The renewed interest in Lipsky's street level bureaucracy (SLBy) in a wide array of public sectors brings higher education research's reticent stance on the bottom-up implementation approach to the limelight. This article explores the impact of front line actors' implementation on the Bologna-inspired quality assurance reforms in Tunisia from the lens of Lipsky's SLBy. Specifically, it investigates how academics use their discretion to cope with the ambiguities and complexities of a rule-bound policy reform. It puts the so-called "decentralized approach" to test in the higher education sector by probing Lipsky's claims on policy making at the bottom-end of policy process. This paper's findings are based on interviews conducted with academics in three disciplines at two Tunisian universities. It concludes that academics' use of discretion can question their technical role as "policy takers" as they sometimes tamper with the policy text. However, Lipsky's concept of policy making at the shop-floor remains somewhat overstated.