film clips. Nor can I offer them a PowerPoint presentation, as the TV, whose simulated walnut-grain finish attests to its origins in a simpler time, lacks the proper input ports for the computer cables.

So there in the corner of my classroom sit the unimpressive and generally useless carcasses of BSU's investment in innovative instructional technologies: a 1980s-era television, a dusty VCR, and an overhead projector.

Even though I have an interest in developing other instructional tools, I am generally limited to presenting information via photocopied handouts and comments written on the board. But if I want to do the latter, I must first beg the office manager for chalk and whiteboard markers, seemingly simple technologies that are nevertheless judged to be as sought-after by our thieving students as are the overhead projector and decade-old VCR.

Similar problems plague BSU's administrative systems. Our entire e-mail network was down for a week; our in boxes -- which I use as a daily to-do list -- were unavailable for five days. During that time, I was unable to reply to student requests for recommendations, to double-check time and locations of committee meetings, to verify that the article I submitted for review had actually been received.

And that was not an isolated e-tragedy: Our e-mail system fairly regularly shuts down for a short nap, leaving us all without an essential tool.

Internal grants programs, too, are badly administered. It took three months for the university to reimburse me for travel costs related to a grant it had promised me. The file bounced among several offices, even disappearing at one point. Only a series of demanding e-mails and phone calls could get the file moving again.

In the end, I had to resort to threats to get my grant money from the university. In the midst of that financial tug-of-war, I was treated to weekly invitations to apply for BSU's generous internal-grants programs and to announcements of the university's "commitment to excellence in research!"

The biggest obstacle -- not only for myself but for the realization of the university's ambitions -- is the great disparity between its abstract mission statement and the material requirements of the teachers and scholars for whom the mission is a mandate.

The administration wants BSU to become one of the "top" institutions in the country, and to achieve that goal with facilities that are outdated, overcrowded, and ill-maintained, and with technologies that are unreliable, obsolete, and often unavailable.

So forgive me if I can't get excited about our multimillion-dollar research projects or rising national prestige. Those things do not alter the conditions of the work I do in the classroom, the work that our students and their parents are paying for.