by Tom Pantera
Columnist

If I’ve learned nothing else in graduate school, I’ve learned how to format documents in Microsoft Word. And it’s brought home something I see every day, but only stop to think about occasionally.

Rules suck. I hate them.

As I write this, I just sent my master’s thesis off to my committee. The next step is to meet with them (after I’ve given them a week to read my 80-page opus) for my “defense,” which basically is a question-and-answer session. If there are no major flaws in it (which isn’t likely, since part of my committee chairman’s job is to point out any while I’m working on it), they’ll approve it and I can make the arrangements to graduate in May.

You might think that the research and writing of an 80-page thesis might take a little time, and it does. I started doing the research last summer and started doing the actual writing in October.

But it feels like it took me nearly as long to do the formatting. There are a lot of rules for how one formats an academic thesis. They basically all have to look the same. And the rules are nothing if not picky, even when they don’t need to be. The left margin, for example, has to be an inch and a half wide, a half-inch wider than the top, bottom and right margins. That’s because up until a semester or two ago, you had to submit a bound copy of the thesis and the extra space was needed on the left side for the binding. Now, you have to turn them in on a disc; no bound copy is necessary. They haven’t changed that rule about the left margin, though.

The most maddening rule was the page numbers. In the main body of the thesis, you use Arabic numbers. But in the stuff that’s before that, like the acknowledgements, you use Roman numerals. You would not believe how long it takes a 54-year-old man who learned to type on a manual typewriter to learn how to switch between numbering sections within a paper. I’d estimate it took me about two-thirds the time it took me to actually write the thing.

Fortunately, Ginny, the secretary in the journalism grad school office, does a format check. She knows the rules backwards and forwards. Thank God. She’s also resolutely cheerful, which makes me feel better. She’s got some chocolates coming.

Still, grad school is what it is. It’s a bureaucracy and rules are the language of bureaucrats.

It’s particularly irksome when you are, like me, a child of the 1970s. What began in the 1960s as a questioning of rules in general reached full flower in the 1970s. By that time, after 10 years of getting no explanations about why the rules existed, people finally just said, “To hell with the rules.” Granted, that sent some chickens scurrying home to roost; the AIDS crisis of the 1980s began because people had stopped following some fairly common-sense rules, like “know a little bit about the person you’re sleeping with.” But at the time, we didn’t know that kind of thing was going to happen. All we knew was that we were finally calling B.S.

The problem with rules is that they’re often aimed at making life easier for somebody other than you. Rules that aren’t your own generally make your life harder. It’s human nature to want to know why somebody else is doing that to you. But if they’ve set things up correctly, they can just say, “It’s the rule.” And in the end, if you don’t like it, all you can do is vote with your feet.

Of course, a lot of rules make sense. That’s particularly true of the broader rules, like doing unto others as you would have them do unto you (although it was once pointed out that that isn’t always good, because the other person’s taste may differ). And things like traffic rules, which can be fairly specific, are useful because the stakes are so high. You run a red light, somebody might die.

It’s when rules become a fetish that they become a problem. Tiger Woods apparently broke some extremely minor rule at the Master’s and a lot of golf panjandrums are calling on him to basically fall on his sword. I don’t golf and I don’t watch golf, so the whole debate is pretty esoteric to me. But from what little I’ve read, Woods’ violation is to the overall game what jaywalking is to American drug law. Still, the Keepers of the Rules are in high dudgeon.

That’s why I hate zero-tolerance policies on anything. Zero-tolerance policies are basically a way of relieving people who run things of the onerous responsibility of thinking. That’s why you occasionally hear about some 6-year-old being suspended from school for kissing a classmate on the cheek or bringing a pair of nail clippers to class. The basic problem in such instances is usually that some chowder head with authority decides that thinking is just too much work and falls back on The Rules. People inevitably get screwed and it’s hard to nail down exactly who does the screwing. Oftentimes, it might be the original rule makers, but they’ve moved on and the reasons for the rules have been long since forgotten.

But all those of us who don’t like them can do is complain. I tried to avoid venting at Ginny, because it wasn’t her fault – she was merely guiding me through the thicket – but boy, I’d like to whine at somebody.

Of course, there’s probably a rule against that.