| 12:57a |
Запрос на эпилептоидный кнут
I vividly remember the endless discussions that ensued, when I was a junior professor at Yale University, about a first-year archaeology graduate student whose husband had died in a car crash on the first day of the term. For some reason, the shock caused her to develop a mental block on doing paperwork. She still attended lectures and was an avid participant in class discussions; and she turned in papers and got excellent grades. But eventually the professor would always discover she hadn’t formally signed up for the class. As the éminence grise of the department would point out during faculty meetings, that was all that really mattered.
“As far as the guys in Registration are concerned, if you don’t get the forms in on time, you didn’t take the course. So your performance is completely irrelevant.” Other professors would mumble and fuss, and there would be occasional careful allusions to her “personal tragedy”—the exact nature of which was never specified. (I had to learn about it from other students later on.) But no one raised any fundamental objections to Registration’s attitude. That was just reality—from an administrative point of view.
Eventually, after last-minute attempts to have her fill out a sheaf of late-application appeal documents also met with no response, and after numerous long soliloquies from the Director of Graduate Studies about just how inconsiderate it was of her to make things so difficult for those who were only trying to help her,18 the student was expelled from the program on the grounds that anyone so incapable of handling paperwork was obviously not suited for an academic career.
David Graeber,
"Bullshit Jobs". |