Yale is still on top, at least among bureaucracies

By Daniel Price

Yale truly ranks as the top university in the nation, albeit in a category not mentioned in any of the college guides that high school seniors treat with almost religious awe. It has nothing to do with academics, social life or even the the rampant sex as seen by the "Yale Four." Rather, we may be proud (or chagrined) to know that our school's remarkable ability to force us through daily bureaucratic hoops outpaces the efforts of any other college. If we we are willing to give up this honor, we must first recognize the extreme, and unnecessary, nature of the problem.

My own relationship with the Yale bureaucracy became particularly rocky two weeks ago. Twice I found myself running around Hendrie Hall like a lab rat unable to find his way through a maze. Unlike the rat, however, my scurrying promised no great discovery for the benefit of mankind.

One night I picked up my telephone and heard...nothing. When I finally reached a real, live person she told me that they had turned off the phones of students who had not yet paid. After listening to my protestations of innocence, I was shocked to hear her promise to switch my line back on within the hour. "Wow," I thought, "someone in the Yale bureaucracy is actually willing to fix their mistakes!"

I was prepared to forgive all, despite the fact that I had missed a day's worth of calls during job-hunting season, until I checked and found my phone still dead two hours later. The same polite lady told me that the problem was a bit more complex and that it would take a technician to fix it.

The next morning, another telecommunications guru told me that I had now been disconnected from the outside world because they had lost my registration for telephone service. Unlike real-world bureaucracies, however, Yale failed let me know that that they had not received my payment. Why should they? Yale bars me from signing up with a competitor regardless of how bad I find their service.

My next trip to Hendrie Hall was another excursion into the bowels of Yale's administrative torture chambers. This time I had gone to pick up my paychecks at the student employment office only to find that they had deducted excessively large sums for tax purposes. When I asked why, I was told, "We're only student employment. You need to call Yale payroll." What did the central payroll office say? That it was the student employment office's fault for not sending over the tax forms fast enough, of course. "Not our fault," said student employment. "We send them over every week." There is only one thing worse than a student going up against one Yale bureaucracy: being caught between two.

Despite these experiences, I am not without hope when it comes to Yale's bureaucrats. Some offices on this campus operate efficiently, accurately, and are even staffed with pleasant and helpful employees. In the real world, none of this would be remarkable. At Yale, however, each little instance of competence seems deserving of a merit badge. Perhaps this represents the best argument for the residential colleges; I have never had anything but praise for either my Dean's or Master's offices.

In my seven semesters of registration, I have been lucky enough to escape the greatest form of bureaucratic flagellation-bursar's hold. Thus, I know that many have it even worse than I do. But a few lessons from the real world and an effort to run telecommunications and other divisions of the University like companies and not like bloated monopolies would go a long way toward making the life of a student a bit easier. We must recognize that we can do better--after all, it would be difficult to do worse.

Daniel Price is a senior in Trumbull.

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