Of Chairs and Purchasing Policies... I'm somewhere around 5'11"-an above average height, to be sure, but hardly an unusual one for an American adult. Yet whoever manufactured and purchased many of the chair/desks in Wesleyan's classrooms (I'm thinking particularly of most of Fisk and of several rooms in the Science Center-PAC is mostly ok) seems not to have considered that a person of my prodigious size would have to sit at said desks. When I sit up with my back against the back of the chair and my knees bent at roughly a 90-degree angle, my legs hit the desk. This is, mind you, in flat shoes. I sure as hell can't cross my legs without twisting my body so that I quickly develop back pain. To write on a notebook sitting on the desk, I have to curl over-more back pain. Slouching is not a viable option, for reasons I don't quite understand.
While I'm sure that the child-sized desks we now have were cheaper than adult-sized versions would have been, I don't especially care. I assume that I'm not the only person to be made uncomfortable by these hellish little pieces of furniture. I'm also pretty sure that the people responsible for having made and bought them don't have to sit at them for the number of hours per week that students do. Here's my feeling, then: as an equalizing measure, all members of the administration, particularly the purchasing department, should have to work at these desks for one full work week. Once that's been done, the University should institute a policy that requires the person in charge of deciding what brand of desk to buy to spend several hours in each of the options before finalizing the purchase.
by Laura Clawson |