FeatofClay

I know, right? I was like "THE MOTH DICK GUY!" like he was a long lost friend from summer camp.

Not only did I bawl my eyes out, my then-11-year-old son spent the rest of the summer having regular crying fits over stuffed animals from his past we had given away. I would go up to his room and find him in bed sobbing, asking me over and over if I thought his giant lobster was in a landfill somewhere. MULTIPLE TIMES. And the thing is, I totally got where he was coming from. Powerful stuff.

I can't justify the growth in all administration--and I can assure you that there is bloat!--but people definitely underestimate the demands placed on colleges to "administrate."

My campus has a full-time staff member whose primary job is to deal with the many, MANY surveys we get from magazines and guidebooks. We don't even answer all the ones that come in. You should see the annual USN&WR survey. It has over 600 items on it (they don't use all of them to rank schools, obviously, but they ask for a ton of data). This is just one small example, of course, but I offer it up because most people don't realize how time-consuming that kind of expectation on a University gets to be. The U has added an administrator to payroll and yet there isn't a faculty member or student on campus who can say "Oh yes, my campus experience is directly, demonstrably better because the U added that person." The benefits are indirect (The U recruits better students, or more students who have a better fit; the reputation of the students' degrees are enhanced, etc)

There's evidence that rapists aren't typically one-time offenders. Information gathered about a case with an uncooperative victim might prove helpful in future cases. To me, that challenges the notion that it is a waste of time to do any investigation at all unless you have a fully cooperative victim.

This attitude also bodes very poorly for justice in the cases of rape where the victim cannot cooperate due to incapacitation---perhaps due to the severity of the injuries suffered during the sexual assault, or intellectual or physical disabilities already present. A police force that thinks it can only solve rapes if a victim cooperates is not going to have the chops to handle those.

Interesting. May there be some day in the future when I can say "Oh, it's an Aston Martin, reverse is on the dash" and have friends and bystanders awed at my command of random information.

When I got my electric car it gave a valet pause, but it is anything but high-end.