Guest post by Jonathan Gallant

Here is a thought experiment about academia.  Let us imagine that, about 40 years ago, a few academic operators had invented a newish subject called “Critical Chemical Studies”.   The focus of this subject would not be actual chemicals, but rather the language used in writing or talking about  Chemistry:  catalogues of the frequency of words like element, molecule, valence,  bond,  reaction, intermediate, rate, etc. etc.; and then endless gabble about the philosophical implications of the words’ spelling,  font type, sound, pronunciation, association, and usage.

    Before long, journals would be established to publish disquisitions in this vein.  The scholars of Critical Chemical Studies would not need laboratories, beakers, or spectrophotometers, for they would not do experiments; they would not produce things like nanosensors or new kinds of batteries or drug tests.   Instead, they would produce a steady stream of publications about chemical words in their parochial journals, and these publications would refer to each other, thus mimicking in a formal way a behavior of their academic colleagues who did actual Chemistry with chemicals.   Some of the scholars would then extend their logomachy to general propositions; for example the thesis that the lengths of terms like “coordination complex” and “dissociation constant” defined the general structure of the university, of human society, and of the universe.  Conjectures of this kind would be routinely referred to as “Theory”, thus imitating a status like that of the atomic theory and the kinetic theory of gases.   As a result of this mimicry and these “Theory” exercises, scholars of Critical Chem Studies would rise through the ranks into committees which made decisions about employment, departments, and curriculum in academe;  and in time they would also ascend into administration.    

   They might next get it into their heads that the University should endorse specific political doctrines, particularly ones focussed on certain favorite words— such as “Dilution”, “Equilibrium”, and “Ionization“.    These magic words and their acronym, repeated in innumerable notices, memoranda, statements, and edicts, would establish a new, conventional monoculture in the groves of academe.   A  new bureaucracy would be set up to make sure that everyone in the groves demonstrated fealty to the three magic words in all their teaching, research, writing, correspondence, reading, recreation, thoughts, and dreams—or at least said they did.