On The Relative Merits of Incompetence

On Sunday, several staff members, myself included, collaborated on a piece outlining the disastrous online course Add/Drop that occurred last Monday. As I wrote in that article, I was not entirely shocked by the College’s Add/Drop fumble, but I have been shocked by their response—or lack therefore of. 

At 12 a.m. on the first Monday of the term, the online Add/Drop portal was scheduled to open to allow students to register for classes. Given the recent announcements that classes would be online for the entire term and grades would be pass-fail only, everyone knew that an onslaught of Add/Drop requests were coming. Thus, even though no statement was released from the College about Add/Drop, it was the universal assumption that the Administration had accounted for this impending online traffic jam and was planning accordingly.  This is not to say that Dartmouth students have overwhelming faith in College officials—they do not. Even the authority-philic government majors will conceded that the Administration is sclerotic. But with weeks to prepare for a very apparent problem, certainly some plan was being made?

This modicum of confidence in the Administration kept students from panicking when the Add/Drop portal didn’t open at midnight…or at 1a.m….or 2 a.m. We believed that someone was working on this problem. They clearly weren’t doing an excellent job, but they were at least doing something. Even to a skeptic like me, this belief didn’t seem unreasonable—with all 5000 Dartmouth undergrads waiting up for hours, surely at least one administrator was awake addressing the issue. 

This confidence dwindled as the night wore on with no communication from the College, but was revived at 3a.m. when a statement from the Dean On-call was circulated in student groupmes. The message stated that Add/Drop would be postponed until 8 a.m. the following morning and we should all go to sleep until then. 

Of course, that did not happen. Add/drop opened unannounced at approximately 5:30 a.m. Students who, either by merit of their time zone or their poor sleep schedules, were still awake rushed to register for their classes while attempting to alert their friends of the change. Students who were foolish enough to take the Dean at her word were left at scrambling at 8:01 to get into any courses with an open spot. 

After hours of waiting that night, followed by a mad dash to classes in the morning, another period of waiting commenced—waiting for the Administration to address the mess they made. This editorial is being published nearly two weeks after the initial meltdown and we are still waiting.

Two weeks into a very unusual term, I, along with most students, have moved on the frustration of the logistical fallout of an Add/Drop gone awry. Classes, even if they were not our first choice, are underway and we have more pressing concerns. However, I find my frustration with the Administration’s lack of response to be growing. At this point, it is very clear that the Administration has no intention of even acknowledging this fiasco, much less apologizing for it. 

There are two schools of thought on this omission. The first argues that the Administration is so out of touch and fundamentally ignorant to students’ actual concerns that, though they send asinine emails about campus parking policy daily, they see no need to address the fact that hundreds of students struggled to get into courses they need after the Add/Drop fiasco. The second argues that the Administration is not ignorant, but deceptive. It states that petty College bureaucrats will do everything they can (which is a considerable amount given their present monopoly on campus news) to cover their mistakes and bolster their authority. 

Each day, I find myself moving further from the former camp into the latter. I am increasingly unconvinced that dozens of deans and other administrators can be so fully ignorant. Surely they must have some idea of what they’re doing—even if their primary job is just to cover up their own mistakes. My more optimistic friends tell me that my appreciation for the Administration’s incompetence is simply not robust enough. I hope they are right. I would much rather have an incompetent Administration than an actively deceptive one.

On the other and trite as it already sounds, we are living in unprecedented times. College officials cannot be expected to respond perfectly. Thus, even while their Add/Drop blunder was particularly egregious, most students, myself included, were willing to grant the Administration quite a bit of latitude on this account and many others. Their total lack of transparency and self-reflection betrays this goodwill. Continued mistakes indicate incompetence, but this continued opacity indicates deception, among other moral ills. In these first few weeks of the College’s blundering Covid response and transition online, administrative incompetence has been the term du jour. As a longtime critic of the Administration, I considered myself a bit of an expert on the subject—nevertheless, even I am getting an education in the relative merits of incompetence.