I love this idiom from Miguel de Cervantes’ novel, Don Quixote. Every time I see it, my feelings for it are rekindled. So much so that I wonder why it’s not a greater part of modern-day parlance. It emotes something magical in my imagination. It presents so visually. And its meaning resonates well with conversations on the futility of higher education.
Fighting imaginary enemies. That’s one common interpretation from this seventeenth-century text. We do a lot of that inside universities. It reminds me of a piece of leadership advice I once received during a training session: stop setting traps for yourself. As I see it, it’s all too common a practice to create and foster the very problems that encumber us. That is, we tend to be our own worst enemies, digging our heels in on certain issues that are undeserving of our energy and attention, making life harder generally in how we lead, support, and manage the people we serve.
We fight a lot of imaginary enemies in university administration and leadership. It makes the job hard, unrewarding, and often uncivil. It derails and inhibits. And it ultimately works against the core mission, guiding philosophy, and values of many post-secondary institutions.
The consequences of this mindset are real. Battle lines are drawn to incredible depths, often causing paralysis in terms of meaningful (and necessary) change. That’s not a goal to which anyone inside a university should aspire. It’s the opposite in fact, which stems in large part from mis-understandings, mis-interpretations, false perceptions and narratives on what the issues really are – and our roles, power, and privilege in addressing them.
The ‘enemy’ in a university context tends to be any proponent of change. (See Brian Rosenberg’s excellent book on this subject). The resistance to it is strong, forming the binary under which universities habitually operate – those for and those against. As though it were ever that simple. The truth as I’ve experienced it is that good ideas – and the talents and energy of good people driving them – are frequently waylaid by a smaller camp of vocal people intent on attacking problems of little or no significance. Sometimes, it seems, they are the very generators of the problems which pre-occupy so much of our valuable time.
Wasted energy is wasted talent.
The protagonist in Cervantes’ novel took on what he believed was a giant. The metaphor is clear: tilting at windmills is akin to engaging in pointless disputes. It connotes a clash between reality and perception, where a threat exists only in the mind of the beholder – a perceived adversary, a misinterpreted course of action or goal. The threat is unreal and imaginary. Yet its very conjuring generates a presence and persistence in the culture of higher education that is increasingly bogged down in bureaucracy, in the torment and expectation of consultation on every single issue, in the risk-adverse environment where vision and subsequent decisions to create and implement necessary change are stymied by people who are imagining false enemies.
I often hear (and now use) the expression ‘in the weeds’ in reference to a prevalent way of thinking inside the university. We know that we’re being pulled down into matters of far less significance and importance, obscuring and depleting the energy, creativity, and vision within each one of us. I consider this stark, daily reality another version of ’tilting at windmills’.
Futile endeavours. Un-winnable battles. Imaginary foes. It reads like a laundry list of daily activities for any university leader. Perhaps the most frustrating aspect is that we’re aware of the problem but disabled from nullifying it, so deep is the culture and precedent of complaining, analyzing, and critically appraising every idea and decision.
But there’s another way of understanding the expression’s meaning. I’ll close with this more positive framing, which urges us to conceive of ’tilting at windmills’ as ‘pursuing a goal when it does not seem easily attainable or when everyone around us questions our judgment.’ In essence, this interpretation is a good reminder of the positive expression for ‘quixotic’, which heralds idealism alongside impracticality – committing to ideas that are different, devoted, full of vision, despite their unlikelihood of success.
There is unity in this interpretive framework – not two pitted or opposed camps at war, but a purpose and common cause which should be the backbone of every institution of higher learning.