Connect: Minister for Education Mary Hanafin said this week the Government's continued prohibition on third-level fees "reinforced the importance of developing non-Exchequer income streams".
Her remark is a prime example of obtuse and oily guff. It certainly reinforces the importance of traditional education in order to decode subterfuge and to avoid speaking like that.
"Developing non-Exchequer income streams" means getting money from private rather than public funds. It means tapping-up commercial outfits. On the basis of "he who pays the piper calls the tune" it means that Irish third-level education is being sold by Hanafin and her political colleagues. "Minister continues to sell Irish universities to commerce" is the truth of the guff.
The fact that this "pro-business" Government continues to speak in shifty language should alert people to the reality behind its rhetoric. Our politicians are behaving with the smarm of snake-oil salesmen or shopping-channel presenters. It adds insult to injury. It's bad enough that they are selling off national assets, but they're using the ghastly language of the worst PR to do so.
Mind you, it suggests they know (or, at least, sense) there's something unseemly about their plan. After all, if you were genuinely proud of what you were doing, you'd try to ensure most people could grasp its full implications immediately. It's not, of course, just politicians who speak like that nowadays. Some academics, especially the management type, use comparably oily language. Such language is characterised by its evasiveness, its lack of specifics, its refusal to focus on its own implications. Time was when we all sniggered at the appalling evasiveness, lack of specifics and refusal to focus on its own implications of a term like "collateral damage". The problem is, we are all victims of the "collateral damage" caused by the proliferation of similarly evasive language.
When a euphemism becomes not just a matter of manners but of waffle, we are being treated with contempt. That's the trouble with a remark like Hanafin's - it's contemptuous.
She's not alone, of course. Politicians and managers of every hue, Government Ministers included, seem to think they need to talk like that in order to survive. They appear to think it's "glic", or "cute hoor" stuff or, save us, even "sophisticated". Meanwhile, the public, infected with and generally disillusioned by this contempt, increasingly refuse to vote or to believe in politics or even each other. Shiftiness makes cynicism pervasive. The low-level contempt undermines all society and, in spite of greater affluence, people are seldom happier.
Doubtless Mary Hanafin would insist she was not being contemptuous. It's true that, in using language the way she did, she was not being any more contemptuous than many of her colleagues or other leaders in Irish society. Nonetheless, the evasiveness contains disrespect for its audience and is both a cause and a consequence of increasing disillusionment in Irish society.
On Tuesday, an editorial in this newspaper addressed the Government's latest plans for higher education. Titled "The Engineering of Education", it broadly welcomed the plan to make available a fund (€70 million is needed but may not be forthcoming) in the absence of fees. It's clear, however, that funding will favour disciplines with obvious financial benefits for the economy.
The editorial continued: "There are dangers as well as opportunities in this new, more hard-nosed approach . . . The new policy could lead to a downgrading of the arts and humanities in some colleges in the rush to embrace a pro-business approach. This is not education."
The only word this column can disagree with is "could". For "could" substitute "will" and you're closer to the truth. Arts and humanities will be downgraded. That is inevitable and is already underway. In the short term, the implications of that, though unwelcome, can perhaps be absorbed. In the longer term it will inevitably lead to a decreasing ability to decode political and managerial guff. More and more powerful people will speak evasively and probably with added conviction.
In short, the contempt of the powerful for the less powerful can only increase because of the imbalance created by Government ideology. The worst of the US awaits this country; the best, because of scale, is not possible. It's not yet quite brash enough to scream "in your face, sucker", but that's the likely outcome of this crass, ignorant and bullish approach that confuses education with training.
Science and technology (science with commercial applications) are vital areas of study. They need nurturing and maybe incentives to get people interested. Yet creating an increasingly well-trained-for-the-economy but ill-educated workforce is not only dubious but dangerous. That, however, is the predictable outcome of this week's announcement.
Education is too important to be left solely to professional educators. We all learn from others, not least from the powerful. What have we learned from Mary Hanafin this week? We have learned she too talks in evasive and ultimately contemptuous terms. Presumably she learned it from others. This society is teaching people how to disregard each other. Great lesson, isn't it?
Eddie Holt is a lecturer in the School of Communications at Dublin City University