Overly controlling policies have a way of creating more problems than they actually solve.

When a campus administrator insisted on approving every piece of media students wanted to watch, a determined student employee decided to help by gathering an exhaustive list.

What he imagined as moral oversight quickly turned into way more work than he ever signed up for.

Read on for the full tale of malicious compliance!

College administrator created a ridiculous rule. We gave him everything he wanted and more.

Years ago, I attended a very conservative college.

We had a new administrator who didn’t like that some college students watched shows or movies of either too high a rating or with content he didn’t approve of.

This administrator decided he should get the final say on anything students decided to watch.

He created a rule that anything watched on campus would have to be personally approved by him.

My friend (malicious complier) wrote down some generals on 20-something different 3×5 cards (Disney, Marvel, DCU, Pride and Prejudice, etc.), but he said those were too vague, and he needed specific movies listed.

He wanted specific? That’s exactly what he was going to get.

My friend wanted to create a spreadsheet to post in the college public area so people could more easily see what they were allowed to watch.

She sat in that area as she began her list and asked every college student she could to give her their list of movies and shows to be approved.

She also worked in the administrator’s office (getting paid by the college to do so), and during work, she created a spreadsheet and inputted the content people had requested.

There was no detail spared by this student.

Then she went to every Wikipedia page she could think of and put every individual movie listed on it.

She gave him multiple lists (some lists as long as 30 pages, with each page having about 200 movies listed) to be approved.

She even put a fancy yes/no checkbox next to each movie to make it easier.

The administrator quickly realized this would be a much bigger task than he anticipated.

He got through about 5 pages before he realized it was more work than it was worth.

It was not an enforced rule.

I would also like to add that there was one specific movie that he didn’t approve that we thought he would definitely approve.

Soon it became clear just how out of touch he really was.

We asked him why he didn’t approve it, and his response was, “I wouldn’t let my 2-year-old watch that.”

So, we don’t know what his criteria was for approving content.

Sounds like a completely nonsensical approach for a college administrator.

What did Reddit think?

This type of rule would only make this commenter want to rebel even more.

Notably, there aren’t actually any 2-year-old college students.

This doesn’t sound like the type of environment where free thinking is encouraged.

Doesn’t this administrator understand that college students are adults?

He tried to control what everyone watched, and ended up watching his own rule flop.

It’s hard to hold the moral high ground when you’re buried in paperwork!

If you liked this post, you might want to read this story about a teacher who taught the school’s administration a lesson after they made a sick kid take a final exam.