When Yatrakis looks around at today's Columbia she probably feels a little twinge of remorse. This institution could run so smoothly. If only the students didn't have to act up so often. Columbia has been trying to shake its reputation for having riotous students ever since Hamilton was taken over in 1996 by students demanding Columbia create an Ethnic Studies department. That outbreak was the impetus for a new policy on students, a policy intent on bringing to reality Yatrakis' meat factory dream.

Students become uppity when they think they have the power to change things.

Strip away students' choices and freedoms, restrict their activities, their liberties and they will become submissive. Remove from college life those few attributes on which students depend for their sanity, and they will become controllable. Once students no longer protest, once they no longer make their own decisions, Columbia will be more efficient. Like a factory· a meat factory. That's Yatrakis' dream.

It's a dream of a Columbia where students have no choice at all in their college experience. They come in, get a four-by-six box to live in, buy 200 food points and 40 meals each semester, and take a regimented selection of courses in a statistically obliging pattern. No dropping, ever. Even if you die, your corpse would be expected to continue attending lectures. That way Columbia can go about the regular business of leaching money from undergraduates without having to satisfy their annoying demands.

With this agenda in mind, it should be no surprise that the Yatrakis-led Committee on Instruction (COI) decided recently that the real reason Columbia's classrooms are overcrowded isn't Columbia's recklessly increasing class sizes, its failure to provide enough professors, or the general lack of quality facilities on campus. Classroom crowding is caused by those pernicious students! They're systematically signing up for zillions of courses and waiting until the last minute to drop them all, leaving classes empty that should be full. It's an evil scheme to befuddle those goodhearted college bureaucrats who do room assignments.

Never mind the fact that moving up the drop date up won't solve anything. Students will still drop classes after the registration period and classes will still be over-booked. Never mind the fact that the administration's bogus response to over-booked classes is to bully students into not taking these courses. This has nothing to do with classroom crowding or academic performance; this is all about Yatrakis' meat factory dream.

It was sickeningly sweet of Yatrakis to say that administrators will try to put more information about courses online during pre-registration. (Note: "try" is an administrative word meaning "don't do." When an administrator "tries" to do something, it means that he or she writes "Do Thing A" on a piece of paper, rolls that piece of paper up into a ball and throws it in the trash, basketball style.)

Course information should be made available regardless of the drop date. Students need to know more than just the dates and times of classes when registering. We need more than the blurb in the blue book. We need syllabi. We need student reviews of courses and professors. But this isn't about allowing students to make better choices; it's about Yatrakis' meat factory dream.

Yatrakis and her cronies have no intention of ever putting more information on the registration website. It's third-to-last on Yatrakis' list of things that she'll do when hell freezes over. It just doesn't fit in with her meat factory dream; meat doesn't need more information, it just needs to be processed.

In the meat factory college, Yatrakis' job is just a matter of just plugging the right numbers into a spreadsheet. She makes all the decisions and everything works just like she wants it to. No empty seats, no over-booked classes, no need for the telephone registration system or the online bulletin. Simple. Easy. This is Yatrakis' meat factory dream.

It's tough responding to a dynamic environment of real students with differing needs who are choosing classes from vague descriptions and call numbers. Accommodating to their various demands is strenuous. It takes extra effort to increase the amount of useful course information available. Hiring new professors and granting good ones tenure in order to adjust to a growing student body is a challenging task. Complex. Hard. This is Yatrakis' college reality.

It's her meat factory dream that makes Dean Yatrakis the anti-student. She hates the way that we change our minds, the way we complain, the way we write articles about her, the way we're so not like meat. She wants us to be docile and subservient, we want to express ourselves and maximize the benefits of our college education. So we hate her. Now, even more, because she's going after the drop date.