Sphinx

I dream of a better world. A world in which academics can be trusted to take a visiting speaker out to dinner without blowing the entire school budget on hookers and gin, or indeed inventing entirely fictional visiting speakers in order to create a plausible opportunity to spend the university’s money irresponsibly on personal pleasure. Sadly we do not live in such a world, or at least that’s the only reasonable conclusion from the fact that I have had to fill out a load of forms to prove the existence of each visiting speaker, establish his/her academic credentials and explain why we’re wasting valuable time inviting them to the department, and justifying giving them dinner – and another set of forms to beg for an exemption from using the university catering service, who wouldn’t be in a position to provide a quick dinner for such a speaker in any case. Academic behaviour in the past must have been pretty dubious to have inspired the creation of these rules; we can only try to control our appetite for luxury and self-indulgence in future…