I have almost forgotten everything from the two years of Japanese language study I took at UCLA as part of the requirements for PhD students in the Chinese track. Yet the everyday life of institutionalized academia often reminds me of the causative form: the verbal form that expresses making (or letting) someone do something, which, when declined in the passive, turns into “to be made to do” something.
As scholars, we live in the causative-passive form.
This morning, while attending one of those grandiose yet Kafkaesque meetings, I remembered a venerable colleague of mine who often used to say, “Folks, we have been participated again in an institutional project, this time about this and that…”