THE N. U. SHUFFLE:
The popular dance that keeps students on their toes.
By Bill Kirtz
Horror stories from Huntington Avenue: An Indian student arrived on campus ready to begin courses, only to find that he had to fly right back to Asia because the International Student Office had muffed his visa application. A graduate student, having transferred University College credits to day classes, encountered an asterisk on his grade sheet instead of the A he had earned. Other students have lost their financial aid with no notice or explanation.
Not to worry. They're just doing the N.U. Shuffle, more common on campus than the Macarena. Our hallowed halls have long echoed with cries of "They have me in the wrong division!" and "I've been purged from all my courses!" Bureaucracy is the bane of the Northeastern student existence.
What sets the bureaucracy here apart, perhaps, is that the tuition-payer rather than the institution seems to be held responsible for righting every screwup. Students here "have to advocate for themselves to get things done," says the graduate student whose A was transmuted into an asterisk. It turned out that his original grade sheet had been smudged. Mistakes happen. But he found it was up to him-not the teacher, the department, or the registrar's office-to resolve the situation. He calls his undergraduate years at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst more hassle-free. "Sometimes, you feel like you're doing someone else's job," he says, echoing the common gripe. "How many times do you have to do things twice?" Now that he's part of the administration-on the other side of the N.U. desk-he tries to be as "user-friendly as possible."
Judging from the invective hurled at the third floor of Richards Hall, the financial aid office could stand to learn that lesson. "It's a big mess this year, with nonstop hassles and not much being done about it. It's absolutely horrible," says Stacy Archfield, student government vice president for financial affairs. "It's the most bureaucratic, the most red tape. Students just dread going up there. There are cases of lost aid for no reason at all." Particularly infuriating is the office's penchant for making students stand in one line just to get approval to stand in another line.
Getting a response from Financial Aid for a comment illustrates the good, the bad, and the ugly sides of Northeastern's bureaucracy. The head of the office has no direct extension listed, ensuring a ten-minute minuet of beeps, clicks, recorded voices, and elevator music. Then a live voice cuts the connection when asked to link the caller with the director. Repeating the routine elicits the news that the director is no longer with us-now the senior associate director is in charge. Can one speak to him? "He's in a meeting." What's his extension? "I don't want to give it out."
When finally reached, however, acting financial aid director Michael Wildeman exudes warmth. With a sign over his desk noting, "Sometimes you're the pigeon, sometimes you're the statue," he explains that in an era of escalating tuition, many visitors to his office inevitably leave disappointed. "We have to police for the federal government, represent the institution, and also be an advocate for students and parents. These roles don't always coincide. Often there's conflict," he says.
Weekly meetings with his thirty-five-person staff include discussion of aid applicants' gripes. "Are some complaints justified? Of course, [but] the student is a customer we need, and he deserves the best one-on-one treatment we can give him. We work on that constantly," Wildeman says.
But one-on-one contact is precisely what's lacking at many offices around the university, according to Archfield, a middler majoring in geology. "After you spend fifteen minutes on hold and actually get someone in the bursar's office, they're very helpful," she says. "Finding the right place to go is the problem."
Archfield thinks Northeastern's bureaucracy will shape up if and when its top people deem it vital-and enforce that priority. She praises President Richard Freeland for action in this area. "When he heard that students weren't invited to his inauguration, he corrected the situation immediately. This sends a good message." One person who's gotten that message is Jean Eddy, vice provost for enrollment management. "She's excellent, very open," says Archfield. "She tells it how it is and doesn't give you the runaround."
For Eddy, cutting red tape is less a courtesy than a necessity in keeping students at Northeastern. "If they're happy with their professors, their major, and their college, you can do an awful lot of things to them-like a bad roommate or bad food-and they'll hang in there. If they have an incomprehensible teaching assistant and a run-in with the bursar's office, they'll want to leave," she says. "I tell them that they didn't come here to worry about housekeeping. They shouldn't have to spend hours and hours trying to figure out their bills or their housing paperwork."
Eddy was "flabbergasted" when she arrived here nine years ago to find an antiquated computer network. It forms a big part of the bureaucratic tangle about which students rightfully complain, she says. "We have four systems that don't talk to each other. We're as frustrated as the students." Records get purged because one department's computer doesn't know what the other's is doing. "You thought you did everything you had to do, but the computer didn't know that," Eddy groans. Because you can "make or break students' lives" by how you handle their records, N.U. is "trying to build a fully integrated system, and when we do, so much that students see as bureaucracy will go away. If we had the tools, it would be easy," she says.
What doesn't kill you makes you stronger, Friedrich Nietzsche once said. Though Nietzsche never had to brave multiple lines to get a Leipzig U. parking sticker or found himself inexplicably dropped from Philosophy 101, many N.U. administrators agree. One says that having to be on top of your own records is "good training for life." Eddy adds, "Northeastern students have to be able to deal. They're on a roller coaster, they've got to be in-your-face people." If they aren't, "this place is just too tough."
Tougher than what? N.U. business professor Charles Baker thinks bureaucrats get a bad rap and that "Northeastern runs pretty well." He should know; he sat behind "in" and "out" boxes as U.S. undersecretary of health and human services and assistant secretary of transportation, as head of the international consulting firm Harbridge House, and as a Westinghouse Electric Corporation executive.
He has a pungent one-word response to people who equate bureaucracy with mindless paper-shuffling. "There are times when routine is highly desirable for repetitive activities," he adds more diplomatically. "There'd be chaos with no rules. Why reinvent the wheel every time you do something like registration, for example? With no development office, there'd be no fund-raising, and most of the faculty wouldn't be here. Every organization depends on very bureaucratic things, like human resources, plant operations, legal departments. Take them away and the organization stops. The quality of bureaucrats at Northeastern is pretty good. They know their job, and they're more flexible than they're thought to be. It runs pretty well, as well and maybe better than Harvard, better than Westinghouse, and at least as well as I ran Harbridge House."
Good isn't perfect. Baker says bureaucrats in general could be more willing to revisit routines to see if they should be changed. Agreeing that departmental pride-in serving students, for example-is laudable, he thinks it can sometimes be parochial. "Holism is the way of the future. How can you have decentralization and holism? It's a tough administrative question." Eddy admits that "we could do a better job cross-training people within systems. Sometimes the frontline people can't assess when a situation is out of control because they lack training."
But will things ever change? Many mid-level staffers fear the big Northeastern machine will keep grinding on-and sometimes over-hapless tuition-payers. "They've been saying for years that we should coordinate systems," says one frustrated manager. "We need some restructuring, a systems person. People in the university are trying to put on Band-Aids, but they aren't having any effect. We need to look at the big picture. Down in the trenches, it ain't happening."
That depends on your perspective. In the words of a departed but still beloved administrator, "Northeastern would be a great place without the students." To make an omelet, don't you have to break a few middlers? And didn't that Indian scholar have some unforgettable memories to share with the folks back home?
Bill Kirtz is an associate professor in the School of Journalism. His opinions appear regularly in "Talk of the Gown."
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