The horrors of Princeton bureaucracy

Dramatization:

"I'm sorry," said the card swiper, a thin smirk playing across her face. "There's no meal exchange on Sunday brunch."

"All right," I said hopefully. "Let's do a guest meal then."

"I'm sorry," said the card swiper, smirk broadening and shaking her head sadly. "You have used up all four guest meals."

"You mean I only get four?" I asked. "But that was last semester."

"I'm sorry."

"But I thought they wanted upperclassmen in the college dining halls."

"I'm sorry." The smirk turned to a grin.

Last semester felt very far away.

Marjorie and I turned and retreated slowly down the staircase and back out into the pouring rain. Crestfallen, we made our way across the wet concrete to Zorba's Brother for some grease on a spoon. We had just had a run in with Princeton's deadening bureaucracy.

Whichever way we turn, it seems that the coiling tentacles of Princeton's bureaucracy are waiting to poke us. The University has twice as many employees as it has students. Eleven-hundred of these are faculty, leaving eleven thousand employees. Most of these are no doubt working hard at important tasks. Yet the daily irritations and petty regulations of student life suggest that the bureaucracy has gotten too big.

Consider for a moment the utter insanity of trying to eat with someone. There are no meal exchanges on brunch, on "special" meals, or during the full moon. No one has explained why late meals need be so complicated at Frist. It is not as if the value of pizza and sandwiches fluctuates in the ten minutes people wait for the official start of late meal. Nor do students lead such tidily organized lives that they can count on a set mealtime every day. The university is building four-year colleges and presumably supports interclass interaction. Nevertheless, it is probably easier for two men of different class years to get married in San Francisco than to share a meal in a residential college. Rules for rules' sake are simply getting in the way of students lives.

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"No, you missed the deadline to register for the DataMall. We can't tell you how much money you have in your account. What? Use this Xerox machine? No. You have to use the one at Frist."

It is with words and attitudes similar to these that the West College bureaucracy, another villain in the bureaucratization of the university, stifles the initiative of the student groups that are fundamental to the Princetonian's educational experience. Try though they will, student organizations face an uphill battle. Every step of organizing an event – perhaps a guest speaker or a panel discussion — must be undertaken in the face of an implacable, opaque, and frequently hostile administrative cadre.

The list of administrative inanities is long indeed. Our residential buildings are proxed into a near-Balkan mosaic, with limited access to facilities increasingly common. At Firestone, students undergo bag searches that are as intrusive as they are lackadaisical, when electronic scanners would be more secure and less irritating. The Registrar simplifies things to make them more complicated (SCORE!). Schools of Public and International Affairs refuse credit for courses on Islamic fundamentalism because of cross-listing technicalities. Meanwhile, fire inspectors make sure that no one mistakes his "means of egress" for an elephant.

Too frequently, we encounter those who seem to take a special pleasure in saying "no" or in rules for their own sake. From dining halls to deans' offices, the argument that "Oh, but if we do that for you, we have to do it for everyone" closes off decisions that would otherwise tailor the Princeton experience to the specific needs of individual students. A bureaucratic attitude thus undermines the benefits of a relatively small university. In most cases, moreover, petty bureaucracy also undermines the University's stated goals.

But far from producing a litany of abuses for its own sake, I mean to highlight these small boils on Old Nassau's otherwise hale body so that they might be lanced. Even if Princeton gets the little things wrong, most often it gets big things right. For example, despite fears of a housing shorting earlier this year, the University managed to produce extra housing in 1903 hall through deft administrative footwork. It's hard to imagine so enlightened an outcome at a larger state institution.

Bureaucratic abuse usually takes place in the shadows of daily life, and rarely survives sustained sunlight.

Do you have a horror story about Princeton bureaucracy? Send it to cr@princeton.edu for inclusion in a future column. Carlos Ramos-Mrosovsky is a Wilson School major from New York, N.Y. His column runs alternate Wednesdays. He can be reached at cr@princeton.edu.