There’s an academic joke that says that the job of a university president is really pretty simple. To ensure happiness on campus, all he or she needs to do is make sure that there’s sex for the undergraduates, food for the graduate students, and parking for the faculty.<\/p>\n
It’s certainly true that parking enforcement has been one of the most efficient departments on every campus I’ve been associated with. At Maryland, it was practically the only efficient thing there, but it was a fearsome oepration. I once parked my car in a faculty lot just long enough to run inside and drop a homework set in a professor’s mailbox, and came out to find a ticket on my car. Duane Simpkins, the point guard on the basketball team, got in trouble with the NCAA because he ran up over $8,000 in parking fines, and sports pundits boggled at the number. All I can say is that anyone who found that improbable had never tried to park a car in College Park.<\/p>\n
The other big problem with campus parking isthat the rates can be pretty outrageous. One of the grad students at Yale when I was there had calculated that it was actually cheaper to have your car towed once a semester than to pay the parking fee. I never checked the math, but it cost a lot of money to get a sticker for an inconvenient lot. I lived close enough to the lab that I opted to walk in instead, and take my chances with parking illegaly on those days when I did drive in.<\/p>\n
Why do I mention this? I just had to renew my parking sticker, having accumulated three tickets over the past week. I haven’t done it until now, because they recently raised the rates, and I’m planning to get a new car soon. Of course, it’s a little silly, given what the rate actually is, which I’ll put below the fold, lest it outrage people at larger campuses…<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
We pay $15\/year for a faculty parking sticker. Which is actually mildly controversial, as up until a year or two ago, the rate was $15 for the life of the car. You paid once for a sticker, and it was good forever.<\/p>\n
That’s just a little bit less of a burden that at Yale and Maryland. It doesn’t keep the faculty from getting annoyed at the rate hike, though. It’s the principle of the thing, damn it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
There’s an academic joke that says that the job of a university president is really pretty simple. To ensure happiness on campus, all he or she needs to do is make sure that there’s sex for the undergraduates, food for the graduate students, and parking for the faculty. It’s certainly true that parking enforcement has… Continue reading The Efficient Part of Campus<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-704","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/704","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=704"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/704\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=704"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=704"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=704"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}