Bureaucracy and Democracy

The problem with bureaucracy is that people create it to avoid work. Because of that, bureaucracy works for most people, most of the time, but not every person is always going to be happy, get what they want... in fact, I think there is a large chunk of people who get underserved by bureaucracy.

The word bureaucracy comes from the French "bureau" (desk/office), and the Greek "-cracy" meaning rule. Since I don't know Greek, or anything about Greece, I'll stick to the French. "Bureau" means desk. One of the quotations in the Oxford English Dictionary uses "office tyranny" to describe bureaucracy. And that's exactly what it is. It's a bunch of little people in little offices with little rules, and something about the whole process makes all people petty.

Why do bureaucracies develop? Basically, there are so many people and problems to treat, and only so many hours in the day. So a bureaucracy begins to form. It begins with a few forms that people have to fill out, and a few policies to make things run more smoothly. The problem arises when you have several bureaucratic organizations with several different, sometimes conflicting, sets of policies and paperwork.

Case in point - where I work, we only allow our majors to do internships in the summertime. I'm not actually sure why that policy developed, but I'm sure it arose out of experience. Students may have been doing internships during the school year, and it impacted their schoolwork. So they tried to drop classes after the drop/add date but appealed so they wouldn't receive a penalty in their grade. This, of course, is not an excuse to drop a course after a drop/add date (normally the only thing that counts is a death in the immediate family, extreme illness, etc). Yet if the school allows their majors to do such a thing... you see where this gets us. It's not difficult, once you get to know students and how they operate, how these policies develop.

Let's take a conflicting policy, however. A student is offered an internship at a high-power financial firm, like Morgan Stanley or Barclay's. For liability reasons, the company can not employ the student without compensation. Compensation can include pay, which costs the company money, or it can include college credit, for which the student pays and costs the company nothing.

You see where the conflict begins to develop. The student cannot do the internship unless he receives credit, yet for various policy reasons (often developed because previous students abused privilege), he cannot get credit. So he calls the front desk of the advising office (i.e. me) to complain, asks for the dean, calls the career center, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. The next step (which I'm waiting for now) is for him to have his parents call us.

Bureaucracy. It's not democracy, that's for sure.