I got a wonderful letter in the mail today from my university. It is not congratulating me on submitting my dissertation, but informing me I have $206 worth of library fines to pay before I can graduate. At my university, academic staff do not get fined, but postgraduates do, even if they are working as casual academic staff and use their student accounts to loan books.
I know very well I have $206 worth of fines because I have had them for 2 years. For those 2 years I have not been able to use my university’s library. Yes, I completed my PhD without using my own university’s library. Obviously, they have such an excellent system of fines that it helps students learn and researchers do research.
Does the library or student administration seriously believe that I am going to pay $206 worth of fines after not being able to use the library for 2 years?
Now I have my own library, don’t need their books, lol…
I had a big-ish fine at the end of my PhD (no, wait, at the end of the 3rd year of my PhD and they weren’t going to let me re-enroll if I didn’t pay up).
I told them it was ridiculous as the books they were fining me for were (1) completely obscure that I was the only person interested in them in the entire university and (2) superceeded by other books in the library that anyone who was not me who was in their right mind would have borrowed.
I think I paid 10-30% of it in the end. They actually had a fines dispute and resolution procedure.
What are the fines actually for? Did you not return books, or return books late? or What?
don’t know, can’t remember
$200 when your uni gets about $100K for a PhD completion. This has to be a bluff. Surely your uni isn’t going to say no to having one of its cash-cows processed.