The 5 Worst University Departments On Every College Campus

Universities, as large academic institutions, are going to have some bureaucracy built in. It’s one of those constants of the universe — the bigger the organization, the more likely it is to have an office of people whose jobs are of questionable legitimacy at best. However, inefficiency isn’t the end-all, be-all of university dysfunction. Throughout America most universities have several departments that take bureaucratic nitpicking to such a level of suck that the nearest supermassive black hole is impressed and physicists are rushing from their hidey holes in the decaying hobbit homes that people call the Physics Building to study the sheer improbability of it all. Though the names may change from school to school, their purposes remain the same: to make your life Hell in a number of new and exciting ways.

 

5. The Greek Office

They might be the “highest” ranked on this list, but only because their damage is limited by the scope of their mission. If they were allowed free reign they would basically be the government of Panem in The Hunger Games or Soviet-era Russia. Now, they have a difficult job, I understand this. We Greeks are like a herd of drunk, angry, destructive cats and they’re tasked with making sure we don’t set the place on fire and manage to look good enough that the media doesn’t call for our blood more often than is socially acceptable. That said, other than campus police, there are no worse fun police. They’re always saying things like, “don’t put that pledge in a washing machine” or “don’t set that rival fraternity’s porch on fire with an improvised explosive device made out of old Natty cans”. They’re simply dishonoring the age old tradition of us fraternity men nearly taking ourselves out of the gene pool prematurely through really sophomoric pranks, and if you can’t get behind that, then you can’t really support America.

 

4. The Health Center

If you’re not dead or infected with a sexually transmitted disease, you probably will be after the professionals at your local university health center get done with you. At no time in their life should a student have to tell their “doctor” what kind of medicine they need for a sinus infection, especially when that student did the lab work himself (thank god for TA lab access). I mean, sure, microbiology was my thing, but that doesn’t mean I should be going all CSI on the bacteria in my head to get the right prescription. These medical professionals are more likely to diagnose your acute case of plague as a broken arm than an actual disease that might need some real treatment, but at least you can count on them to not fuck up a flu vaccination. Don’t go here when the zombie apocalypse breaks out, because I’m sure this is where it will start.

 

3. Admissions

I don’t really know what goes on here, but I am almost certain that whatever it is, it involves a lot of booze and hard drugs, because have you seen the people they’re admitting now? I mean, I might have started college in 2008 but come on. The next generation of kids in college cannot be that difficult to pull some solid candidates out of, yet admissions is consistently letting in people like hamster kid from Ole Miss and any number of other fucksticks that don’t know how to be a degenerate without getting caught. Speaking of, that should be a required intro class, though I imagine admissions would also fuck up registering people for it, and then also the ability of people to know what they actually need to pay for. If there was a department on campus that’s just a bad Seth MacFarlane comedy made flesh, it’s admissions. If I could get in on those bullshit essays I wrote, someone had to be asleep at the wheel. I mean, I wrote about how Jurassic Park inspired me to become a geneticist. Talk about missing the point, right?

 

2. Public Safety or Campus Police

In a world where real crimes don’t happen nearly as much as they would like them to, these Keystone Kops of the modern era reign supreme. Nothing says below average IQ and above average propensity for unfiltered rage like being a campus cop or “public safety officer”. At most schools, they’re glorified security guards with a bigger obesity problem than a Kentucky town whose only restaurants are KFC and a local chain of Heart Attack Burger restaurants (which aren’t a thing, but should be). These guys and gals would fail the psych eval to play the Joker more than half the time. Never has there been an example of a more metaphorically trigger happy group of unqualified assholes than the campus police. Just look at any number of college riot videos. In rare cases, it’s the students that turn it into a riot. Usually it’s just a bunch of alpha male douchebags compensating for the fact that they were too fucking stupid to pass a fifth grade math class and crack 1000 on the SAT. They’re so busy busting kids for fake IDs and MIPs that they apparently don’t have time to investigate real crimes, like sexual assaults.

 

1. Department Of Transportation

Good old DOTS, as they’re called at Maryland, is the kind of organization Satan would shit out into this world if he was in the habit of shitting organizations into existence. This unholy hydra of parking fines, bad parking policy and bus service that was, at times, beyond inconsistent is the epitome of all that is wrong with American university administration. Never has there been an organization in the history of human civilization that could make signs that are essentially supposed to say “park here” or “don’t park here” more complicated. I should not need a degree in linguistics and an instruction sheet from the Ark of the fucking Covenant to figure out if this lot is 24/7 lot 19 permits only or if I can park here between 12am and 3:25 am on every fifth Thursday in months ending in “-ary”.

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