Our college is chaotic.  This, I accept.  What I do not accept is that our college is so chaotic on purpose, from the moment we begin scheduling classes not due to start for eight months. 

Here is how we start, all by the decree of of President, Herlinda Garces.

Every September, every January, every May our college begins the process of scheduling, respectively, the spring, summer and fall semesters. Teachers request classes, department chairs update the rollover, deans remind us deadlines and supervise the results. Scheduling is a craft.  Like staffing and student mediation, one becomes better at scheduling by doing it, by seeing which classes will attract enough students to "make" and which classes will not.  Over and over, semester by semester, experience proves that a freshman compostion class at nine-thirty, Tuesday-Thursday, will fill up, while a literature class at two in the afternoon will attract five students, at most, and will end up cut from the final schedule.The result--as one semester follows another, as we muddle through--is an imperfect, but useful tool.

Do we deviate from the template on occasion?  Of course.  A teacher will want a particular class at a particular time, the class will be scheduled, and on the theory that, "You eat what you kill," the teachers will recruit the students.

The trouble occurs when the first draft of the schedule is distributed around the college, and the counselors and campus directors weigh in.  Our college is comprised of four campuses stretching across twenty miles. Our largest and oldest campus was built in a mall that, beginning in the late eighties, lost both its antique stores and half it boutiques.  When, a dozen years ago, our campus was retro-fitted into a six thousand square feet of empty mall space, I thought our act might play to a bay of empty desks.  Twelve years on, at this Brookway Campus, we're turning students away at the door, and our administrators are cursing themselves for not purchasing the entire mall instead of merely leasing part of it.

Another one of our campuses, in contrast, was built at a cost of several million dollars.  The land was given to the college by a wealthy local family, and it's not hard to see why.  The Thomas Campus is a half-mile from from a freeway access road whose off-ramp, if one drives from town, is a half-miles past the campus itself.  Thus getting gto the campus involves driving past the campus itself, the negotiating a U-turn beneath the freeway, then driving along a one-way parabolic side street until one sees the sign--the only sign--indicating the driveway that leads to the campus.  Miss the sign, and hence the driveway, and you've just lost the next hour of your life negotiating the various twists and turns, attempting to find some street, some on-ramp, some anything in order to find a campus you cannot see until you are back against its front doors. 

It is quite simply the rule that any new faculty--people with Master's and PhDs, most of them with a fairly developed sense of direction--will alwys drive miles past our campus and call us from a pay phone or cell phone, hopelessly lost.  Always. One new teacher, after twice negotiating the spaghetti strands of freeways, access roads, and exits, called me and abruptly refused to return again unless I met her at her day job in my car and allowed her to follow me to campus.

The campus's location is doubly troublesome.  Thomas Hall sits in the center of a flood plain, a bit higher than the parking lot and egress, with the result that a tropical storm a few years ago kept two dozen people , mostly support staff, stuck on campus ove a weekend, eating from the vending machines and sleeping on the sofas in the library.  Since then, the campus simply closes every time heavy rain drifts in our direction.

Still more.   If our college had commissioned a league of urban planners to draw a location for a campus where students were least likely to enroll, the result would be Thomas Hall as presently configured.  Unless one views Thomas Hall from a certain freeway overpass (from which Thomas Hall is utterly inaccessible), the single view one has of Thomas is down the long driveway between an enormous warehouse and a dealership specializing in eighteen-wheelers.  The view is roughly comparable to staring down a long urban street flanked on both sides by a canyon of skytscrapers; in order to appreciate the view of Thomas Hall, you must turn your head at exactly the right moment, within a window of maybe ten seconds before it vanishes.  Miss that one glimpse (while travelling, at minimum, fifty miles per hour), and you are lost.

This is the one view the campus affords.  Once you actually arrive, the campus looks like a software company set down in bad real estate.

The entire point of having a multi-campus college is accessability--no one in our community lives more than five miles away from an campus.  This campus, however, is ten miles away from the homes of most potential students.  Really, and I always ask myself, Where are the students coming from?  To the north is a farm; when the dean summons me to her office, I stare past her head, out the window, and see cows.  To our west, a thousand acres of grassland, then further on as many woods. 

And to the east? Monday through Friday, on my way to work, I drive past mile after mile of warehouse after flea market after abandoned factory after open field surrounded by cyclone fencing that seems to protect nothing worth stealing. I see this, and I think, Where are the students? Or, rather: From where, possibly, could students come?

I am not alone in my thinking.  From the time our college broke ground on the Thomas Campus seven years ago, the question of student population has occurred to most of my colleagues.   Drive east to where the people are, or north, or south, and you arrive within walking distance (long walking distance, granted) of another one of our campuses, or--even more so--another one of the twenthy-four colleges in the area. The sum total of our efforts, our accessibility, and our competition has led to classes at the Thomas Campus, in prime slots--say, Composition I at 9:30, Tuesdays and Thursdays--dxraw six or seven students at most, in a classroom designed for twenty-five.

To her credit, Dr. Garces has done a few things to remedy our empty campus.  Entire programs--law enforcement, trucking--have put hundreds of workforce students into Zach Mayo status: namely, they have nowhere else to go.  In fact, our public safety programs have been so effective that the professors of the  future cops and fire fighters have taken over our empty academic classrooms--in one, they shoved all the desks out in the hall, brought in rubber mats, and made themselves a self-defense classroom.  Their success in filling up the one b uilding we have has earned them, in the opinion of the Board of Trustees, a new instructional building, a "burn" building, a running track, and firing range, the aggregation of which will yank these students from the main campus building, leaving us again with empty classrooms.  Or rather, a few classrooms with six students.  Or seven. 

Which brings us back to scheduling.  And staffing.  And my one class.

In higher education, there are two types of problems.  The first are those for which no solutions are readily available: racial animosity, financial aid bearaucracy.  The second are those for which solutions practically scream themselves, but are never implemented.  The solution to the empty-except-for-specialized-classes campus is clear: simply give the space completely over to police, fire, trucking, and the forthcoming classes in homeland security, and remove our academic olfferings entirely, all but the few that these workforce students will need.  Either that or resign ourselves to living with six and seven students, forever, in English, Speech, Art, Government. 

Given those two choices, our Dr. Garces has chosen Door Number Three.  She has moved heaven and earth, proclaimed one idea after another, called every office obsessively day after day--and then blamed us when nothing happened, as we said nothing would.

Certainly no one can fault our president for lack of effort.  Though our population base might be miles away, within what she believes is our "service area," (in other words, neighborhoods closer to other campuses and other colleges), there is not a church whose social she has not attended, a Kiwanis at whose breakfast she has not spoken, and ethnic businessman's dinner at which she has not appeared--all to sing the praises of one single campus.  At Thomas Hall, we have hosted registration fairs (with free chicken), job fairs (free Subway), transfer fairs (free pizza).

The results of these exhausting efforts: six students per class.  Maybe seven.

We have all tried hard.  But . . . doesn't there come a time when you admit the dog doesn't like the dog food and try something else?  Driving to Thomas Mall through roads that wind through miles of industry, I wonder: what heroic efforts are in store for us now?  We have gone so far as to offer free tuition one semester, just to generate some foot traffic, an act that accomplished nothing besides infuriating the students at our other campuses, who saw our act as charging some students more than others--and really, who could blame them? (All of us who remembered the "discounts for cash" fiasco at gas stations in the 1980s saw the students' anger coming, and said so, at least among ourselves.)  Having tried everything and finding it not to work, and further realizing that we weren't going anywhere, my colleagues and I simply resigned ourselves to Thomas Hall, hard by the pasture and the industrial park, home of six and seven students at a time.

Then our preisdent had a thought.  The problem, she decided, was that the mass of students who would have poured onto our campus were kept away because . . . wait for it . . . we weren't scheduling enough classes.  The reason students were not flying through our doors was that our offerings were too minimal.  The solution: more classes.  Many, many more classes.

To those of us familiar with scheduling, this was sheer barking madness.  The only way we ran courses at all was our minimal offerings, which succeeding in penning our students into groups of six and seven, barely enough to sustain a class.  Double our offerings? Triple our offerings?  Ruin.

I have worked at my college for seventeen years, the last nine as department head or (as it later became known) department chair, and only once have I taken issue with our college president.  The occasion was the senior staff meeting when the new scheduling policy was announced.  (Senior staff meetings, I should mention, are the once-a-month, three-hour, no-bathroom-break marathons during which two things happen: We are told things about which we don't care about and will forget as soon as the meeting is over; and our input is, at great length and with hectoring zeal, solicited, and then disregarded as soon as the meeting is over.  Leading the proceedings is the energetic Dr. Garces, who shouts and gestulates, with no sign of fatigue, like Castro from the balcony.)  Our scheduling, Dr. Garces informed us, was too inflexible, too narrow, too--what was the word she wanted?--ah yes, insensitive. Yes, that was it.  It stood to reason (or rather, it stood as screamingly obvious to our president) that the reason our campus-in-a-cow pasture was was not succeeding was because we offered only, say, one Comp I class on Monday and Wednesday morning, instead of, say, six.  In additin to our nine-thirty MW class, we should have a class starting at eight, at eleven, and at twelve-thirty.  Plus--and here was the real killer--a seven to eight o'clock class to run on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. 

Then, she told us this thinking should be applied to every course, every day.  Only then, she assured us, would the campus meet everyone's expectations.

"I fully believe in the success of this," she said. "We need to boost our class average to twenty students per class, and this is the way."

It was here that I turned and whispered something to another chair--of social sciences, as it were.  The president looked down at me, lacking only a prince-nez at the end of here nose for a looked of imperiousness.

"Doctor Davidson," she harrumphed, "do you have something to share with us?"

She must have assumed I would back of, as she looked down and began re-arranging her papers.  Instead, now, I said, "Well, if we schedule like this, we're going to have nine thousand classes with two students apiece."

She looked up, apparently stunned I had said anything.  "Why," she asked, "do you have to be so defensive?"

"I don't . . . " I looked around, waiting for someone to support me--perhaps one of the dozen or more people in the room who had heard about Dr. Garces' scheduling plan in advance and would do so as soon as the meeting ended, but not now.  Nothing.  And so, three months later, when I was left with fifty classes with zero, one, or two classes each, we were compelled to call all those students and explain why their classes were cancelled.  The students in turn complained to the counselors that they could not make a schedule.  The counsellors complained to Dr. Garces, who ordered an emergency meeting, during which we were told that we were not meeting the needs of our students.

The solution?  More class offerings.

And so it started again.