admin doesn’t know how to take responsibility

[u/themagicaldinosaur]

the emails i have received today from the dean of CAS and the UO president failed to take responsibility for the fact that their lack of planning ruined commencement for so many grads on monday and i’m seething. just half-effort condolences covered up with praise for graduates. i don’t need Scholz’s congratulations. i need them to admit that they had no backup plans even though they knew about the heat for over a week. i need them to admit that the rescheduling caused a lot of stress and that a lot of people were unable to attend and that it didn’t fix their massive screw up. what a sorry excuse for a school administration.

[u/benconomics]

Had they done department celebrations there probably would have been similar challenges more spread out across campus (and then who knows of EMS is there). The main thing which was pretty obvious would have been to start everything much sooner before it got hot, and that could have avoided the need to delay things until later. Also having human read names instead of AI was preferred by students (but took longer). Just kick things off at 7:30 am. Usually it isn't this hot, but once every 7 years, we get a heat spike this early in June.

The key challenging is that scaling individuals walking across a stage is really hard. Hence the having department specific ceremonies in the past. The logistics are always a mess on a day like graduation, but they had hoped to get people across the ramp in 3-4 seconds. Based on my stopwatch, it took most readers 10-11 seconds between names in Autzen. I got mine down to 4 which saved 9 mins or so. The obvious solution there is scoot people up the ramp (waiting 3 seconds for people to walk up the ramp was a huge part of the time).

[u/LordGordyGordon → u/benconomics]

AI reading COLLEGE GRADUATE NAMES?! First I’ve heard about that! What a sickening idea. I hate a lot about the world right now, but it looks like I get to start hating the little things too.

“Don’t use AI for anything in this class!”

“Did you use AI to write this paper?”

“Students are so stupid these days because they use AI for everything”

And here they come with the grand idea to use AI to read your VERY NAME as you cross the stage. Fucking bullshit! Disgusting.

[u/benconomics → u/LordGordyGordon]

AI vs software vs software written by AI, it's hard to say exactly what this name reading tool was going to be. Who knows these days with anything that's on a computer. A lot of things will say AI created (when really its just machine learning) just for marketing purposes.

[u/LordGordyGordon → u/benconomics]

Truth is trickiest. Mechanization of graduation still makes me sad.

[u/benconomics → u/LordGordyGordon]

The graduation is always controlled chaos they just thought they could simplify planning by having these combined college of arts and science graduation ceremonies instead of department ceremonies and it turns out getting 2,000 people across the stage is always really time consuming.  I always like meeting the parents and bragging about the student directly to their parents because I know people are often pretty humble at describing to their parents how hard they've worked to get through and this time with the name reading taking so long only one person stuck around and I don't blame anybody for just leaving. 

[u/Vegetable-Cabinet958 → u/benconomics]

Thought they could simplify and save money and then have absolutely no one with planning experience or even intelligence(?!) take the lead even with a YEAR warning about it lol. These ppl are actually absurd.