2008 Woodie Awards
Staff Editorial: Campus buzzwords don't mean anything anymore
Issue date: 9/21/06 Section: Opinions
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If you're in the habit of reading e-mails from Carol Christ, you may recall a certain one that she sent out last Thursday. Under the subject heading "Strategic Planning Round Table Discussions for Students," she listed a variety of topics which students were invited to discuss with administrators at scheduled times during the semester. These discussions will help complete "the strategic plan that will guide the college over the next decade," wrote Christ. But what exactly are they going to be about?
The titles of the round table meetings are, at best, vague. But what's worse is that they make perfect use of an aspect of liberal arts college life that we have come to despise: super-politically correct, overly-sensitive non-speak. In an attempt to neither provoke nor offend, we have adopted a specific vocabulary which has come to mean both everything and nothing.
Using words like "community," "diversity" and "conversation," members of our campus think they're being generally safe and explicit, when really they are failing to convey any information at all. Where once these words may have actually meant something, they have been overused and distorted so that the concepts that they originally signified no longer apply, and their current intent is thus achieved: perfect, inoffensive vagueness.
One round table discussion that Christ listed in her e-mail is "Strengthening Essential Student Capacities." What does that even mean? Maybe attendance at this meeting will illuminate its mysterious title. I would hope the same goes for the other round tables as well, which will be guided under the headings of "Deepening Students' Awareness and Appreciation of Other Cultures and Global Issues," "Promoting a Culture of Research, Inquiry, and Discovery" and "Encouraging Purposeful Engagement with Society's Challenges."
Sure, you can glean the general topic of these meetings from their titles, but take a good look at the words being used. What does "engagement" mean to you? Or what about "awareness," "cultures" and "capacities?" These are all words that get tossed around so often on campus that they fail to convey a specific meaning anymore. Why is it that we can no longer say what we mean? At these meetings, people will have "conversations" about "diversity" in their "community," but what will come of it? Have we become a campus of hollow talk and no action?
When we use this language, we are obscuring the point of what we are trying to convey. If we actually want to make progress with real issues that exist on this campus such as tensions about race and class, which we know are present but are too frightened to discuss, we're going to have to take our words out of the clouds and start saying what we mean. No amount of overly-sensitive language is going to solve our problems.
The titles of the round table meetings are, at best, vague. But what's worse is that they make perfect use of an aspect of liberal arts college life that we have come to despise: super-politically correct, overly-sensitive non-speak. In an attempt to neither provoke nor offend, we have adopted a specific vocabulary which has come to mean both everything and nothing.
Using words like "community," "diversity" and "conversation," members of our campus think they're being generally safe and explicit, when really they are failing to convey any information at all. Where once these words may have actually meant something, they have been overused and distorted so that the concepts that they originally signified no longer apply, and their current intent is thus achieved: perfect, inoffensive vagueness.
One round table discussion that Christ listed in her e-mail is "Strengthening Essential Student Capacities." What does that even mean? Maybe attendance at this meeting will illuminate its mysterious title. I would hope the same goes for the other round tables as well, which will be guided under the headings of "Deepening Students' Awareness and Appreciation of Other Cultures and Global Issues," "Promoting a Culture of Research, Inquiry, and Discovery" and "Encouraging Purposeful Engagement with Society's Challenges."
Sure, you can glean the general topic of these meetings from their titles, but take a good look at the words being used. What does "engagement" mean to you? Or what about "awareness," "cultures" and "capacities?" These are all words that get tossed around so often on campus that they fail to convey a specific meaning anymore. Why is it that we can no longer say what we mean? At these meetings, people will have "conversations" about "diversity" in their "community," but what will come of it? Have we become a campus of hollow talk and no action?
When we use this language, we are obscuring the point of what we are trying to convey. If we actually want to make progress with real issues that exist on this campus such as tensions about race and class, which we know are present but are too frightened to discuss, we're going to have to take our words out of the clouds and start saying what we mean. No amount of overly-sensitive language is going to solve our problems.
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