Written by Dr. Sanjay Paul, Associate Professor of Economics
Branding. Core competency. Value proposition.
These are terms that Homer rarely used to hear at faculty meetings. Routinely used in the business world, they have now made alarming inroads into the world of academe. Not that Homer’s faculty meetings were paragons of intellectual discourse—the ivory tower has always been beset with its own petty concerns, blustering egos, and most common of all, an overwhelming propensity to criticize the incompetence of the administration they labored under.
The language of the administrative state, on the other hand, has always borrowed freely from business, and especially books like “From Good to Great” and “Who Moved My Cheese?” with their easily-digestible chunks of management wisdom. The import of business terms lent a commercial patina to the labors of college administrators, who otherwise spent their days dealing with the picayune issues of cantankerous faculty.
Even those who had previously been card-carrying members of the ivory tower, and were now deans and provosts and vice presidents of this and that, would quickly pick up the required lingo. Before long they too would slip terms like “branding” and “core competency” casually into conversations, and if this was done when members of the Board of Trustees were in earshot, the camaraderie with the titans of industry would become stronger yet.
Until recently, the language of academics was the language of their discipline, but they knew when to unleash it. A marketing professor might blurt out the word “branding” in a meeting, only to be met with pitying glances from her humanities colleagues. An economist using words like “core competency” would elicit a harsher reaction: the malefactor would be asked to leave the meeting. Many an economist has been banished from faculty gatherings, in some cases, never to be seen again.
Until recently, barring the occasional faux pas, academics refrained from uttering such vulgarities. Now, however, you can hardly attend a meeting where business terms are not bandied about. Distressingly, noted Homer, academics of all stripes are engaging in this subversive activity, this uttering of phrases that the tongue is not naturally used to.
Faculty from the social sciences, the natural sciences, even—gasp!—the humanities have discovered their inner business selves, and are not ashamed to reveal them. Meetings are littered with references to “return on investment”, or the more sexy acronym “ROI,” and “cost-benefit analysis.” Professors of marketing and economics and finance look on with wonder, sometimes with resentment, at these instances of linguistic appropriation. After all, controlling your specific language is a source of power. What does it say about the exclusivity of finance if sociologists speak casually about ROI?
Perhaps this is all to the good, the democratization of business lingo. No longer the preserve of profit-seeking capitalists or management-minded administrators, the language of business now rolls off the academic’s tongue. Meetings, peppered with the terms of commerce, appear to feature ideas that are more precise.
But, noted Homer, this phenomenon of linguistic creep in faculty meetings carries risks. The aura of precision may be misplaced. People who do not use these terms routinely in their classes or research may be unaware of the subtleties or the shortcomings or even the applicability of the concepts these terms are meant to describe.
Other disciplines have had to endure similar indignities. Mathematicians have long chafed at the abuse of terms like “exponential growth.” Physicists cringed at the takeover of “quantum” by those seeking to cloak their ideas in scientific rigor.
But, noted Homer, the intrusiveness of management-speak in faculty meetings is probably here to stay. As his colleagues become further enmeshed in activities they are unused to—asking donors for money, or attending finance sessions at Board meetings—the language of the academy will continue to mimic that of business.
Homer decided he would have to live with it. After all, he could still look forward to the value proposition of a scone at the Blue Bean.
