The abstract art of gobbledegook evolves by the week. Chambers dictionary defines gobbledegook as ”official jargon, rubbish, nonsense”, which is a bit of an oxymoron when you come to think of it.
I heard some official jargon only last week, when some politician spoke about a fascinating new contradiction called ”functional illiteracy”. Chambers might well consider adding that to their definition, as it serves to define what passes for information and guidance in a world increasingly asphyxiated by bureaucracy of one sort or another.
Like underarm deodorants, gobbledegook is available in various concentrations. Here is an example of a 24-hour variety called ”New Labour-Extra-Strength”. It’s a paragraph from the British Finance Act. I think I remember this one winning an international prize.
If a right to acquire shares in a body corporate is assigned or released in whole or in part for a consideration which consists of or comprises another right to assign in that or any other body corporate, that right shall not be treated as consideration for the assignment or release, but this section shall apply in relation to it as it applies in relation to the right assigned or released and as if the consideration for its acquisition did not include the value of the right assigned or released but did include the amount or value of the consideration given for the grant of the right assigned or released so far as that has not been offset by any valuable consideration for the assignment or release other than the consideration consisting of the other right.
It has, of course, taken centuries of British civil servants to develop the art to such sublime levels. Think of Dickens, lampooning the exaggerations of the lawyers and clerks of his time. Restoration comedies are filled with comic derision of official pomposity. And Shakespeare was forever going on about ”art, made tongue-tied by authority”, and the immortal ”man, proud man, dres’t in a little brief authority”.
The scientific world is regularly bombarded by gobbledegook of a particularly obsessive strain. You wonder how the planet keeps spinning without earnest research papers — published in Science magazine — with titles such as Chaperone Activity of Protein O-Fucosyltransferase Promotes Notch Receptor Folding or the deathless The Genome of the Diatom Thallassiosira Pseudonana: Ecology, Evolution and Metabolism. It took some 46 authors to produce that last one.
Out here in the abandoned colonies, as an inevitable sequela of democracy, our bureaucratic atmosphere is becoming as foggy as the best. Our politicians, along with the steadily incremental civil service which leeches off them, provide some splendid specimens. But when it comes to truly constipated gobbledegook, how about this sample, not from the politicos, but from a document headed Call for UCT Research Signature Theme Proposals.
Do not be misled into thinking this is about submissions for a new University of Cape Town (UCT) rugby song. This is far more serious.
The key principles are that a research theme should elicit innovative multidisciplinary collaboration that will have a gearing effect on shifting existing knowledge boundaries (or research parameters). The selected research themes should span across silos and thereby contribute to cultural and operational change on various levels. As a framework, it offers the potential to allow strategic filters to be applied to an integrated planning and budgeting process for research and teaching.
How’s that for a ”real eye-waterer”, as Neddie Seagoon once put it? Out of sheer human pity I will not identify the manufacturer of the above bolus, beyond saying that it dropped from an administrative entity very high in the UCT foliage.
There should be some sort of prize offered by UCT to anyone who can explain what it means. A free course in ”communications”?
The four-and-a-half page ”announcement” in which the above paragraph appears is a small masterpiece, an even stickier coagulation of the time-honoured discipline of academic prolixity. It curdles with mind-numbing phraseology like integrations of curricula and transformation-sensitive postdoctoral fellowships and throughputs. Individually- and curiosity-driven research activities rubs shoulders with strategic collaboration and leverage capacity.
”Cant Struck”, as Clive James once put it. Still, for all its impenetrability, this single document serves as confirmation of the fear that our universities are being coerced by the politicians to abandon their traditional roles as educators and researchers. Rather, they are becoming, at best, mass-production lines for fast-food degrees; at worst, fetchers-and-carriers in Kader Asmal-style comrade-training centres.
Whichever way you look at it, our universities are now noticeably less independent of political control than they ever were. Instruction and research are steadily becoming incidental to what is now expected of teaching staff as their primary obligation: the interpretation, mitigation and fulfillment of the mandates of ”transformation”.
No one denies the urgent necessity of reconstructing our educational system. But it seems the pendulum is swinging a bit wildly when, from the top levels of a teaching institution as worthy as UCT, comes material which belongs in a satire of academic excess, lines like, ”elicit innovative multidisciplinary collaboration that will have a gearing effect on shifting existing knowledge boundaries”.
It seems illiteracy can indeed be functional.