The lock on the gate of the Ivory Tower

It seems obvious that humans need jargon. If you are a mechanic, it does not suffice to ask your assistant for "that thingamajig that makes this part of the engine work again." In fields where great precision of language is necessary, including many academic fields, people argue about suitable definitions for words. Once there is a consensus, members of that field use those definitions with the assumption that the definition is understood. This allows members of an academic field to refer to complicated concepts, without having to explain in minute detail each time what they mean.

Jargon can be useful, especially in the academic world, where complex ideas are common. Jargon can be dangerously exclusive, however, and turn universities into ivory towers. A strong dose of the vernacular in academic debate would healthy, I believe, for both the public and for universities themselves.

Jargon can be a way of grouping concepts within a field into a single reference. In principle, this allows for higher level groupings to occur creatively. For instance, consider the somewhat jargonized terms "drive train" and "internal combustion engine." The inventor of the hybrid car, at some point, must have said or thought something to the effect of "why don't we attach an electric motor and an internal combustion engine to the same drive train?" For a more erudite example, Kant's alledged synthesis of Rationalism and Empiricism would not have been possible without the terms Rationalism and Empiricism from philosophical jargon.

So how can jargon be bad? In addition to its role in creative thinking, jargon can play an important social function as an inclusionary or exclusionary force, and it is in this capacity that jargon differs from simple technical vocabulary. Jargon can reinforce mutually shared identity, or signify a lack of shared identity. Jargon can also simply confuse the nonprofessional. Particularly in the social sciences and the humanities, jargon tends to bear a specious resemblence to ordinary vocabulary, which makes the disciplines more confusing for outsiders and more thrilling for insiders.

I do not wish to level an accusation of snobbery at all professors of the social sciences and humanities at Princeton, but perhaps the purpose of many of the words they use is to define themselves as "experts," over against the non-jargonized amateur. This is particularly harmful in disciplines like politics and foreign affairs, where amateurs are expected to weigh in at least every four years. This effect was exemplified during our last election, when at least one professor explicitly related the voting patterns of certain Ohioans to their lack of education. While it is true that the academic elite have always looked down on the uneducated, and probably always will, snobbery is easier to defend if a layer of jargon insulates the snobs from the snubbed.

For other disciplines, anthropology and comparative literature, for example, the overuse of jargon imperils the fields with the possibility of simple irrelevance. Both fields try to answer large questions about humanity and, if I may use a bit of jargon myself, the human experience. For this reason, it is important that the discussions that take place within these fields be public, at least in part, and in plain English. No one I know contends — at least not explicitly — that the academic world can really make sense of the universe without the cooperation of the nonacademic world. Universities are supposed to provide intellectual leadership for the societies that support them. Our hostility to the concept of the ivory tower proves that.

If we really want Princeton to provide intellectual leadership for our nation and the world, as our motto would imply, we have to "vulgarize" discourse in our social science and humanities departments. While some amount of jargon is necessary for the sake of brevity, we have to fight against using it to exclude the uneducated from our debates entirely. We cannot fulfill our obligation to the nation and the world solely through volunteerism and civil service. We have an obligation to discuss matters of importance publicly, which means discussing them in ways that the public can understand and contribute to. Who knows? Perhaps we can even learn something from them. David Schaengold is a philosophy major from Cincinati, O.H. He can be reached at dschaeng@princeton.edu.