At the start of every semester, I receive a polite, automated invoice reminding me that I owe thousands of dollars for the privilege of higher education. I pay it begrudgingly, expecting a fair exchange of capital for knowledge.
However, we are now about three weeks into the semester, and I have come to an uncomfortable realization: I am not always receiving an education. Sometimes I take on a new role managing an entry-level intern who happens to have a doctorate and tenure.
The first 20 minutes of my Tuesday morning seminar are not spent interrogating macroeconomic theory or unpacking modern social contracts. They are spent watching a grown man wage war against an HDMI cable.
Our professor stands before the lecture hall, clutching a tangle of cords as if handling venomous snakes, staring at the podium touchscreen with profound existential dread. Without fail, a collective sigh ripples across 70 undergraduate students. By noon, four separate people from the front row have attempted to assist the poor man to no avail, as he passively shoos them off with his hand, insisting that if he walked six miles to school every day, he could figure out how to keep the projector from turning off mid-lecture (spoiler: he cannot).
This is just the warm-up. The true battlefield is Brightspace.
To my professor, our university’s learning portal isn’t an organizational tool — it is a high-tech safe he can’t crack. Assignments are uploaded at 3:17 a.m. in mystery formats, or are received via a defeated email that reads: “if yo cannot see my assignment i attached it to this email SENT FROM MY IPHONE.” Newsflash: the email has no attachments. Any attempt to clarify the discrepancy via a response email requires a level of patience that I have yet to discover. Reaching him by inbox feels like launching a radio signal into deep space: you wait days for a response, only to receive a three-word transmission typed entirely into the subject line with no punctuation: “NO EXTENSION SENT FROM MY IPAD.”
When we finally get around to the lecture material, the technological gap is replaced by a temporal one. In an earnest effort to make the course content feel “timely and relevant,” he routinely anchors his arguments to cultural touchstones from the Carter administration.
His favorite thing to do is ask if anyone was forced to read this book that can only be found in the depths of the old, retired classics section of your public library, where you will find one singular copy that has not been checked out since the ‘60s and has pages falling out due to the worn spine.
The room falls silent, hands frozen at our sides, as he sighs and launches into a rant about how he had to read these books, hated them and maybe should make us read them. Professor, I’m sorry, but I don’t think they even are in print anymore. As he explains this obscure reference, the students nod along with glazed-over expressions while frantically googling it under their desks just to parse the slide.
The generation gap is obviously funny, but there is also a genuine, frustrating irony here. Students are constantly told that college is an essential investment to prepare us for an ultracompetitive, modern workforce. We are lectured about efficiency, digital literacy and agile adaptation. Yet the very institution demanding our tuition is staffed by people who cannot convert a Word document into a PDF without calling campus tech support.
I don’t expect every professor to be an expert in contemporary internet culture, nor do I demand that my department chair understand algorithmic trading. However, if I am expected to pay full sticker price for a course, I shouldn’t spend half of it coaching a tenured academic through the complex wizardry of the “power” button.
Moving forward, I propose a modest policy amendment to the faculty handbook. Before any instructor is granted tenure, or allowed to dock points for late submissions, they must pass a basic competency exam. The test will consist of three tasks: uploading a readable syllabus to Brightspace, replying to a student in the body of an email and navigating out of full-screen mode without rebooting the computer.
Until that happens, I’ll be sitting in the front row. Not because I’m entranced in the material, but because someone has to be on standby when the projector inevitably goes to sleep.
Mia Kiristis is a junior majoring in psychology.
Views expressed in the opinions pages represent the opinions of the columnists. The only piece that represents the view of the Pipe Dream Editorial Board is the Staff Editorial.