‘We value freedom, justice, truth, human rights and collective effort for the public good.’ This statement seems as though it should be written on the welcome mat outside a house containing all the superheroes of the world, or at the very least in the job description of the police force. It is not a description that is normally associated with university students. It is included in the values of a UK university; but I highly doubt that the students spend their days performing vigilante acts of justice.
I started looking through different university prospectuses and found the exaggerations did not end with the values sections. For example, one university promoted that ‘there is a strong café and restaurant culture’, or in other words, people eat food there.
There is also a new development, The Human Movement Centre. Are only allowed to make movements in this particular building? Must we remain static around all other areas of the campus? I can picture it now, students who are seeking justice and working towards ‘the public good’ on patrol around the campus making sure no human movements are being made outside the designated centre, storming classes where students are raising their hands, paving over the sport fields, and tackling joggers to the ground.
I found that there the mission statements of most universities in the UK all set somewhat unrealistic tasks.
For example, one sets its sights on contributing to ‘society through the pursuit of education, learning and research.’ Another takes this one step further, attempting not only to contribute to society, but to transform it through ‘practice-based education, research and knowledge exchange.’
I was curious as to how various universities intended to transform society as whole, but this seems like a simple task in comparison to one university which seemingly intends to take conquer the world and become a ‘global university’.
While I consider the given examples to be reaching beyond their grip in terms of transforming society and moving towards the public good, at least I was able to understand what they were trying to say, which is more than I can say for the mission statements of some other universities.
For example, one claims to offer excellence in higher education ‘characterised by flexibility and interdisciplinarity.’ At first glance I worried that perhaps I did not understand this because I am not educated enough to understand the meaning of interdisciplinarity, however as I am typing this even Microsoft Word is identifying that there is a problem with this word by producing a squiggly red line beneath it.
The dictionary defines interdisciplinarity as the combining of two or more academic fields into one single discipline. This raises the question as to why on earth this particular univeristy did not simply explain this instead of using the complex word. I am reminded of an episode of ‘Friends’ in which the character of Joey Tribiani uses a thesaurus for every single word in an attempt to sound intelligent, and ends up changing his own name to Baby Kangaroo Tribbiani.
Presumably if you are reading a university prospectus it is because you are intending to go to university and so are fairly well educated, however this does mean that Universities should over complicate anything. So if you are someone who writes prospectuses – please refrain from employing sesquipedalian.
Ahh, I found this very amusing and so true!
ReplyDeleteWhen I read an article with flowery language I always think how the writer either had trouble hitting their word count or are trying too hard to make something sound appealing; heck, who talks like that in the real world anyway?
Great feature :)
-Just be careful with the word university however, sometimes you capitalise it and other times you don't.