iSchool drama

Wait, you ask, what's the drama? After all, they will graduate on time- albeit by taking a less desirable distance section. But no harm done, right?

Well, the drama lies in the fact that for over a week, this 560 drama played out publicly on the various school listservs, with students publicly questioning the administration's failure to openly address this issue. Many, many students were angry, confused, and worried about their own future ability to graduate on time and were discussing this on iChat, iKnow, and amongst themselves. An ALISS officer discussed the situation with school administration and asked for a public statement on the issue. Anything, really. An acknowledgement that students are concerned. Now, there might be good reasons that the iSchool doesn't guarantee spaces in core classes for graduating students. But a simple statement stating why those policies are there would go a long way toward diffusing the situation. Perhaps something like: "we've considered a waitlist or add-code procedure for core class registration but have decided against it because of [x]". Or, "we've decided that core classes beyond 510 and 520 will be first come first served because [x]".  

But all we get is silence.

I have two issues with this. One, it's a basic lack of respect by the administration to refuse to acknowledge student concerns. Students, first year students, are scared that this will happen to them; perhaps they'll be unable to register for a core class and they won't have the option of a distance class to save their behinds.  To pretend this issue doesn't exist, or to refuse to acknowledge student's requests for a clarifying statement, is disrespectful. But it's also more than that; it's a failure of leadership. For all the iSchool talks about creating the future leaders of the profession, they routinely fail at modeling leadership traits themselves.

Then this weekend comes the iSchool student body elections. Now, I'm not exactly neutral on this issue; I'm the ALISS vice-president and the iServe webmaster. So I have a pretty good grasp on what's going on in the school; I'm consistently involved in a wide variety of events; and I'm proud of the organizations I serve and the other officers I work with. Enough so that when I read the website of a pair of students running for ALISS president on a platform of "ALISS is crap, here's what we're going to do", I can't decide if I should laugh hysterically or gouge my eyes out in disgust.

Now seriously, kids. If you want to critique the way things have gone down this year, by all means do so. Certainly there is room for improvement. But to make suggestions for next year that are directly lifted off the things we did this year, and then to accuse current officers of not doing much, or excluding participation, is downright crazy.

It also seems very bizarre to me that two people who, to my knowledge, have never come to an ALISS open meeting, have never contacted an ALISS officer to discuss any issues, have never offered to volunteer for any ALISS activity such as booksale (The most successful one in the past 10 years, I might add) or have never done anything to suggest an interest in ALISS at all are suddenly selling themselves as the ALISS saviors.

I can only ask one thing: What crack pipe are they smoking?

________

* So sue me.

-UPDATE-

Ok, so the candidates in question apologized for their candidate statements and clarified their intentions. It seems they really didn't get how their statements would be construed. Fine, apology accepted; however this whole thing seems to indicate a lack of insight and/or diplomatic skills which is kind of important for an ALISS president. But oh well. I'm sure they're both perfectly nice people who are very enthusiastic and excited to take on leadership positions. If only they weren't so badly misinformed about ALISS's activities this year.