Human Ecology and Meaning-Making

Last fall, I visited my granddaughter at Cornell University, where she’s an undergrad in the College of Engineering, currently a junior majoring in something called Operations Research and Information Engineering. It says something about the state of language in the twenty-first century that this writer and old English major tells her friends, "It's really data analysis," hoping this will make it more comprehensible to those of us who remember when language was meant for us to speak clearly to each other.

Numbers shine brightly in my granddaughter's mind. Her numeracy fills me with awe. But she's articulate as well and has many other gifts and skills. She plays guitar, indeed, had asked her dad to bring her guitar with him when we came to see her that weekend. She started doing competitive hiphop at age three and is on a dance team at Cornell. She even choreographed a piece for a dozen dancers last spring. And she thinks. We had wonderful conversations during the visit. I also had time to see how the university—-not only Cornell, because this is a sign of the zeitgeist—-is using language these days.

One sign that made me tear my hair even as I laughed was blazoned on the building that presumably houses what at Harvard is called the Divinity School and at Fordham, the Theology Department. It said OFFICE OF SPIRITUALITY AND MEANING-MAKING. I assume the intention was to label belief in the ineffable and exploration of the unseen, including everything and offending no one. The term spirituality is a fine one. As a crackerjack editor, I say it does the job. I'd delete meaning-making. Were they afraid atheists would picket them? They should have worried more about sticklers for felicitous prose.

My granddaughter has an eclectic group of friends. She'd told me one of her roommates had a double major in pre-med and English, so I led with that when I met her.

"Oh, I'm not majoring in English any more," she said. "Now I'm doing pre-med and fashion."

"I can't fault you for dropping English," I said. "But fashion is a major?"

"It's in the College of Human Ecology," she said.

"What on earth," I said, "is human ecology?"

"Oh, it's where they put everything that doesn't fit anywhere else."

I'd call inventing a term with that definition meaning-unmaking, though I admit human ecology has a fine ring to it, seducing us into believing that it means something. I don't know if academics or marketing professionals wrote the university catalog, but they produced some grand word salad by way of artistic verisimilitude. (I know, I know, human ecology really is a thing. I googled it after I wrote this post. Nonetheless...)

Sez the college website:

High-quality education, research and public engagement are the cornerstones of the College of Human Ecology and its academic departments, which include: Psychology, Nutritional Sciences, and Human Centered Design.

We prioritize innovative collaboration and are fueled by a powerful, interdisciplinary and applied approach to improving lives.

Our undergraduate academic majors are firmly grounded in the social, natural and physical sciences, and design to create dynamic, interdisciplinary fields of study. This allows our students to explore their interests in a broader context and to understand and analyze issues from multiple perspectives. . . there is no prescribed way to prepare for careers in business, health/medicine, or law, or just one way to be creative in the college. . .

Majors include design and environmental analysis, fashion design and management, fiber science, global and public health, human biology, health, and society, human development, and nutritional sciences.

Whatever.

I suspect it's of a piece with the headlong rush toward AI's takeover of language. In the twenty-first century, the idea is not to make meaning, certainly not clearer meaning or new meaning, but to take the meaning language already offers us and complicate, distort, obfuscate, and ultimately lose it.