Politics for Physicist 101

Careers advisory centre is terrified that students will count on this, waste their free time and raise the number of graduates failing to be employed and therefore damage the reputation (or at least the ranking) of the university. Department is trying to satisfy the teaching standards, listen to feedback and generally keep improving everything.

One of the improvements everyone seemed to be waiting for long before I arrived is the recording of the lectures. In the first term, everyone seemed to be excited about it (and no one really wanted to do it), but when it the system finally started to work, everyone suddenly had an opinion about it. A simple improvement requested by and designed for students suddenly become an affair. Some of our lecturers complained about the quality of the recordings, which one part of the students took as a prove that some lecturers don’t want the whole world to see how bad they actually are in lecturing, the other part was afraid that the bad quality of the recordings will, once again, damage the reputation of the University. Moreover, the whole system was supposed to be run by volunteers and someone decided that the most efficient way is to make everyone “volunteer”. The final drop was when one of our lecturers asked us to vote if we want his lectures being put online or not. For one day, it seemed to be the only topic of conversation; however the arguments started to be ridiculous already about 3am. When people started to realise this and pretty much everyone agreed that they won’t put any lectures on Youtube, the whole affair seemed absolutely meaningless.

Fortunately, another occasion for the people who started to like to tell everyone what they should think and do appeared almost instantaneously: The Big Election. So called roles of responsibility turned into roles of power and some first year physicist suddenly turned into first year politicians. I wonder how long is this one going to last, the vision of taking over the world with a group of friends seems to be more powerful and more fun than meaningless arguing. Yet, from the other point of view, it seems even more ridiculous.