Tiny college, middle of nowhere. Nothin’ to do.
But I got lots of studying done, and “dadgummit, we made our own fun”. Which was awesome: We made up some great parties, like the one for the Day of the Dead, with tequila shots, tequila drinks, and tequila milk shakes… and a nacho bar.
In the early 2003 and 2004, my university required a form to be typed–not submitted online, not typed on a computer and printed out, not even hand-written–and submitted to the registrar’s office to get approval of “excess units in transfer.” The worst part of the whole incident? When I told the clerk at the registrar’s office that the only time I’d seen a typewriter in the last decade or more was in an antique shop, the clerk directed me to the university’s Women’s Center. Yep. Where else would you have a (stereo)typewriter, after all?
Texas A&M, early-mid 1990s.
What sucked at the time, is that the school, the student body and the surrounding urban area were in the process of getting out from under their own historical shadow. All 3 were convinced that they were small, rural and stuck in 1962, when in fact, they were large (40,000 students, in a 150,000 person urban area (inc. students)).
This led to a lot of annoyance on my part, because the town and university tended to have a real resistance to change that meant that a lot of things weren’t as efficient, or as well-served as they’d have been without that “small & country” attitude.
Plus, way too many of the students were willing to buy into the rural shit-kicker attitude and image of the school, despite having grown up in suburban Houston, Dallas or San Antonio. This meant that in practice, if you didn’t like country music, cheap beer, and stuff like that, you were more or less out of luck unless you were a frat/sorority person.
The masturbatory focus on NCAA college athletics, which is the most useless part of college. And let me tell you what caused me to write it off. One day I drove up to campus to teach a 3-hour engineering class at night (I was an assistant professor then). So I drive up to the faculty parking outside the engineering school, and there was some dooode in a fraternity shirt blocking the way with a lighted wand.
“You can’t park here, ma’am. VIP game parking only.”
“I’m Professor Persson (assistant, actually, but hey, I got a paycheck…). I’m teaching a class tonight.”
“Sorry, VIP game parking only.”
“No, you don’t understand. I am teaching a class tonight. I work here.”
“Sorry, VIP game parking only.”
“I’m parking here anyway. Move.”
“OK, but if you do I’ll call and have you towed.”
“Then where the fuck do I park?”
“(indicates parking lot about 1.2 miles away)”
So there I went, and made it late to my class. You know, the one I was teaching? It was raining and I was soaked.
Upon commiserating with the rest of the staff the next day, they told me that this was nothing new. So being young and naive, I complained to the Dean. The Dean’s response? To summarize, “tough.”
When a bunch of kids chasing a basketball is more important to a University than teaching a graduate engineering class, you’re beyond the fucking looking glass. They only had to have sacrificed a dozen parking spaces so legitimate instructors could teach their classes. But no, jock culture rules, and every time my old University (I’m with another now) sends me an alumni request begging for money, I send it right in the trash.
I went to Florida State University starting in the mid-'80s. During that time, the school began renovating and remodeling the Student Union building, while also adding on to it. For a couple of years, they had a sign out on the corner of West Tennessee (big street that runs next to campus) and N. Woodward (street that bisects the campus itself) that said (in huge letters)
Pardon our dust
We’re expandivating
Used to drive me crazy seeing a university being cutesy like that.
Other than that, the biggest way that FSU sucked was that sometimes, particularly in the summer, there might be one day a month when it was impossible to find any kind of party at all and we had to just sit at home drinking tequila and beer and smoking our own weed. Hard times, I tell ya. 
I went to a private college in Kentucky for undergrad. The College was affiliated with the Baptist Church, and the school held onto completely archaic ideology regarding women and college life. The women’s dorms were locked down at 1AM on weeknights and 12 midnight on weekends. If a girl wanted to go somewhere overnight, she had to sign out and say where she was going and who she was going with. This was all subject to approval. In other words “I am staying at my boyfriend’s apartment tonight” was not gonna fly. The dorms would be locked up and if you happened to get in after curfew, you would have to call the RA or Director and try to get someone to answer to let you in. Otherwise you slept on the sidewalk. The reason you could not get a hold of anyone to let you in is because the RAs were going in every girl’s room to shine a flashlight on them to make sure they were there.
The men’s dorms were always open and remained unlocked. The men would not have to sign out and could come and go as they pleased. Although the county was dry, the women were all locked up so where could they go?
On the rare occasion there were open houses, and we could visit the dorms of the opposite sex. However, the doors had to remain open and there always had to be a foot on the floor.
In the ten years since I graduated from the school, the college has become a University and the women’s dorm rules have been relaxed. Probably because you can’t accept state funding while upholding sexist oppression. They did successfully kick out a guy a few years ago because he admitted to being gay on his Myspace page, so I guess teh gayyy are the ones being oppressed there now.
I went to a private college in NYC ,'06-'10. Saint Francis College in Downtown Brooklyn to be exact, what sucked about it so majorly was that for my first two years there it was extremely segregated. All the White kids to one cafeteria all the Black kids to another, with your few floaters of course. It got to the point that it was so bad professors started randomly bringing it up in class, since it was starting to happen in classrooms too. Eventually it got even worse and they tore down one cafeteria and turned it into a lounge type area forcing everyone to filter into the one. It was really depressing.
Snowboard Bo: That sign reminded me of my community college in Monterey. In 2001 or 2002, just before one semester began, the college had one of those moveable* signs on CA Hwy 1 near the exit leading to the college. The name of the college was misspelled. Drivers on said highway were politely informed that registration had begun for Monterey Peninsula Collage.
*Yep, I checked a dictionary before using this spelling. For those who are disturbed by this spelling, mentally replace it with the alternate spelling: movable.
Early to mid 80s we’d drive to your campus from Austin to play on your golf course. It was never crowded, and the people who played there were more relaxed than the fraternity assholes all over the Austin courses.
Austin was okay, but with 50000+ students it had zero common culture…it was more like a small city.
IUPUI, 2002-2010. (Yeah, I was a part-time student.) An urban, mostly commuter campus on the west side of downtown Indianapolis.
Parking was always horrible at the beginning of each semester thinning out as the semester wore on and people dropped classes. There were several times that I had to park two or three miles off campus and walk. Lots would also be shut down for special events, as for Una Persson, including off-campus things. Which sucked on weekends, because the parks, stadiums, museums, etc. nearby had special events every weekend. Rib Fest? Shut down the surface lots. Mini-marathon? Shut down the surface lots. Special events also sucked because the primary routes into and out of campus were routinely shut down or rerouted for bike races, walkathons, and so on. It was supposed to get better as they began building parking garages, but never seemed to improve. Surface lots shed student parking while expanding spaces for administration and employees, and the garages often have restrictions on parking (visitor-only, Herron Art students only, students only after 4 pm).
Being a commuter campus reduced any sense of belonging, and administration was always at pains to get people to participate in school activities. Most students worked and had families off-campus, so we’d just drive in, take a class, then drive out. That leaves a small proportion of the students (the few on-campus residents, plus students involved in mentoring centers and such) with a large proportion of “power” and prestige on campus. You’d see the same students in all the promotional pictures, the same people winning awards over and over, the same people grabbing the scholarships. I was lucky in that regard, as a couple of years in, I was tapped to develop mentoring programs for several logic courses, so I was able to take advantage of it, and graduated with a profit from the scholarships and have a ridiculously long list of awards. But it wasn’t something I sought out, and I had no clue the mentoring programs even existed until I got hired by one. One of my final projects was a large survey of the students to find out how many even knew about the existence of multiple school programs, and on average, about 70% had no idea about any of them.
Food. Wasn’t bad when I first started there, as there were multiple options on campus; standard cafeteria fare, chain sandwich shops, pizza shops, cafes, and they were in multiple buildings. Didn’t like the cafeteria pizza? Head over to the hotel/conference center and grab some Pizza Hut. Then in 2006 or so, the school sold its food concessions to a single company, Chartwells, which had crappier food at higher prices, slow service, eliminated all franchises except for the Chartwells-run Chick-Fil-A, and which consolidated most eating options into a single building.
There is an underlying sense that the university is also becoming more unfriendly to non-traditional, older students. The average age of incoming freshmen has dropped to nearly that of a traditional 4-year with a concomitant drop in enrollment of older students, there’s an increasing emphasis on new “collaborative learning techniques” rather than traditional lectures when it’s been shown that older students are at a disadvantage when they’re used, they’re bandying about (with IU, one of the parent universities) requiring students to have a semester of study abroad, despite the expense, and the stress on work and family. A 40-year old guy coming back to finish his degree can’t easily drop his life and go outside the country for four months.
Snow issues. Those cleared up near the end of my time there, as IUPUI administration finally began putting their foot down about shutting the university when snow was making commuting problematic. IU runs IUPUI, and IU’s policy is to never close their own campus. Which is fine as most IU students live on campus and can walk. IUPUI? Downtown traffic is snarled, there are crashes all over the interstates, and 90% of the students are trying to get through that mess. And any good snow fall, once plowed, reduced surface parking by 1/3 to 1/2… again, a problem being fixed now with garages being put up all over, but in the first 6 years of my time there, I dreaded being on campus when it snowed.
It’s in Flint. :eek:
(U of M-Flint)
I graduated from Ohio University in 1972, which probably qualifies me as a prehistoric curiosity, but…
The dorms (and most of the other buildings) were not air conditioned. Heating came from a central plant and the heat was turned on and off on set dates regardless of weather.
Dorms were single-sex, with ‘open visitation’ only on weekends and only in the men’s dorms.
I had $10.00 per week in spending money.
It’s in Watts.
I may be sort of threadshitting here, but college never sucked. Quite the opposite, college was great for me.
Primary school was forgettable to unpleasant, middle school was pure hell. High school wasn’t particularly better. But in college I got to meet other geeks and made the first real friends I had in the education system. And I had a great time. So no, college never sucked for me. I might have had a few gripes about minor matters, but nothing serious compared to the shit I lived through before college.
An associate professor is a full time tenure track rank and nothing like a TA or grad assistant. Generally professor ranks go fom assistant prof, assoc prof (with or without tenure) and only achieve full prof rank late in their career.
College was amazing for me, in retrospect. I didn’t enjoy it as much as I could have though. To whatever degree it sucked was because I was a bit more messed up in the head than I am now.
The only real complaint was that it was near impossible to find a job. I went to IU Bloomington which had 30,000 students. So finding a job was near impossible for me, since the labor market for young unskilled labor was glutted.
Aside from that, excellent. I would like to be buried in my college town, at least in the 5 years after I left I haven’t experienced anything in my life that made me want to be buried anywhere else. I really dislike my hometown, no other town I’ve lived in made me feel as safe and like I was burgeoning on so many levels as my college town.
Frats.
At a few colleges, including my not-at-all-lamented former employer, “associate faculty” is used as a euphemism for “adjunct.” I’m guessing that’s what the poster probably meant?
As for the OP, hmm. There were a lot of ways in which my college years kinda sucked, although most of them weren’t the college’s fault, but rather my fault for being a socially awkward nerd who was entirely too fond of boys and alcohol and had no clue how to handle either.
The worst I can say is that the campus was a sea of mud when it rained, which was all the goddamn time, and that it was surrounded by Colonial Williamsburg, which is not exactly a cool and exciting place unless you are really into tricorn hats and blacksmithery. (On the other hand, it did add a certain appealing level of surrealism.)
Our golf course was one of the really great things at A&M- right on campus, cheap as hell, and a decent course in addition. We used to play super-twilight ($6 w/student id) during the early and late parts of the school year, and during summer school. Usually we could get 9-10 holes in before it got too dark.
The psychology course in my college was atrociously organized. They were in “sorta between reorganizations”, for the entire six years I was there. Hardly any colleges or much guidance in any way. I’ll stop now, I don’t want people to know my degree is as worthless as I think it is.
God, I’ve read popular science books on psychology since I graduated an dmost of them were better then the required reading list in college. That is, if you could find out in time what the required reading list was, where you could order the books, and where to find a professor that would take a test on them.