When auditing goes too far

I'm not a huge fan of auditors. They ask questions, offer unsolicited commentary, and if they don't arrive late and make us give up our seats because they're old, they arrive early to get seats in inevitably overcrowded classrooms. I'm paying nearly $27,000 to attend school here, and some bag lady who knocks over my latte on her way to the corner seat gets to chat with the professor about which actor is more attractive.

And now, at least at Stanford, auditors also live with the students. Bear's Necessity and the Clog have already covered this, but that doesn't mean I can't offer my two cents. For those who don't read BN or the Clog and don't care to click the link on the right, here's the deal: earlier this week, a woman was exposed as having lived in the Stanford dorms without ever being a student. Shortly thereafter, a woman posing as a physics graduate student (and a visiting scholar in either the music or German departments-- details of which are unclear) was outed for having essentially lived and worked in the physics lab for four years.

Irrespective of the security concerns about the fact that unsuspecting people of appropriate age (and gender; women get away with being sneaky all the time) can get away with attending a highly selective private university for anywhere between one and four years, this is a case of auditing going a bit far.

Auditors: we pay good money to go to school. The point of "auditing" is that you are neither seen nor heard, and that you don't interrupt or undermine the efforts of us starving students. If the class is full, don't come. Don't live in the classrooms OR the dorms. And if my latte gets knocked over one more time, you'd better have a replacement in that giant bag of yours.