Beware the jargon in academic-speak

THIS month the Plain English Campaign announced its list of shame, that is, public bodies and private firms found guilty of providing information that is difficult or impossible for ordinary people to understand. The list mainly consisted of insurance companies.

None was university, and the only institution involved in education was the National Police Training Centre, But it might not be a bad idea for the campaign to direct some of its attention to higher education, since some of the very worst offenders are to be found among the growth areas of academic life. My list of shame would not be complete without a few examples from the management consultants who have had such a prosperous few years in higher education, More than most fields, management thinking combines banality and self-importance and has gone through an explosive growth in verbiage without any accompanying advance in rigour or quality. Sometimes the obscurity is understandable. Bosses wanting to lay off lots of employees often find it useful to dress their strategies up in a meaninglessly benign language. But in the long run it deepens cynicism and distrust.

The other offender, and booming field, is post-modernism and cultural studies. As with the management thinkers the lack of clear communication is often a symptom of woolly thought (although there may also be another reason as it subliminally confirms the postmodemists contention that texts speak in many voices).

One of the ironies of the British left is that so many of its radicals went into university and immediately clad themselves in all of the paraphernalia of an elite cult. The theoreticians place "ism" at the end of words, are prolix at using such prefixes as pre- and post- or cyber. They use Latinate versions whenever possible, nouns instead of verbs, intransitive instead of transitive uses, and love to wave around quote marks like confetti, supposedly as a sign of irony. Words like "foreground", which has perfectly good ordinary English synonyms, are used to achieve a spurious sense of high intellectual activity.

Jargon has a valuable purpose when it is a shortcut. A technical word can sum up decades of argument and thought, and one of the virtues of a very flexible language like English is that it is good at evolving, creating neologisms that are useful. But too much jargon can compress meaning rather than exclude it. It has more in common with the Catholic church's use of Latin than with the pursuit of knowledge.

It is a classic strategy for keeping outsiders at bay and raising the relative price of your cultural capital. If outsiders can plainly understand what you are saying and doing, they may show less respect.

Unfortunately, the proliferation of journals and publications that has been given such a boost by research assessment exercises has, if anything, accelerated the growth of jargon. In linguistics there is evidence that the more dense the population, the greater the number of dialects, because people use dialects as a way of distinguishing themselves from others. Something of the same happens in academic life. If you have five journals instead of one in a field the pressures to demarcate boost the demand for obscurity.

Perhaps we should have a cull every year or two of jargon words that do not add real meaning. Perhaps audits should be done of articles to find how many words they really need to make their point. BT already offers a piece of software which lets you input a 10,000-word article and reduce it to whatever length you wish.

These are not flippant concerns. In an age when many more people have to work and communicate across disciplinary boundaries these things matter. In science there are excellent role models who can communicate brilliantly without in any way compromising the complexity of their ideas. That mix of confidence and clarity is a sign of intellectual energy. On the other had we have disciplines that lack confidence and take refuge in obscurity and elitism. Perhaps this is a job for the research councils: in each discipline a prize for the best communication, and a prize for the worst deliberate obscurity. I fear that there would be no shortage of competition.

Geoff Mulgan is director of Demos, the independent think tank.