The campus ideology that has seeped into other spheres of American life has replaced language as communication with language as power.
The campus ideology that has seeped into other spheres of American life has replaced language as communication with language as power.
W hen I started a student magazine of conservative opinion during my junior year at Colorado College, it was met with immediate backlash. Just days after the release of the first issue, student activists ran an anonymous campaign to confiscate and destroy hundreds of copies around campus, arguing that the publication’s presence posed a danger to the safety of the student body. The students engaging in the coordinated effort to remove the magazine from campus claimed “a right, as members of the community, to reject such discourse in our spaces,” as a spokesperson for the group wrote.
That language — “a right to reject such discourse in our spaces” — might have struck a previous generation as odd. But it wasn’t particularly unusual at colleges like mine. The introduction of a new semantic flexibility — wherein pronouns no longer necessarily correspond to biological sex, our truth has replaced any notion of the truth, and words like “rights” are devalued to nothing — was intended to emancipate us from oppressive structures supposedly encoded into the English language. But instead, the untethering of words from their commonly understood definitions has damaged our ability to communicate with one another at all: Students say more but convey less. In the classroom and beyond, today’s elites-in-waiting are rewarded for their mastery of academic jargon rather than for saying anything worthwhile or true.
Those of us who have attended college in the past decade are the first to speak the contemporary campus dialect as a native tongue. This was the inevitable outcome of the new understanding of the purpose and function of language that prevails in the modern academy. “Language is made not to be believed but to be obeyed, and to compel obedience,” wrote Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus (1980), one of the most influential texts in post-structuralist theory. “Words are not tools, but we give children language, pens, and notebooks as we give workers shovels and pickaxes. A rule of grammar is a power marker before it is a syntactical marker. . . . Language is not life; it gives life orders. Life does not speak; it listens and waits.”
The modern university — and the campus ideology that has crept out into other spheres of American life — has replaced language as communication with language as power. Today’s elite institutions of higher learning teach students to use words as weapons rather than bridges, to view language not as an earnest attempt to make oneself known but as an imposition of the will — what Deleuze and Guattari described as “the emission, transmission, and observation of orders as commands.”
Take the recent case of Ilya Shapiro. After a poorly worded tweet, the libertarian constitutional-law scholar is at risk of losing his new post as the executive director of Georgetown Law’s Center for the Constitution before he’s even begun it. What is notable — though far from unique — about Shapiro’s case is the way in which the student activists calling for his ouster frame their argument. At a sit-in demanding Shapiro’s termination, agitators from Georgetown Law’s Black Law Student Alliance (BLSA) informed the dean of the law school that they were “exhausted”: “We’re starting off the month that’s supposed to celebrate us and our history [i.e., Black History Month] already exhausted,” one BLSA member insisted. “Like really, really, really tired.”
The dean, for his part, assured them that he was “appalled” by Shapiro’s “painful” tweets, and promised to “listen,” “learn,” and “do better” in the future. He expressed his gratitude for BLSA’s “insights,” promising that he had “heard a lot today that I won’t just be reflecting on but that I’ll be moving forward with, and I will be in dialogue with you about what we’re doing.”
Of course, the dean was not genuinely “appalled” by the “painful” nature of Shapiro’s tweets, nor was he really planning to “listen” and “learn” beyond gleaning what information was necessary for his own self-preservation. And the BLSA activists, students at one of the top-ranking law schools in the nation, were not really “exhausted” — they were exhilarated. On its face, all of this verges on incoherent. But coherence was not the point. The crux of the matter was power, wielded by the students and against Shapiro and the Georgetown Law administration. Key words (we are tired) are imbued with a power to extract demands (give us free food) and to silence and punish views considered offensive (we say Shapiro is a racist — fire him).
In other words, the dean and his students were not engaged in a conversation in the traditional sense of the term. It was an elaborately choreographed performance, with an existing script and roles for both sides to play. The ability to pull off this performance, which we have seen play out time and time again in recent years, depends entirely on one’s fluency in its new language.
The controversy surrounding Joe Rogan’s relationship to Spotify, sparked after a political hit campaign surfaced old, out-of-context clips of the podcast host using a racial slur, followed a remarkably similar script. For months, activist-minded Spotify employees had been pushing the company to deplatform Rogan’s show, attacking him for “transphobic comments” and spreading “misinformation” about Covid. In January, 270 members of “a coalition of scientists, medical professionals, professors, and science communicators” called “on Spotify to take action against the mass-misinformation events which continue to occur on its platform,” accusing Rogan of “promoting baseless conspiracy theories.” In an open letter, they claimed that, “by allowing the propagation of false and societally harmful assertions, Spotify is enabling its hosted media to damage public trust in scientific research and sow doubt in the credibility of data-driven guidance offered by medical professionals.” Beginning with Neil Young, a number of famous musicians pulled their work from the platform in protest.
Responding in a letter to his employees, the Spotify CEO expressed his deep “regret that you are carrying so much of this burden. . . . It’s critical we listen carefully to one another and consider how we can and should do better. . . . I know this situation leaves many of you feeling drained, frustrated and unheard.” Though he neglected to cut Rogan’s highly lucrative show from the platform, he promised to invest $100 million in music produced by “historically marginalized groups.” Another extraction gained via the use of the magic words; another concession made in the same canned, formulaic language.
Of course, the CEO and the dean both knew their expected roles. Corporate executives and university administrators are well-trained in such matters.
But what happens to those who don’t know the right lines?
Toward the end of the same semester in which I launched my magazine, a group of young men on the college’s hockey team were accused of racism for not letting three black students into a private party hosted at the home of one of the players. (The evidence presented as “proof” of their racist intent was the simple fact that they were white and their accusers were not.) The hockey players were hauled before a group of a hundred or so angry students demanding they make amends for their alleged offenses.
The athletes — almost all of them working-class boys on generous athletic scholarships, at a school with the second-richest student body of any college in the country — earnestly attempted to apologize, although they seemed unsure of exactly what they had done wrong. They didn’t know their lines. They didn’t even know they had lines. Faced with an impromptu truth-and-reconciliation commission cum Maoist struggle session, the three bashful young men stammered through a clumsy mea culpa — nervously choking out unfamiliar words like “privilege,” “whiteness,” “allies,” and “oppression” — to an unsympathetic mass of their peers.
In this sense, the woke dialect is a new kind of gnosticism, separating the elite from the great unwashed. This boundary between the initiated and the uninitiated — the woke and the “problematic” — is one that the working-class hockey players ran up against: Their attempted apology was vindictively policed by the other students, punctuated by regular interruptions from the crowd “calling out” this or that choice of words for falling off script. (Apparently, one of the hockey players had lightly put his hand on the shoulder of a black female student to prevent her from entering the party. “I know, I should never put my hands on a woman,” he said, in an effort to say the right line. The crowd exploded: “You should never put your hands on anyone—regardless of their gender identity!”)
What that means, of course, is that the well-educated elite are far less vulnerable to vindictive activists than their less privileged counterparts. “The cancel-culture debate has primarily played out in the public view with famous celebrities or those attached to large institutions,” Phil Klein wrote on Thursday. “The bigger threat from cancel culture is not to famous people with massive audiences. It is to those whose lives can be turned upside down thanks to online mobs, who don’t have the resources or supporters to survive such an assault.”
More fundamentally, the deconstruction of our shared language has made us less capable of seeing one another as fellow citizens. We are no longer capable of talking to one another. There is a “special connection,” wrote George Orwell in his famous 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language,” “between politics and the debasement of language.” As our political culture deteriorates, so too does our vocabulary. But Orwell warned that the deterioration of our language can corrupt our political thinking in turn: “A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language.”
We are living with the effects of the debasement of our language, as genuine conversation has been replaced with partisan warfare. This is the tragic result of language purposely stripped of fixed meaning: It robs us of our ability to understand one another.