Misplaced Priorities, Anyone?

It has come to our attention that a certain tenured professor has announced her refusal to advise English majors until such time as she is supplied with new computer equipment that can handle mainframe access. Apparently, she has for several years requested such equipment, to no avail, and has now reached the end of the proverbial rope.

(For those of you who are not so privileged as to work in our precious little pit of vipers, online mainframe access allows one to see whether individual sections of a course are open or closed and who is enrolled in a particular section. It also allows one to see students' transcripts.)

Most members of the faculty ROUTINELY report that they DON'T EVEN KNOW HOW TO USE mainframe access, yet they nonetheless manage somehow to advise their students anyway, so it would seem more than a bit disingenuous to claim at this late date that one can't advise students without it. Reliable sources indicate that most faculty send students to the Registrar without first checking whether the sections being scheduled still have open seats. Other persons in a position to know report that professors regularly schedule students for courses the prerequisites for which have not been completed and habitually joke about their inexplicable inability to remember, for more than a few seconds, the keyboard commands for navigating mainframe access, which, for a bunch of stuck-up PhDs, should be downright embarrassing. And English majors themselves regularly complain that Department faculty "don't know what they're talking about" when it comes to the requirements for graduation. This leads us to conclude that professors take their professional responsibility to advise those students who have, for some mysterious reason, chosen to major in English, less seriously than, say, writing articles and books that nobody will ever read. Yet none of this has ever stopped those professors from advising their students.

In short, if we didn't know better (ahem), we might think the good professor were punishing her advisees for the admittedly poor treatment being meted out to her by the University, when it comes to the unrelated matter of her office computer.

We here at the Brooklyn English Underground sincerely sympathize with the frustration one must feel at being repeatedly ignored when requesting up-to-date computer equipment, which is of course necessary for all the work one is required to do as a professor, not only advisement. So we wholeheartedly support her request for said computer equipment, but we must protest when she stoops to using students as bargaining chips.