I am honored to have had the chance to serve on the board of the Tufts Economics Society. My term is ending this spring and I am actively deliberating whether or not I will continue on next year. At first this fact came as a shock to both my friends and my colleagues who know both how much I am involved in the society and how much I enjoy the activities in which we partake. However, I would be concealing my true feelings at this moment if I were to say that I unconditionally love every part of my job on the board.
First, however, it is important for me to acknowledge how thankful I am for the wonderful board members that share the responsibilities of running the society with me. Our society advisor, Prof. Garman, and associated faculty members have supported our projects and events throughout and I thank them wholeheartedly. To our 250 members that have become involved: thank you.
While the society has had all of this support from the department's and students' side, what is most lacking is support from the University. Today, a speaker from Harvard will come to try to get Tufts students involved in a wonderful opportunity that has never been made available to them before. The society has been planning this event in conjunction with Harvard since late November. While we have done all of the work we can to make the event run smoothly, factors that are out of our control have made planning this event such a difficulty, rather than a satisfaction.
Here is why. When we wanted to reserve a room, we had to go through two different people: one person was in charge of the room before 5 p.m. and someone in a completely different office was in charge of the room after 5 p.m. When we finally got the room reserved, all we needed was a simple, old-fashioned overhead projector. Such a projector can be purchased at Staples for as low as $150 (I checked). I e-mailed the two people who reserved the room for us about our need for a projector. One of these people told me to check a URL that did not work while the other sent me a URL that was for faculty members only.
This whole process took at least two days and in the end got us nowhere. Another URL I found said a secretary in the Tisch Library is in charge of AV equipment for Eaton. I managed to get her on the phone first thing in the morning but it was only a false hope that I could accomplish something. Her system that reserves AV carts was down. She called me back at the end of the day after her system recovered and left a voice mail saying that the cart for the first floor of Eaton was reserved for the date and time that we needed. "Sorry" was the concluding remark of her voicemail.
Outrageous. It is as if my need for a projector had gone away suddenly because the one cart she has is already reserved. I called her back to see where else I can go to find a projector. For two days, she was out of her office, away from her desk or busy. Finally, I went into her office personally and asked her what I can do. I STILL NEED A PROJECTOR! She shrugged her shoulders and said that there is only one AV cart per floor, that it is rented out already and that I would have to change the room to a location that does have an AV cart. CHANGE THE ROOM? That took enough time going through two people from two different offices!
She gave me the number of a manager in Tisch's IT department who doesn't seem to answer his phone. In near tears, I went to my good friend, a secretary in the Economics Department office, who said that she said could lend me hers. She was very kind, however the problem is that the talk ends at 5:30 and she leaves at 4:30. We figured out that the only way I could get a projector was to take hers with me to the lecture, bring it home that night, and return it to the Economics Department office the next day. If this is not lunacy, I don't know what is. Take home a projector? Perhaps my housemates wouldn't mind the overnight guest, however does this whole thing not seem a bit outrageous?
My point in writing this is not to write a catty list of conversations I have had with various administrators at Tufts. It is to make the point that most of my time spent on the Tufts Economics Society is not devoted to the activities, events or students themselves. My time is wasted running around trying to disentangle the unorganized mess collectively called Tufts' administration. And that is precisely why I feel disheartened at the thought of continuing my program the board next year.
While I thought that most of Tufts' problems were due to a lack of endowment (and yes, there are serious problems due to a lack of endowment), on a more fundamental level, they are due to a complete lack of rules or organization on the part of the administration. In the business world, this is called mismanagement. And we know what happens to bad managers in that world. Tufts should not be run like a corporation, however when it comes to getting the most basic things like a projector for a talk, one should not have to spend two weeks just finding one and then commute home with it after the talk!
Manijeh Azmoodeh is a junior majoring in international relations and economics. She is the PR coordinator of the Tufts Economics Society.
