Universities shift toward accessible writing, away from jargon, convolutedness

In August 2024, scholars attending the Academic Conference of Critical Evaluation of Intellectual Tergiversation engaged with the idea of implementing a standard of accessible and readable language in academia. As students and broader subsets of plebians continue to importune that academia aligns itself more fully with ideas regarding diversity and inclusion of varying backgrounds, as well as systems of educational, linguistic, and literary nature, professors and scholars alike have moved toward writing and knowledge that is presented in a manner that is less than roundabout. The emerging trajectory toward maximizing engagement with higher education is propitious one that draws endorsements from transdisciplinary and intersectional contingents.

This development emanates from an increased interest in research pertaining to educational models and the way that knowledge is conveyed and collected in an institutional environment such as a college or university. A recent Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) study scrutinized queries in relation to accessible writing, surveying pupils and professors affiliated with a number of universities within the United States of America. The survey unearthed evidence suggesting that pupils are slightly less than over quadruple as much more likely than professors to concur that academic prose is opaque, and that said opacity dilapidates the very nature and quality of education in higher learning.

Be that as it may that professors may oppose such a reorientation, a number of professors and students alike express concern that the current standard of labyrinthine composition that students struggle to navigate upholds a hegemonic model of learning.

In a testimonial given to the HERI from a disciple of Yale University, Idee Contorto assured the surveyor that “readable and accessible academic works are the sine qua non of any resultant pedagogy.” Additionally, Contorto contended that while “so many professors and institutions adduce the imperative of furthering inclusivity and democratization of education, they mustn’t forget the notion: acta non verba.”

Another student, Fox (no last name, Fox is deeply enmeshed in the generation subject to Millennial naming practices), echoes this sentiment: ‘The way which we conduct academic work must change and will inevitably be

revolutionized, it is whether it is now or later and how. Nietzsche once said, ‘many are stubborn in pursuit of the path they have chosen, few in the goal.’ I know many of my professors would never even begin to entertain the ideas of such a simple thinker and writer, but Nietzsche is perhaps closer to right than they are. In many ways, what to do about academia is dependent on what academia is---is it the cultivation, preservation, dissemination, or hoarding of knowledge? Is knowledge or learning the goal? Once again, I think there are answers in clear written words—Leo Tolstoy said: ‘the changes in our life must come from the impossibility to live otherwise than according to the demands of our conscience not from our mental resolution to try a new form of life.’ As students and academics, we must internalize the need to reconfigure academia in the interest of our own preservation and our own sense of right and wrong.”

Perhaps the most bewildering testimonial came from DeVry University, where Professor Parsimony Teoria said: “It’s Occam’s Razor.” There are many contextual elements and interpretations that can be applied to such a statement, and perhaps the ambiguity and complexity of a seemingly simple statement makes it the most insightful and constructive of them all. In other responses Professor Teoria offered praise for the embrace of more accessible language, therefore, “it’s Occam’s Razor” supports this idea.

It is nonetheless paramount to be cognizant of the fact that while academia is evolving into a sort of quadruped more suitable to simple terrain, it is inevitable that said progression nolens volens will require much time and dedication to achieve. In the meantime, students often ululate that they are locked in a battle to decipher literature likened more closely to a Beowulfian beast than a common Ursdiae.^[1] The act of deaggregating enduring understandings of proper academic expression and supplanting the seemingly immortal paradigms of education cannot and must not be simplified to the extent that its result may come to be expected imminently rather than in gradations over an extended interval of time. The consequences of perpetuating a false impression of elementary implementation of change could position students and proponents of said change against the institutions of which they are affiliated.

Many professors and scholars have been less than quiet in their resistance to this trend and argue that to communicate in such a pedestrian and common way is antithetical to the institutional values of higher education, further lamenting that it is pestiferous and incommodious.  The HERI includes testimonies of oppugnant viewpoints in their study, one of the most notable coming from Ennuyeux Déroutant, Associate Professor of Classics at UCLA. Professor Déroutant avowed: “To distance academia from obfuscating and Byzantine

knowledge is to do violence to education in its entirety. The very nature of Delphic doctrina in higher education obliges students to engage in metacognition and innovate their own perceptions of meaning and the creation of it through mediums such as text. Universities, in their traditional modus operandi—not the new diluted, impotent, and coddling learning systems—problematize the very concepts of knowledge, understanding, and whether either is ever even attainable. While I believe Classics can only be taught and appreciated in Latin and Greek, I do not believe that higher education need be subject to exclusion and a sort of proverbial gatekeeping; the entire field of classics has championed diversity and the importance of numerous slightly varying iterations of a conception of history. We are not dissimilar to an institution such as the British Museum which notably promotes engagement with and gleaning from cultures across the world.” In simpler terms, Professor Déroutant, along with many likeminded counterparts, believes that to convey information in a way that is, in a sense of the word, serpentine, is to enable a student to engage in meaning finding and meaning making in a manner that is simply unobtainable in a simplistic and unpretentious way.

While the dialectical panorama of academic and scholarly attitudes is ever evolving, the heuristic approach to epistemology will be nonnegotiable. As American higher education institutions continue to operationalize concepts of change and demonstratively engage in dialogues about accessibility, it will be interesting to examine the phenomenological ramifications of such changes.

^[1] Ursidae is the scientific family term for the carnivorous mammals often referred to by common and prosaic terms similar to that of “bear.”