At the risk of being deeply unoriginal, I hate bureaucracy. I found an extremely elegant, easy, money-saving solution for the problem of our Arabic course that suddenly lost its instructor. But the administration forbade me to proceed because, and I quote, “we’ve never done it this way”.
Well, obviously, we’ve never done this. It’s an extraordinary situation and I’m trying to solve it inventively. They aren’t offering any solutions of their own, so I tried to be creative. But no. Everybody is paralyzed with fear of innovation and creativity.
As I keep saying, it’s all lies about the corporatization of higher education. In a business setting, I’d be getting a bonus for figuring this out on my own and requesting zero additional money. We are given zero space for innovation. Everybody just stares at me with big, terrified eyes like the mouse in an old Soviet joke* and intones, “but we’ve never done it this way!”
* The joke goes as follows:
An elephant is walking through a jungle at night and sees a pair of gigantic eyes staring at him.
“Who is this?” he asks, terrified.
“I’m a mouse”, the owner of the eyes responds in a tiny voice.
“But why are your eyes so huge?” asks the elephant.
“I’m pooping”, says the mouse.
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