When Words Lose Their Meaning

It is over 40 years since the publication of James Boyd White’s When Words Lose Their Meaning. Although the precise year was 1984, Orwell and his Ministry of Truth are not the subject, though they are never far off. White deals with the past rather than the predicted future, starting with the greatest of the Greek historians, Thucydides.

Thucydides knew what could happen to language when civil discord turned to open conflict — for him, that between democratic and oligarchic parties and civil war on the island of Corfu. In the process and to justify extreme and lawless acts “they changed the usual meanings of words to describe actions for new ones as they thought fit.” White also analyzes Plato and Jonathan Swift and their shared “sense of the individual’s responsibility for the language that he speaks and for the person that he becomes in doing so.”

It might be worth asking how Harvard has been doing in this sphere and how we might measure the University’s governing euphemism against the standard of its erstwhile motto: “Veritas.”

What has been happening here is all child’s play compared to the current national discourse under which the Supreme Court-enabled president seems to abandon the law in the name of “saving the country.” But greater subtlety is no less deserving of criticism. It is the more effective rhetorical tool, precisely because we might not notice the shift in meaning or application. And it seems unlikely that the University will be able to survive the coming onslaught on meaning if it is unable to use language honestly itself.

Of course, there is nothing new here. Way back in the mid-1990s former University President Neil L. Rudenstine indicated that a reduction of Harvard’s faculty pension contributions was potentially necessary since Harvard risked “breaking anti-discrimination” laws by contributing at too high a rate. Early in this millennium, one of us heard the next president suggest that providing a living wage for our food service workers would result in increased Harvard retail cafeteria food prices, with students eating less expensively in Harvard Square, where workers were not paid a living wage, resulting in layoffs of our soon-to-be-overpaid workers. Case closed.

Another example: “disruption of University business.” That was the judgement when encamping students confined themselves to patches of Harvard Yard. It was hard to see how such business was disrupted – with or without comparison to the truly disruptive three-week occupation of Massachusetts Hall in 2001. Speaking of rules, we also now have “time, place and manner” as applied to student protests. Indeed, the Palestine exception, always hotly denied, seems in full swing with application of these apparently “neutral” rules. Disruption is one of those words that is very much in the eye of the beholder and the rule-maker.

Then we have “institutional neutrality,” perhaps defined as the institution’s being uninterested in the outside world. Or is it the need to have University leaders express no views at all so as to ensure their students feel comfortable saying anything whatsoever? In reality, neutrality becomes a way of supporting a status quo, even a skewed and unjust one, when it is favored by wealthy donors and by the beneficiaries of that status quo.

An extension of the neutrality argument is the “both sides principle” where both sides are to get equal time, and not at the macro level of the University, but at the micro level of the single event. The canceled Lowell House panel was one example, and the principle revealed its inherent vacuity when a presentation at Harvard Medical School covering the effect of the Gaza destruction on children was canceled following objections that the “other side” was not represented. Further assurances: of course we support affiliates’ right to speak out on issues, we just can’t officially recognize (i.e. allow space for) such one-sided events.

Then we have “the business of the University is teaching, learning, and research,” frequently reiterated with the apparent intention of closing down any conversation about where the endowment is invested or what word might be appropriate to describe the moral enormity in Gaza. The Office of the General Counsel, recently seen negotiating speech policy in order to settle a lawsuit, has apparently received a carve out.

Wasn’t the pursuit of truth once included in that list? Our website still claims we teach students to be citizens (“Harvard University is devoted to excellence in teaching, learning, and research, and to developing leaders who make a difference globally”). Doesn’t it make sense for an institution as wealthy and powerful as Harvard to accept the responsibility of speaking out broadly for the truth, and perhaps even for justice?

One gets the feeling that there lurks an implicit qualification before “teaching, learning, and research.” Today, those words are being used as the academic analog of “shut up and dribble:” “Give your lectures, take your tests, do not ask why or what any of it means in a larger sense or question the enabling fiction that separates your work from the rest of the world. And never, ever ask where the money comes from, or what we’re going to do about protecting the University and its faculty and students.”

Walter Johnson is the Winthrop Professor of History and a professor of African and African American Studies. Richard F. Thomas is the George Martin Lane Professor of the Classics. They are members of the executive committee of the American Association of University Professors-Harvard Faculty Chapter.