Bureaucracy

Title: Bureaucracy

Informant Info: Mene Ukueberuwa is an Editor-in-Chief Emeritus of The Dartmouth Review. He is a ’16 (formerly ’14) from Princeton, NJ. He was interviewed on May 12, 2016 at the Collis Center in Hanover, NH.

Type of Lore: Verbal, Joke

Language: English

Country of Origin: United States

Social / Cultural Context: The concept of government (or college) bureaucracy tends to be an easy target of ridicule for conservative or libertarian-minded students. This genre of jokes is a lighthearted and humorous expression of philosophical ideals.

Transcript:

Yeah, one is kind of just poking fun at the overgrown bureaucracy within the College. The Dartmouth Review is very much a very anti-bureaucratic organization ourselves.  We like to kind of just take things as they come, and obviously it’s become a huge problem for the College to have these massively bloated staff, and so we always like to poke fun at the titles like “The Vice Provost of Student Affairs” and things like that, by sort of designing overblown titles for ourselves and suggesting that we add them to the masthead, so things like “The Uber-Vice-President for Internal Management Affairs of the Review,” things like that … This same guy, Vice President of the Dartmouth Review, another way, another way that we kind of poke fun at bureaucracy is that whenever someone has a purchase they want to make or a change they want to make, we always ask them to write up a full proposal just so that he can make sure we can properly gauge the environmental impact of the actions, and things like that.  Not only poking fun at bureaucracy, but also poking fun at the oversensitive environment and a lot of the sort of tendencies of people we tend to disagree with.

Proposed bureaucracy of the Review ... needs an environmental impact statement!

Proposed bureaucracy of the Review … needs an environmental impact statement!

Collector’s Comments: This genre of bureaucracy-related jokes has become quite prolific within the Review. A related genre of jokes (which was heard but not formally collected), relates to surveillance by the National Security Agency (NSA).

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