My colleagues and I have formulated a new position (unfortunately fictitious) for KAUST: professional smooth-maker.

There are a number of small problems here, and under the collective weight of these straws, the camel’s back is breaking. No working printers in the library. No wifi access in most classrooms. No working projectors in many classrooms. No dishes in my home. No solution in sight.

With the money that KAUST is dishing out for various events and items, they would be better-served to set aside a certain amount in their embarrassingly large budge to fix problems in an ad-hoc fashion. Many of these issues will not be fixed in the near future, and in the mean time, we don’t have books for some classes still. People are scrambling to put the permanent solutions in place, but in the mean time, it’s as if we’re holding our breaths - hoping that we’ll surface from the ocean of incompetence soon.

A man about campus, man of the people, he’d trawl around seeing problems and fixing them. Hire a guy for this, buy that piece of crucial equipment.

While the rest of the administration is bogged down in bureaucratic black holes of paperwork, he’d be a classic cowboy hero - arrive just in time to save the day and ride off into the sunset. Victory for all.

This may not work in implementation, but students are forming their own ad-hoc solutions. Like a wiki for information about how things work on campus (like when the medical center is open) as the school hasn’t made it easy to find out. Or a forum for addressing issues as the school’s pricy issue-tracking software wasn’t rolled out in time. Why not embrace that this project is in flux and subject to rapid change and facilitate these solutions?