Somewhere in the College Office is a collection of people whom I rarely see in real life — or maybe I do, I don’t think I’d recognize them — but who do a lovely job about keeping me running on schedule. Then there are the denizens of West College, who periodically pump out e-mails with important headlines, like, “REMINDER — Last Day to Apply for Housing.” Important stuff, that.
Princeton students may have high SAT scores, but we are famously bad about getting things done on time — not that we seem much different from the rest of the human race in this regard — and it’s terribly useful to have a whole staff of people who regularly remind the rest of us when things are supposed to be done. Imagine life without out those reminder e-mails from Dr. Axcelson with the ticking clock about the P/D/F option. Though maybe P/D/F is one of those things people really don’t need to be reminded about.
Granted, a lot of these e-mails are just annoying — reminders about trips that we don’t plan to attend, open houses for departments we don’t like — but clicking “trash” on those is a small price to pay for the occasional reminder note about “SCORE will open for courses next Tuesday…”
Are Princeton undergraduates being wrongly coddled? Should we be left to crash and burn as a lesson, so we wind up in Spelman if we forget about room draw? I think not. But then, I have a vested interest in this question, and I don’t like where this logic is headed. So before anyone starts investigating the matter too thoroughly, let’s get back to the laudatory part.
The word “bureaucrat” is usually used with derision in modern English, but the Franco-Hellenic roots of the word only suggest, “One who rules from behind a desk,” which seems pretty impressive to me. I mean, which would you rather have: President Tilghman sitting sedately in her office at Nassau Hall or astride a warhorse, in chain mail, challenging the prefrosh at FitzRandolph Gate? So let’s retire those “master of college” titles and start calling them Duke of Whitman or Queen Marguerite Browning. (Actually, Master Browning already looks a lot like Helen Mirren, so in some cases this is not such a stretch.)
The only people I can think of with regular support staffs as large as those afforded to Princeton undergraduates are members of the United States Congress. I realize that’s an unflattering comparison, but I would point out there is a fundamental difference between college students and the elected representatives of the American people: when we screw up we don’t get book deals. In economics they call that a “perverse incentive.” Anyway, I don’t really want the memoirs of Larry Craig — or George Bush, for that matter; we lived his life once already — I think I’d rather, “The Complete Tales of Joshua Katz: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Read the Hieroglyphs.”
I’m sort of relying on the idea that over the next two or three weeks I’ll get a lot of reminder e-mails with subject lines like, “Room draw next Friday,” “Pick Courses” and “Define Your Life Now.” I doubt I’m alone in this. Humans just aren’t very good at remembering dates and times, so this needs to be a collective enterprise. When Aristotle called us a social species, he wasn’t kidding.
So to rbromfie@princeton.edu — whoever you are, and whatever it is that you do with the rest of your life — thanks for that notice about, “The fall final exam schedule is now open…” To Laurie Hebditch — again, no idea what you look like, but we’ve corresponded — thanks for reminding me to sign up for summer storage last year. And to my lovely adviser, who is just about one of three people who both send me e-mails and whom I would recognize in Frist Campus Center — thanks for those automated computer messages that remind me we’ve got a meeting on for Thursday, 3:30. I won’t remember, but I trust that someone else will.
Brendan Carroll is a sophomore from New York, NY. He can be reached at btcarrol@princeton.edu.
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