Coincidences, punctuation, and originality

There is story told by the writer Bill Bryson which has always appealed to me. He recounts how, when working as a journalist, he was commissioned to write an article about strange coincidences. Moments later, he stumbled by chance on a book on the desk of a colleague. Its subject was ‘strange coincidences’.

I recalled this story because last week during a meeting I made a joke about the ‘Oxford comma’ (I know that sounds strange: you had to be there). The joke fell flat because no one else in the room knew what an Oxford comma is. The answer to that is that it is a comma (also known as a ‘serial comma’) inserted in a list of nouns before the final ‘and’ (and/or, sometimes, the final ‘or’). For example: ‘John, Jane, and Jill’. Sometimes, this can make a significant difference to the meaning of a sentence. For example: ‘This shirt is available in blue, black, green and white’ might be taken to mean that a green and white shirt is an option, whereas the insertion of the Oxford comma avoids this ambiguity. Thus: ‘This shirt is available in blue, black, green, and white’. It is called an Oxford comma because it is the house style of Oxford University Press (but by no means all publishers) always to use such a comma even if its exclusion would not create ambiguity or change the meaning.

So now for the coincidence. Immediately after the meeting, I logged on to twitter (my new addiction) and almost the first thing I saw was a link to a news story about how the absence of an Oxford comma had, that very day, proved decisive in a legal dispute about overtime payments between dairy drivers and their employer in the State of Maine in the USA. The State’s law says that the following activities do not count for overtime pay: “The canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing for shipment or distribution of: (1) Agricultural produce; (2) Meat and fish products; and (3) Perishable foods”. (By the way, unless I am wrong, that last semi-colon is an Oxford semi-colon, if there is such a thing).

The case hinged on the ambiguity created by the lack of a comma between “packing for shipment” and “or”. The drivers distribute but they do not pack and the lack of the Oxford comma means that the law implies that it is “packing for distribution” that is exempt from overtime payments, not distribution itself. The court agreed; the drivers are entitled to overtime payments, and this may cost the company some $10 million. That, by the way, is the tangential and only link between this post and the ostensible organization studies focus of this blog.

This is not the first time a comma has featured in a legal case (in fact, I am sure there are many examples). Famously, Roger Casement was ‘hanged for a comma’ in 1916 having sought unsuccessfully to defend himself from the charge of treason on the basis of an ambiguity created by a missing comma in the 1351 Treason Act. This case is discussed by Lynne Truss in her estimable book on punctuation Eats, Shoots & Leaves (2003: 99-101). It is a bit much to be hanged for a comma - it is not as if he had used the word 'disinterested' as if it meant 'uninterested'. That really is a hanging offence.

In my book (p.14) I refer to the saying ‘words are loaded pistols, we use them at our peril’ (I refer to it is an anonymous saying, but I’ve since learned that the ‘words are loaded pistols’ part, at least, is attributable to Jean-Paul Sartre). If so, punctuation is the firing mechanism. One should be wary, though, about pedantry as all too often it is liable to backfire as other pedants correct one’s own pedantry. So, like Yiannis Gabriel, who recently wrote about the use and misuse of the apostrophe, I see little point in being too fussy about punctuation. On the subject of apostrophes, though, I do like one arcane point which is that adjectival nouns do not take apostrophes. For example, there is no apostrophe after ‘boys’ in ‘boys night out’ (although Word spellcheck does not like it) in those cases when it is used to describe the nature of the night rather than the participants. Thus, pleasingly, one can write: ‘John went to the opera; the boy’s night out was enjoyable. Jim and Bill went to the pub; the boys’ night out was a great success. Meanwhile, the girls had a boys night out’. This knowledge, even if it is correct, has never been the slightest use to me.

However, as the Oxford comma court case shows, you can never tell when knowing about punctuation may come in handy. It may even provide material for an unusual blog post. Or so I thought. But, in a final coincidence, having written this post with the idea that it would relate to an obscure news story that very few would be aware of I discovered that it has featured in numerous articles in all the main national newspapers in the UK, USA and, no doubt, further afield. It was only when I searched for a link to the definition of an Oxford comma that I realised this. Attempts at originality, like linguistic pedantry, are fraught with risk. Perhaps the best way to put the lesson learned is in future to think, google, and write.

In praise of universities

This week the Adam Smith Institute (ASI), a hard right free market think tank, produced a report entitled ‘Lackademia: why do academics lean left?’ It claims – and treats as a problem – that “left-liberals” are “over-represented” in British academia. The methodology used to establish the political views of academics was risible, being based on a self-selecting survey (what survey methodologists call a ‘voodoo poll’) and this and other flaws were pointed out by John Morgan in the Times Higher Education.

Even if the data were more robust, it is a bizarre notion that academics’ political views should be ‘representative’ of the general population and that, if they are not, they are, to use the report’s word “skewed”. Academics are not appointed for their political views, or to represent anyone under some kind of proportional representation system – and it would be disastrous if they were appointed in this way, rather than on the basis of their academic expertise. But the choice of the term ‘over-representation’ is deliberate, as signalled in the closing line of the full report – it tries to take the language of diversity (in relation to gender, class and ethnicity) in order to imply, although there is absolutely no evidence of this, that those on the political right are victims of discrimination so that whilst being qualified for academic posts they are excluded from them.

The word ‘victims’ is significant in understanding what is going on here, which is a species of the populist politics sweeping Western societies. That populism has at its heart a victim narrative in which the ‘liberal elite’ (sometimes the ‘metropolitan liberal elite’) has a fiendish power to do down the common sense of ‘the people’. It is a nonsensical reading of where power lies, since the intellectual apparatchiks of recent decades are more obviously the ASI and similar neo-liberal bodies than anyone else, but after the events of the last year no one can doubt its traction. Another part of the populist wave is its anti-intellectualism, with ‘experts’ being denounced and even compared to Nazis. So the ASI report channels that strand of populism, too.

The populist implications of the ASI report were quite apparent in the way it got picked up in the media. Especially grotesque was a spiteful piece by Tom Utley in, inevitably, the Daily Mail. It started with a long whine about having been put down by his ‘left-wing’ tutor at Cambridge (like so many of the populist Right – Boris Johnson, Jacob Rees-Mogg - Utley is a product of ‘elite’ universities) some forty years ago.  The ‘put down’ was, in fact, a correction of his misunderstanding about the subject under discussion – as it happens John Rawls’ ‘veil of ignorance’ concept, discussed on p. 146 of my book - although Utley clearly doesn’t realise this and it apparently still rankles.

The rest of the article is a series of tendentious assertions (e.g. cherry picked examples of Oxbridge college heads) and smears (e.g. the ‘endless holidays’ of ‘dons’) exhibiting such a degree of intellectual dishonesty and disregard for evidence that one can at least agree that he was not very well-taught when at university. These are then explicitly linked to populist politics by pointing out that most academics opposed Brexit. That is hardly surprising: most people with a degree and even more with a higher degree did.

The irony is that British universities are extraordinarily successful in any terms they might be judged. They perform far better proportionate to either the size of the UK or the funding they receive than those of any other country in the world in terms of placement in world rankings, where the UK has 34 of the top 200 universities, and quality of research. They are intimately linked with medical and industrial innovation and the communication of culture. Moreover, they earn billions of pounds for the UK in student fee income (though this is under threat from government immigration policies). To jeopardise this in pursuit of ‘politically representative’ staffing would be, to coin a populist phrase, political correctness gone mad. Would we want, say, biologists, to be selected on the grounds of political representativeness rather than scientific ability? Is that the Lysenkoist dream of Tom Utley and the ASI? I fear that it might be.

But universities should be defended on wider grounds than this. To the extent that it is the case that they are bulwarks against populism then that is a good thing in itself. The hallmark of populism is what we are learning to call post-truth. The hallmark of universities is still that of a liberal Enlightenment commitment to truth, evidence and reason (that is so even when academics interrogate and critique the liberal Enlightenment). So it is small wonder that they are under attack from populists, and that is all the more reason to hold on tight to what they embody and represent.