As we all know, sitting in various meetings is part of university life. Not the most popular part, of course, because most of us like to think we are here to do something completely unrelated to most of the things in the average agenda of your average meeting. But these things have to be done and most of the time they do get done, much of it thanks to the hard work of the administrative staff. Things are often prepared in advance and one gets to watch very complicated decisions take place in a few minutes thanks to skilful planning and routine. Sometimes, this mechanical way of getting through decisions means one has time to think about the unrelated things one would rather be thinking about were one not sitting in a meeting.
At one of these meetings, it was brought to our attention that we had to decide who was to be the director of the managers of the department’s new subdepartmental heads. When it was asked what it is that the director of the managers of the department’s subdepartmental heads actually does, we were informed that the job of the director would be to direct the managers of the department’s subdepartmental heads, both of them. I’ve embellished the minutes slightly to protect the innocent, but it was something along those lines and we ended up laughing at the tautology presented to us as an answer. Of course, that was the only answer to be had, since we are in the middle of restructuring the giant jigsaw puzzle that is our university and sometimes we find ourselves at a point where there is clearly a piece missing.
The decision was made and we moved on, but the weird afterglow of the tautology was enough to distract the easily distracted mind. I remembered the wording of a rule concerning subordinate clauses in one of the half a dozen Latin grammars I’ve bought and never read through: ’Subordinate clauses in both Latin and English are introduced by a wide variety of subordinating conjunctions. A subordinating conjunction is a conjunction that introduces a subordinate clause’. It then goes on to list some of the subordinating conjunctions that are conjunctions and introduce subordinate clauses. The book is Yale’s Learn to Read Latin, an otherwise excellent read I would recommend to anyone who wants to learn to read Latin. For example, it says that Latin has only six tenses in the indicative mood although ’it would have been most efficient if Latin had had nine tenses corresponding to the nine possible combinations of time and aspect’. The possibility is noted, gracefully negated and much inquisitive, some would say neurotic, googling is averted.
There are people who are excellent in taking in tautological information, organizing it and processing it into something useful. I’m not one of them. It seems suspicious, it does not seem like information at all, but a trick of some sort that puts an end to discussion, a formula whose purpose is to fix the rules without actually understanding the rules. Questions must cease, one has to move on and waste no more time on matters that have been resolved. Tautologies, philosophers tell us, are secure in their truth, but they do not actually mean anything: they represent certainty without meaning. The warm laughter that echoed in the room was perhaps caused by this meaningless tautological certainty — it is quite wonderful in its own pedantic way. It could have also been caused by the knowledge that after the meeting we could exit the world of administration until next time and get back to that other part of university life where certainty counts for very little and meaningful questions rule the day.
Have a great semester!
Tommi Kakko
Plural Blog 