How to Travel With a Salmon and Other Essays

How to Compile an Inventory

The Italian government has given assurances that something will be done to guarantee the autonomy of our country's universities. Italian universities were autonomous in the Middle Ages, and they functioned better than they do today. American universities, whose perfection has become legendary for Europeans, are autonomous. German universities are under the jurisdiction of the regional authorities, but local governments are more alert than a centralized administration, and in many cases—like the appointment of professors—the regional parliament merely ratifies formally what the university itself has already decided. In Italy, if a scientist discovers that phlogiston doesn't exist he will most likely be able to announce his finding only if he happens to teach a course on the Axiomatics of Phlogiston, because a course title, once it is on the ministry's lists, can be changed only after protracted negotiations among all the institutions of higher learning in the country, along with the Superior Council of Education, the Minister, and some other organizations whose names escape me.

Research goes forward because someone glimpses a path that no one has seen before, and a few other people, with exceptional decisional flexibility, decide to believe in him or her. But if someone wants to move a desk in Vitipeno, a decision must come from Rome, after consultations with Chivasso, Terontola, Afragola, Montelepre, and Decimomannu, so obviously the desk will be moved only when the move is no longer necessary.

Teachers engaged on temporary contracts ought to be outside scholars of great reputation and irreplaceable expertise. But between the submission of the university's request and notification of the ministry's approval we usually reach the end of the academic year, with only a few weeks of instruction remaining (unless the ministry simply says no). Clearly, in such an aleatory situation, it is hard to attract a Nobel laureate, and we end up with the dean's unemployed sister-in-law.

Research bogs down also because the bureaucratic routine makes us waste time in solving ridiculous problems. I am the head of a university department. Some years ago we were told to make an inventory of the department's physical possessions, a scrupulous list. Our only available employee was supposed to deal with a thousand other questions. But it was possible to farm out the task to a private organization that asked for three hundred thousand lire. We had the money, but in funds meant for inventoriable materials. How could we declare that an inventory was inventoriable?

I had to set up a committee of logicians, who suspended their own researches for three days. In my statement of the problem they saw something comparable to The Set of Normal Sets. Then they decided that the act of compiling an inventory, as it is an act, is not an object and therefore cannot be inventoried, but they further decided that its output is the catalogue of the inventory and, as this is an object, it can be inventoried. We asked the private firm to bill us not for the act but for its result, a result that we then inventoried. For several days I distracted serious scholars from their specific tasks, but I avoided going to jail.

Some months ago the janitors came and told me we were without toilet paper. I told them to buy some. The secretary told me I currently had funds only for inventoriable materials, and pointed out that while toilet paper can be inventoried, the natural tendency of such paper is to vanish, for reasons I prefer not to go into, and once it has vanished, it vanishes also from the inventory. I formed a committee of biologists to ask how we could inventory used toilet paper, and the answer was that such a thing is possible, but at a very high human cost.

I summoned a committee of jurists, who supplied me with the solution. I receive the toilet paper, I inventory it, and I require its distribution among the rest rooms for scientific purposes. If the paper disappears, I report the theft of catalogued material by unknown criminals. Unfortunately, I have to repeat this process every two days, and an inspector from the Secret Services has uttered some heavy insinuations, criticizing an institution that can be infiltrated by unidentified crooks so easily and so frequently. I am under suspicion, but I have an iron-clad alibi. They'll never get me.

The flaw is that to find the solution I had again to remove illustrious men of learning, for days and days, from research that would be of use to our country, while we wasted taxpayers' money on hours of work from teachers and staff, not to mention telephone calls and fax paper. But no one is ever indicted for squandering government money if everything is done within the law.

1986