April 1 in Antarctica

In case anyone didn’t catch it, that career change post was an April Fool’s joke.

That’s my third fairly convincing “American University in X”-type April 1 joke in the past 9 years.

On April 1, 2001 I pulled an elaborate prank on a friend in the library here, telling her that I was moving to the American University of Beirut, with the following big complication… AUB’s American faculty quota was already full, so I could be hired only by taking a Lebanese passport, which would require me to spend the summer doing Lebanese military training. She fell for it. (And incidentally, it’s a luxury I allow myself only on April 1, mostly because I am so ANTI-teasing. I am constitutionally incapable of pulling anyone’s leg for even 5 seconds on any other day. It always feels unethical to me to give a teasing answer to a real question.)

On April 1, 2003 I sent a fake news story to friends, saying that an American University team was following close behind the invasion forces in Iraq and was establishing an AUI in Umm Qasr in the far south. (The irony, of course, is that an American University of Iraq does now exist, in Kurdistan.)

One other year I convinced some relatives that the Aswan High Dam had burst and I had to evacuate Cairo immediately. Actually, that’s not such a funny joke, since it would pretty much wipe out the whole of this country– fast tsunami down the Nile. I’ve been told it would take only a few hours to go from Aswan to Cairo.

But anyway… They are not building an American University of the Antarctic, and so of course I will not be teaching there.