The Jargon Prize

The rumor that unsubscribing yourself from an unwanted e-mail list tends to regenerate your address in other unwanted e-mail blasts bears fruit, in my case, with electronic scatter-bombs from sites promoting educational administration and technology. I have never, for the record, had anything to do with either of these areas of expertise. But I receive regular communications titled “Collegiality from a Positive Leadership Perspective,” “iOS, Android and Mobile Development Tools in Ed Tech,” “Have a Firm Grip on Your Metrics Reviews,” and the like. Indeed, the more I unsubscribe, the more my junk mail in these areas grows.

I felt right at home, then, reading about The Times Higher Education’s Higher Education Jargon Competition. Last year’s winner felt almost like local dialect:

“We can reframe the way we define it, so that it’s not viewed as simply foregrounding cost savings, but instead a much more complex interplay of influences and drivers that facilitate opportunities for enhancing the ways in which we manage movement.”

Unsubscribe, right? Yet they keep on coming, these architectures of jargon. And they don’t just arrive in the form of unsolicited e-mail from ghost organizations. They come, as the Times’s Chris Parr points out, from all levels of college and university administration.

If you want to enter the contest, you can of course rip whole paragraphs from one of the e-mails you’ve consigned to your Junk or Deleted folder—or, God help you, on which you’ve had to act once you’ve figured out what on earth these people want. Or you can go to Science Geeks’ Educational Jargon Generator. “This fine academic tool,” its inventors gleefully announce, will result in “finely crafted phrases of educational nonsense.” Our choices are grouped into nouns, verbs, adjectives, and—my favorite—prepositional phrases. Joining them at random, we can generate baffling sentences like Differentiated lessons exemplify dynamic enrichment across cognitive and affective domains.

Brilliant! Let’s try another. For our 21^st century learners, global classification can be disaggregated within the core curriculum.

I feel smarter already. What’s more, I now understand what these spammers have been doing all along—creating entries for the Higher Education Jargon Contest. They’re not quite so confusing as my made-up sentence, but the rhythms are close: Participants of this seminar will learn concrete strategies using standardized assessment instruments to measure and improve people’s collegial behavior. … Setup [sic] a web-enabled process to conduct reviews, track issues, action items, and ensure compliance. … This white paper showcases how a process management workflow can contribute to the success of Six Sigma projects by automating project tracking.

It’s the verbs mostly—foreground, facilitate, exemplify, action (yes, that’s a verb here), ensure. It’s also the compound nouns—almost half the choices offered by the Educational Jargon Creator are either adjective-noun phrases or two-word nouns like action items, concept maps, growth mind-sets. And the prepositions the Science Geeks offer are mostly spatial—within, through, across.

All academic fields have their terms of art, so perhaps it’s unfair to poke such fun at administrative gobbledy-speak. But maybe that’s the root cause of these silly, convoluted phrases: the elevation of administrative work to an academic specialty. Some readers may know when this trend began. All I know is that it’s here to stay, however early and often we unsubscribe. Might as well enter the contest. In fact, let’s have our own, right here on Lingua Franca. Winner gets a copy of Roy Peter Clark’s How to Write Short. Entries close at midnight on Friday, October 11.

We can’t stop you from cheating with the Jargon Generator—but if you get the kind of e-mails I receive, you won’t have to. This stuff is self-generating, its functionalities brain-compatible through cognitive disequilibrium (Stop! Stop it!), with synergistic effects harnessed hands-on (Stop, I say!) by manipulatives within professional learning communities. (STOP!)