YOU WOULD THINK
During the last several weeks, I have
listened patiently to Natania’s daily rants about her on-going battles to
register for school, deal with the government bureaucracy so that she will
ultimately get the tuition refund she’s entitled to, and, last but not least,
get her rav kav (transit card) validated with the student discount. You would
think it wouldn’t be so difficult; after all, it’s all computerized; most of it
you can do on-line. You would think. (Before you go any further, it would
behoove you to get her account – all four parts – first hand by clicking here.)
I understood all too well. Forty-five years
ago, I too was trying to register for college courses, not at Hebrew U., but
City College (C.C.N.Y.), which in our time had as high a percentage of Jewish
students as an Israeli institution does today. Of course, nothing back then was
computerized, so the process was a bit complicated and somewhat harrowing.
It’s sometime in Sept.1958, and the
freshman class will finally get its turn to register for classes – after the
seniors, the juniors, and the sophomores have had their turns. We will have
spent a considerable amount of time poring over the catalogue of classes (an
item readily discarded after the fact, but I’d love to take a gander at one
right now just to see). We know what we’ve got to take: freshman classes that
are either mandatory for everyone or pre-requisites for the courses in what you
suppose will be your major. My courses would include English, a foreign
language (French), math for morons, European history (I think I also started
Latin – then a required course for English majors – that year, but I’m not absolutely
certain). Every student probably has it all worked out in theory so that the
earliest class starts at 10AM and the last one at 3PM, with an hour for lunch.
Nothing to it.
And then…………. To understand the heartache, you have to
understand the process. In the middle of Shepard, the main building in the
north campus (we’re talking about the uptown campus on 141st St.) is
the Great Hall, a place where even the strongest of us could be reduced to
tears – perhaps in keeping with its Gothic architecture. We enter and take a
place at the back of a large throng of our fellow freshmen and other stragglers
who haven’t yet finished registering. In the front of the hall are seated the
registrars, noting on paper who has registered for what. There are also a
series of movable blackboards with all the courses listed on it. If a student
is able to register for a class (say History 101 with Prof. Goldstein, MWF at
10AM), someone will so note that on the board. When that session is filled,
that someone will draw a line through it, telling everyone else that they are
out of luck.
Of course, standing at the back of the
line, you can’t begin to see the imminent danger lurking up front. It would be
like sitting in the bleachers and trying to detect the pitcher putting some forbidden
substance on the baseball. You might ask someone to save your spot so you can
go up and get a peek at the blackboards, but you might not realize the depth of
your dilemma until it’s too late. Every
class you planned to take is filled. Every attempt to revise your schedule is
thwarted. You could be two feet away from the registration table, and that last
place in English 101 gets taken and you have to start reconfiguring all over
again. So much for your well thought out schedule; now what are you going to
do? There are in theory enough spots in Freshman English for everyone, as there
are in theory enough spots in math for morons.
But what happens when the only sessions remaining are at the same time? To
make matters worse, some very frustrated young lady twenty feet ahead of you,
who has been trying for three hours to come up with a workable schedule, is
having a complete meltdown.
I would wind up with Mr. Nesselrode’s 8 AM
French class (where he closes the door at exactly 8AM; so if you’re a minute
late, you can’t get in – after you spent an hour getting there). Math for morons was at 4PM, with everything
else somewhere in the middle – leaving me much too much time to hang out on the
south campus lawn. Still, I was happy,
no, ecstatic, because at least I got through, I got something, unlike Miss
Meltdown, who could have gone to school seven days a week and still not be able
to fit in her classes.
It would get better. It did get easier the closer you were to
graduating and your classes became more specialized. You were pretty much assured a spot in third
term Ancient Greek or first term Anglo-Saxon (I can show you my battered copy
of “Beowulf and Judith, done in a normalized orthography and edited by Francis P.
Magoun, Jr, Department of English, Harvard University, 1959, to prove I was
there). And there was always this hope. There
has to be a better way and someday, somebody will figure it out. There’s no
reason for students to have to go through all this torture just to register for
classes. Had we known about computers back then, we would have understood how
easy everything could be. You would think.
