Some Empty Words Considered

Examining a remarkably inept letter on some faculty firings

In my last essay, I began a series concerned with the qualities that make for lively words. However, that essay wasn’t really the starting point of my thinking on this topic. Last summer, I wrote a longish essay on the topic of “empty words,” in which I developed the idea that a garden serves as a good metaphor for our use of language. That essay will appear from Mere Orthodoxy sometime this year, and I will share it when it appears, but I’m going to be so bold as to quote myself from it here:

Every word ever spoken originates from human culture and human use, and so language must be a place that serves the needs of human beings first if not exclusively. But if language is not precisely an old-growth forest, it’s also not a lab where we produce controlled experiments or an airport given over entirely to the purposes of human commerce. Perhaps the metaphor that will best serve us, then, is that of a garden. Like a garden, language exists for human purposes and under human control—it is not the wild, in which human needs serve only a part. And yet in any sufficiently complex garden things are always happening that we don’t expect: new plants and animals appear, the soil composition changes, light and shade shift their balance subtly and without our notice. Properly speaking, we do not build or install or construct a garden: we plant and cultivate it. So language. Natural languages share with an ecosystem a complexity and mystery beyond our ability to control, and yet they share with a building the need for human care. So like a garden, language brings the natural and the cultural together to produce a place where, if we get it right, we can feel at home.

Today, the garden of language, our home, has become infested with empty words. Rather than expanding our world, this language lacking real meaning merely obscures. As in the parable, it is as if some enemy came in the night and sowed our well-cultivated garden beds with weeds. Now, with the morning breaking, we arise to find that our neat rows of flowers and vegetables have been overcome with rank and frothy plant matter, good for nothing. Or better—since many of these empty words don’t arise naturally from use but are imposed on us through the machinations of industry and technology—it is as if someone came in the night and paved over our garden with a row of parking meters.

My current project in this Substack is to cultivate the garden of language by examining those qualities that help our language come alive, and that help us resist the infestation of empty words.

Today, I want to write a little more in diagnosis, examining abuses of language in a particular example of empty words.

The stories are pro forma at this point: “[Mediocre, struggling university] fires tenured professors, cuts [any and all programs without a job title in the name].” This time, it’s Cornerstone University in Grand Rapids, Michigan, an institution that claims to offer an academically rigorous liberal arts education according to a Christian worldview, and yet after a summertime round of firings, no longer employs any full-time faculty in history, literature, writing, languages, philosophy, theology, or music.

Such purges are depressingly common, symptomatic of institutions that lack vision and leadership, and so engage in frantic cutting in hopes of staving off the decline produced by their inability to attract students. These institutions may buy themselves some relief to a temporary budget shortfall through such austerity measures, but by eliminating so much of what makes a liberal arts education worthwhile, they only reinforce their school’s increasing irrelevance and undermine their appeal to future students.

What especially stands out to me in the Cornerstone story, however, isn’t the details of the cuts, but the language in which the university communicates about them.

In his coverage of the Cornerstone story at Current, John Fea has published a “poorly written letter” sent by Cornerstone officials to their students who are currently enrolled in humanities or arts majors, informing them that their professors have been fired. The letter is a masterpiece of empty words. That the leadership of an institution dedicated to Christian higher learning could produce such a document condemns them and their vision of the world more eloquently than anything I could say.

Nonetheless, a thorough examination of this letter can tell us much about how empty words infest the garden of language. The letter begins:

Dear “student”

As we continuously do, we have been praying for your summer initiatives whether they be restful or productive or a healthy combination.

Notice that the letter employs an infelicity in almost its first word: “continuously” is neither idiomatic nor precise in the opening clause. An English speaker would typically pray “continually,” not “continuously,” nor does the Latinate, corporate “continuous” fit in a personal message. The message continues this business-jargon tone by referring to students’ “summer initiatives,” as if every student is an administrator of his or her own bureaucracy.

The sentence then opts awkwardly for the bare infinitive, “be,” instead of the more natural present tense, “are,” and concludes with a poorly thought out contrast between rest, productivity, and “a healthy combination.” (Evidently we must pick one option?)

I presume that the greeting, with “student” in quotes, reflects Fea’s anonymization of a message that was customized to the recipient by email software, but I like to think that the writers are unsure whether to address the recipient as a student or a “student.”

This summer, the university leadership teams are busy preparing for your return and the welcome of our new students in August. There is much good, hard work to be done all across campus.

Refinements are necessary within all institutions, whether they be ministries or industries, and Cornerstone University is not exempt from the need for continuous assessment and evaluation of our operations and academic offerings. For the past many years, leaders have shared with students our desire to protect our beautiful mission as well as expand its reach to more students and communities.

The first paragraph employs some human vocabulary for the first time (“summer,” “good, hard work”), and yet these tiny marks of warmth are quickly buried by an abrupt transition, another awkward bare infinitive, and a cascade of jargon terms and wordiness. The Trumpian hyperbole of “our beautiful mission” adds a note of the bizarre that quickly fades behind the dead metaphor of “expand its reach.”

For the past 18 months, the university’s Vice President for Academics, Dr. Bradford Sample, has been carefully reviewing six years of student data trends and course choices by our on-campus and online students, and the results of this review prompted several academic refinements in fall of 2023 and additional changes effective fall 2024. These refinements have the unified unanimous support of the board of trustees and the university’s executive team.

A small number of majors will be merged into larger market-aligned programs for future students.

A small number of majors will be discontinued for new students even as we offer teach-outs to all current students.

Faculty resources will be reallocated and deployed to support growing majors and market-aligned programs for the future, including psychology, counseling, social work, chemistry, math, nursing, engineering, business data analytics, and media production.

In this portion of the letter, what stands out first is how the writers create a new variety of weasel wording by referring to closings and firings as “refinements.” Professional abusers of language have long experimented with ways to avoid calling firings what they are: “downsizing,” “right sizing,” “letting go,” “ending the relationship,” “restructuring,” “making a change.”

Now, some of these euphemisms can be justified not as prevarication but as good manners—softening the blow of an undeniably painful reality. Nonetheless, even where such avoidances are polite, they are a failure of candor, and cannot help but give a message an impersonal tone and the reader a feeling of being manipulated.

Note here too the redundancy of “unified unanimous”—a sure sign of the writer’s anxious need to defend an unpopular decision—and, of course, the drumbeat of the repeated phrase “market-aligned.” The rhetorical theorist Kenneth Burke observes that any writer will employ certain words as “devil terms,” which the audience understands as universally deplored, and others as “God terms,” phrases of unqualified and unquestioned approbation. I think that in the phrase “market-aligned,” we have found our writers’ God term. The market can do no wrong; we must simply align ourselves with its omniscient and inevitable will.

Decisions like these often leave people with questions.

Indeed.

In this case, some faculty positions will also be reduced where there are not enough student enrollments in impacted majors. The university is committed to maintaining a robust full-time faculty population to support the majors and courses that students are selecting, but when enrollment trends are shifting from one discipline to another, faculty roles and expertise must adapt. Any impacted faculty have been generously supported by the university in transition plans and separation agreements. …

Administrators don’t fire faculty in the world of this letter: “faculty positions [are] reduced.” “Enrollment trends,” similarly, passively “shift.” It is only “faculty roles and expertise” that must actively change. Only one agent in this system of administrators, students, and faculty can be expected to take responsibility—the others are like forces of nature, who just do what they do.

Andy Crouch has noted that modern usage tends to convert the noun “impact” into a verb in preference to using more familiar verbs like “effected,” “influenced,” or “changed.” He argues that this usage reflects impatience—an “impact,” after all, creates immediate change, where effects or influence may build more slowly. Here, the writer’s inability to control his or her diction undermines the attempt to be comforting and conciliatory, since an “impact”—in the sense of a destructive collision—is precisely what has taken place at Cornerstone University.

We know change is rarely easy or comfortable. We know you desire transparency when possible, and we know that you need to have outlets for questions and discussions. Our SFCC and advising teams are standing by to support you when questions arise over the summer and when the new school year begins.

We do pray for the LORD’s perfect peace to surround you.

It takes breathtaking gall for the writers here to invoke the peace of the LORD as a conclusion to this letter’s parade of circumlocutions, presumptions, and malapropisms. To invoke peace here in the letter is an attempt to end and control subsequent discussion—to imply that only peace can follow these decisions, because further discussion certainly will not.

Properly Christian speech practices are modeled upon the speech of Our Lord, whose language was always candid (consider his words to the Samaritan woman), precise (consider his use of parables and quotations from Scripture), and accurate (consider his debates with the scribes and Pharisees). Nothing in the letter above reflects the principles of Christian speech, because it is dishonest, vague, and careless.

The very words they use indict the leaders of Cornerstone University and their vision of Christianity and education, declaring it to be on the side of mediocrity, heedlessness, and ignorance.

We can take comfort in recognizing the empty words of this letter for what they are. Though they infest the garden of our speech, their roots are shallow. One little wind can blast them.

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