UCalgary replaces all chairs with standing desks

By Abbas Hussain, March 17 2025—

As students settle into their Winter 2025 routines at UCalgary, dramatic changes are on the horizon. While the first month brought the usual mix of new schedules, classes, and friendships, a wild surprise is about to transform the campus experience. In an interview with The Gauntlet, Jacqueline Morris, General Counsel and Vice-President, shared an exciting announcement with students and expressed her delight at the new initiative.

“We have decided to replace all chairs with standing desks across campus, as we are committed to helping students and faculty learn in an ideal environment that works for all,” said Morris. When questioned further, Morris explained, “We want to make the university as efficient as possible. When we had chairs, too much time was spent and wasted transitioning between sitting down and standing up. To us, that’s an unacceptable waste of time. Quite frankly, we really value our faculty and students’ time, which is why we are now implementing the Fabulous Occupation Offending Level System.”

When asked about future plans to make the campus more efficient and faster, Morris said, “Our grand vision for 2030 is to reduce all inefficient elements on campus. First, we plan to eliminate basic mobility elements like doors, elevators, and stairs, as they are easy to eliminate without much disruption to students and faculty. Second, we plan to eliminate professors, as they waste time delivering material to students by telling ‘jokes’ to make students feel more at home and engaged with the material. Plus, we have to pay them money to teach the students, which is simply an ineffective use of our resources—it could be better spent on things like spinning desks.”

“The end goal is to eliminate all inefficiency, so eventually, we will eliminate the physical space on campus, as commuting, walking, eating, drinking, and anything human is simply too inefficient for a university. Instead, we will transition to an online world, where professors will be replaced with AI-powered robots, and students will use virtual reality headsets for information to be transferred directly from source to destination, eliminating all inefficient in-betweens,” Morris stated.

“Students deserve the most efficient use of their time as they pay a lot of money to attend university, and we are simply delivering the most optimal experience. Plus, students should spend more time working minimum wage jobs, dedicating their time away for the benefit of capitalism.”

The Gauntlet will continue to monitor these efficiency initiatives and provide updates as students progressively lose access to chairs, doors and their human professors.

This article is part of our humour section.