3.966 support: tongue-checking & other survival skills (33)

Willard McCarty (MCCARTY@vm.epas.utoronto.ca)
Sun, 28 Jan 90 20:30:46 EST

Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 3, No. 966. Sunday, 28 Jan 1990.

Date: Fri, 26 Jan 90 22:01:00 EST
From: EIEB360@UTXVM
Subject: 3.959 dead Macs, comfy offices,

Thanks to Kessler-at-UCLA for the sympathetic words. It's been said to
me before (rather frequently, in fact, by my wife) that I should wise
up; and I did in fact make it clear that if no reimbursement for that
controller card were promised I would feel quite free to pull the damn
thing and take it home, having paid for it anyway. Where they've got us
of course (They, I mean) is that we love what we're doing: they could
put the blame on us, perhaps, for putting the temptation to exploit that
love so squarely in their way. But I keep hoping things will get
better-- hope not being hope, as Marianne Moore says, till all ground
for hope has vanished. I had a talk with the Provost yesterday about a
project I've been working on; it meets all his criteria, as he
acknowledged, but then he went on to bemoan the dehumanizing of education
represented by the intrusion of the computer into the instructional
environment-- this from a man running a university with 50,000+ students
and not a jot of real support for teaching. There weren't, he said,
enough faculty members working the add/drop tables the day before the
semester began: how sad it is, he thinks, that faculty don't give a damn
about their students. It continues to amaze me that I held my tongue so
firmly in check. I don't know whether to congratulate myself for that
or not. Argh. John Slatin