I think I might have finally hit a bit of oil again...
It's one of those things that whenever you get hit with a really great idea, you're never in the right place at the right time to jot it down and remember it for posterity. Fortunately for me, mine (not necessarily great, but an idea nonetheless) happened to rebound again this evening, after blessing me on the way to Digital earlier today. The profound thought is namely this: why should administration be requesting patience and understanding when they so rarely bless us with the same? I know, I know... the golden rule and all of that. But I just figured I'd take the time to point out the hypocrisy in this.
The last Bud chapel (I think last Wednesday) he alluded to the fact that the "summer project" is just now coming to an end and is indeed, still not done. However, he admonished us that we should be glad that this is going on and noted that this delayed termination date is typical of many large projects and that things should be done shortly. Furthering this line of thought, we have the ever-present security dilemma and the cameras which Bud alluded to sometime last year (aside: we really should probably go through and find the actual date he made reference to those and quote him for posterity.) They're still not here, we have no closed-circuit tv and the budget for security seems to be much less than it should be. Cars are broken into regularly and this whole situation is something of an ongoing debacle. Yet Bud admonishes us that we live in an insecure area of the world and that we really are quite safe and ought to count our blessings and be wise. This is all well and good, and I think these are reasonable requests.
The problem comes out when administration turns around and refuses to make any concessions or hold anything back with regards to its own students. My favorite example, and I will hold this until I leave, is the legend of the 37 chapel credits. For those of you who have never benefitted from this story, here we go...
My old RA Aaron ran things on my floor, quite smoothly all freshman year. We even had the occasional room check, nobody did anything really dumb on his watch and largely things went quite well, especially as a guys' floor goes... well over par. Aaron had a fatal weakness, and that was that he never could seem to go to chapel and thusly ran deficient and had to do makeups. It was the same fall and spring semester... Aaron got behind, Aaron did makeups. But alas, during spring semester his memory slipped a cog and rather than do makeups to sum things up to 38, he only got to 37. And so in August, administration comes calling. It would seem that 37 chapel credits is 1 short and that due to this unfortunate circumstance, Aaron would no longer be allowed to be RA. No matter the fact that he had an impeccable service record, the love and respect of the floor, and had really gone to a lot of effort to make chapel credits up and had just fallen one short... this wasn't good enough for LeTourneau Standards.
I'm really at a loss on this one, because on one hand, I don't think I've held up the standard all of the time myself and I'm not one who deserves the right to judge. But on the other hand, you've got to see that something isn't right here and that this is more the rule than the exception: admin demands and does not reciprocate. If you were God, would you want these guys building a "temple" at LU in your name? I sure wouldn't.
Posted by Vengeful Cynic at October 8, 2003 09:40 AM