Remember the drama around the award ceremony at my university? That whole story about the sweet elderly widow?
As you know, after a protracted struggle, I defeated the administration and forced it to include the widow’s award (and other scholarships) into the second part of the ceremony. Love, peace, butterflies. However, season two of this drama dropped yesterday and it’s a doozy.
From now on, we were told, professors are not going to be allowed to choose the students to award. Students’ names are going to be fed into a database, which will assign a random number to each student. Professors will be choosing whom to award but no longer between Jessica McBride and John Smith. We will be choosing between number 4,583 and number 7,912.
“But why?” I asked, making inhuman efforts to control my temper.
“Because,” I was told, “this will prevent professors from cherry picking which student will receive the award.” Cherry picking. This is the actual word that was used.
“That is the whole point, however,” I responded. “We pick the students who deserve the award based on our interactions with the students and our knowledge of their achievements.”
“Yes,” the administrator said in an accusatory tone. “Precisely! That is what makes the whole process unfair. Under the existing system there are students who have no chance of ever being awarded. We are trying to bring fairness to the process.”
“By turning it into a lottery?” At this point, I most definitely deserved an award for keeping my voice calm and my countenance mostly composed.
“I don’t understand why every professor who is being informed about this important and crucial change is so opposed to fairness,” the administrator pouted.
I am very glad I will no longer be department chair and will not have to find ways to bypass the system in the next award cycle. The next cheer is a wonderful person, a friend and the fellow Conservative. I feel very bad for her because I have no idea how she is going to handle the new process. I keep telling myself, I don’t have to care. I don’t have to care about this any longer. But it’s hard because this is absolute, shameless, ridiculous lunacy.
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