Our Bloody Alma Mater

Remember that thing I said a bit ago (like a month ago) about clinging to the romance of my insanely punishing class schedule?  Remember how I said I hoped it wouldn't wear off?

One of the, ah, things about UCR, and symptomatic of the reasons I cannot in good conscience recommend it to any undergraduate, is that there is not nearly enough parking.  For a largely commuter school with terrible overcrowded dorms, you would think they would provide enough parking space handy to campus.

Instead, the parking is Disneyland-distance from nowhere, and there are about a hundred and fifty too few spaces for as many commuters as are on campus at midday on any given weekday.

I thought they had fixed some of the problem this year.  They've certainly painted in more spots, and I've had no trouble thus far.

Some days ago, however, I discovered that reason it seemed fixed was entirely due to my class schedule.



Normally this quarter, my classes start at eight.  I hate this.  I used to complain about having to come in early for an eleven o'clock class.  On this day, however, I had a cancellation and so I was coming in at half-past ten.  I allowed myself forty minutes to get to class -- generous, I figured.

I drove in circles in the parking lot for a full hour.

What, I ask you, does one do when there is no parking and one needs to get to class?  According to our parking services, this isn't their problem.  Despite the fact that they must have had some vague involvement in  planning, y'know, parking, they only make vague nods at fixing the issue: they have set up a Twitter about available parking spaces, because of course we all have access to check Twitter while driving, and they suggest we come in thirty minutes earlier so that we have a whole extra half hour to drive around and note well how there still isn't anywhere to park.

I really thought it was better this year.

After an hour of checking various lots, I bit the bullet and drove to the shopping center a mile up the road and started walking.

This part, mind you, was my fault.  I should have reflected that I probably stopped wearing those cute sturdy Oxfords back in high school for a good reason, though with me "because I lost them" is generally a good guess at said reason.  The fact that there was crusted blood and pus and a lot of screaming when I tried to take my socks off and ripped the scabs away is not UCR's fault.  Nor can I blame my school for the fact that it was -- I do not jest -- 108 degrees Fahrenheit.

But I can blame UCR for that fact that they must have expected that circumstances like these occur.  And nothing has been done.  This is not, as one may charitably be inclined to think, for budget reasons; there have been no cuts to Transportation and Parking Services, which, like our athletics, have been insulated from the budget cuts that halved our University Writing Program.  Nothing has been done because UCR did not consider it important enough to make sure that there was enough of the resources we all pay for.

By the way, vehicles which don't park in one of the delineated spaces, instead taking advantage of a few out-of-the-way square feet of asphalt that no one's using to drive on, are ticketed.  Is it overly cynical to wonder how much profit is dragged in from students who decide that their studies are more of a priority than parking rules?

No, I don't think that's cynical at all.

This is just a tiny symptom of how our university thinks of us.  Its students and its staff are not important to this bloated bureaucracy. It can treat us this way in every area -- not just parking, everything -- because it knows we need the education or the job or both just too badly to dare protest.

And it was helpful -- as a fantasy -- but however I conjure up in my mind the picture of art students suffering in garrets in the Sorbonne and Oxford scholarship boys trying desperately to remain sufficiently impressive to earn their spots and weary suffragettes enduring immense hardships to achieve equality in education ... well, it stops being a support, it stops being admirable when it starts being you.