The undergraduate students of Professor James Hay's class MACS 320-Popular Culture have been assigned a final exam, a final "journal" entry, and a twelve-page paper all due within ten days of each other during the UIUC finals season. We have brought it to Professor Hay's attention that this workload for an undergraduate class of full-time upperclassmen students, many of which are also full-time employees who need to work to pay bills and eat without the support of their families, is extreme.

Throughout the semester, Professor Hay has not put our grades online so that we may track our progress. Although he gave us the grades on paper which were highly illegible and hard to understand, (even with the code decryptor he provided us with, which should not have been necessary in the first place). The majority of the students agreed that he had hardly analyzed the words we had written at all and simply wrote that it was not specific enough.  This is besides the fact that Professor Hay is the author of a research paper about what a "smart refrigerator" represents when he can't even acquire enough digital literacy to format a compass page correctly and upload out grades. When asked to roll back- at the very least- the page requirement, for the final paper he remarked that the very journal entries he disregarded the content of, returned to us late and illegible, and did not put online, were "preparing us" for this paper.

The midterm exam was also a longer and exact recreation of the journal entries and the final exam will be the same way. We attempted to explain to him that it was not an inability for us to do the assignments, but a lack of time, energy, and importance for us to do them at all since he is basically asking for us to do three of the same assignments at different lengths, on top of all of our other needs at the busiest time of the semester.

Professor Hay has spent the entire semester flaunting his wealth (his home in Italy, his fine suits that he wears to class, and commenting on all the luxury items and events he enjoys partaking in) ignoring his students, and showing a complete lack of empathy for anyone in a different tax bracket and social standing than him. He ignores that we don't all have cars to drive all the way to Marketplace Mall in the middle of a school day, ignores that we are struggling to succeed in a class with no way to keep track of through the standard format of the university, ignores that we are not all lounging around waiting for the next assignment that he happens to grace us with and are instead working 20-40 hours a week, making movies, studying for classes other than his and searching for internships and networking opportunities so that we can actually make money when we graduate!

This is not a cry of students being lazy. We are drowning. We are begging for him to show empathy and he is flat out refusing. This petition is a request that the College of Media and the Media and Cinema Studies department move a hand to help support the students in order to make sure we may actually succeed. We are here to learn. We are here to grow. Seeds cannot grow when buried under stones. And Professor Hay has done nothing but ignore our pleas and pave a gravel road over us. 

Help us succeed. Rollback the page number. Keep it to one final assignment. Anything. Any grace. Please. Thank you.