If I Have a Hypnotist at Orientation, Instead of Having Him Convince Students that They're Justin Bieber, I'd Ask Him Just To Convince Them to Bring Some Paper and a Fucking Pen To Class.

Friday am WTF

It's that time. Students are turning in term papers. One has 2 ½ inch margins on both sides and two lines between the one sentence paragraphs (sigh). What throws me for a loop though is the paper which uses several sources which as not exactly peer-reviewed. OK, let’s be blunt. The student used several openly racist sources and not as examples to argue against. I am dreading reading a paper on the role of hamsters in society when the student uses “books” written by people I see on the news everyday ranting about how awful hamsters are and spreading lies about how they spread disease and crime. Some of the other sources are fine, such as straightforward government sites with statistics from the US Bureau of hamsters. But how to handle the rest? (sigh) I used to like this student. Now I’m disgusted.

Administrative logic

Because I teach computer science, I automatically get a new PC for my office every three years. Because I teach at a state community college, the old PC that gets taken off my desk would normally be dumped in a state warehouse and ultimately destroyed, because they simply can't consider the possibility of, say, selling it to make money for the state and help someone else (such as one of our many financially struggling students) save money. But because I teach CIS I can request to keep my old desktop PC so that my students can occasionally actually tinker with a PC without the wrath of our IT department coming down on their heads, and I habitually make this request even if I have no specific need for it in any of my current courses.

Because I teach CIS I'm regularly required to learn new versions of software, and my plan for my summer break included making time to finally learn about Windows Server 2008. I'd planned on borrowing the old PC from my desk which had been sitting in my office for over a year, unused, and my department  chair agreed to that plan. I asked IT if I could also borrow a monitor and mouse, and that's when all hell broke loose. Apparently, there are absolutely no circumstances under which an employee may take a regular computer off campus -- this I learned in a meeting I was called into which included the Dean of Instruction and the head of IT.

Their solution? Since we're allowed to take home laptop PCs, I can take home one of the brand new high-end laptops that they just purchased, and keep it for the summer. It doesn't matter that the PC I'd hoped to bring home was worth maybe 1/10th of the one they gave me, or that there is so much greater risk of something happening to a laptop, or that laptops weren't really meant to be configured as servers. We can take home laptops, but can't take home desktops, period.

Is anyone else plagued by administrative decisions and policies that make absolutely no sense?