Registration System Discriminates Against the People Registering
By David Lydon
Opinions Writer
As the holiday season approaches, I've noticed that we here at Pomona College have all been a bit more mindful of our cherished traditions. Specifically, the ancient and time-honored tradition of whining about how much work we all have. I don't know about you, but I've been actively seeking to uphold this particular tradition, following the evil and unreasonable decisions by all of my teachers to give me work due this week. But I come not to praise Caesar but to bury him, or, rather, it is not to complain about my work that I come before you today. Instead, I plan to complain about something else, something far more sinister: Registration.
Now there are some pretty obvious complaints that could be made about registration, especially by me. First, my sophomore registration time was placed smack-dab in the middle of all the freshmen's, and secondly I don't have enough time to sit down with the course catalogue and decide what to take. But the first problem has already been remedied, and the second one ties back in with the no-time problem that I'd promised myself not to talk about, so instead I'm going to complain about other aspects of registration. And before everyone gets too mad at me, I want to take a moment to say that the staff down at the Office of the Registrar are really neat people-it's just that they're forced to do what the computers tell them to do, and the computers are occasionally mean and/or poorly designed. Sort of like the evil "Skynet" computer system that keeps sending cyborgs back in time to kill people. Speaking of which, they're making another Terminator movie, and that worries me. The first two were really good, and it'd be sad if this new one sucks like the new Star Wars movies. The same is also true of Indiana Jones.
Before I got caught up in the racing excitement that is Indiana Jones, I'd been planning to cleverly segue into the fact that we should be able to register on-line. It's too late for the segue, so instead I'll just say that we really should be able to register on-line. Lots of other colleges and even big, uncaring universities do it. It may even turn out that the University of Maryland at College Park does it, which should put the Oldenborg Task Force solidly on my side. Online registration is easy and convenient, and would make everyone's life a little less crazy.
Speaking of people's lives being crazy, my friend Brian had to miss his O-Chem class a few days ago to register for an art class. He didn't plan to miss his O-Chem class, as he showed up at the art building at 7:45, 15 minutes before it opened, and thus figured he'd be first in line, and only a bit late to O-Chem. Instead, he found an hour and a half worth of line in front of him. Apparently, that whole "written permission required" thing for all the art classes, which I thought meant you had to make a sample sculpture or something to get in, really only means you need to stand in line for a really long time. They'll give you permission, as long as you get there before they've signed too many slips, thus making the class full.
This is all supposedly necessary because without forcing people to spend two hours getting a slip of paper signed, underclassmen wouldn't be able to get into the art classes, and there could be no art majors. That's a valid concern, except it's one that all of the other departments have learned to deal with; they're able to accommodate more interested students, regardless of year or major. If the Art Department can't do this, it's nothing for them to be ashamed of-it's just probably a sign that they may need to hire an additional teacher to offer more art classes. We can afford this. We're Pomona College. Art classes don't exist solely for art majors. They exist so that all the non-art majors can take art classes, and thus be actively broadened. That's the liberal arts philosophy after all. Making people have to stand in line isn't a very fair system, since people who can't afford to skip their morning classes are screwed. Or maybe art majors just aren't supposed to take morning classes so they can sign up for next semester's art classes. I don't know.
Anyhow, this is TSL's last issue of the semester, so it is now time for us all to go into our non-Claremont cocoon, and emerge next semester spouting all sorts of new-and-improved inane gibberish. If anyone out there's been actively reading my column this semester, thanks a lot! If not, I suggest you rush to the web-archives right away and catch up on all the dumbness you've missed.
Oh, and happy holidays! Break is going to be really restful-assuming all these papers don't kill me first….
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