The Art of Complaining

“Complain, complain, that’s all you do Ever since we lost! If it’s not the crucifixion It’s the Holocaust.” L. Cohen In my brief (five years) and tiny tenure as an administrator responsible for an array of university programs, one of my duties was to receive student complaints. Students usually had real or at least honestly perceived grounds for complaint. The typical complaint was about the quality of instruction or the instructor of a particular course. Frequently, the student would announce a shift of discourse with the phrase “It’s not the reason I’m here, but . . . .” The irony of the situation was that if a student wanted to complain about a grade or even the evaluation of a particular assignment, that was a situation I could easily deal with--and that was the point students would take twenty minutes to get to. The university had rules and procedures in place for reassessing a mark. As I discovered the hard way, the university provided no legal means for dealing w