The “2 Ism” Rule

I would like to take this opportunity to propose what I call “The 2 Ism Rule”: In any piece of academic writing, especially those written for the media or popular magazines, writers are allowed a maximum of no more than two “ism” words.

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I read recently that a dean at Harvard University suggested that “faculty members who criticize Harvard or its policies should be subject to university punishment.” “Criticizing university leadership or publicizing policies that upset donors or Congressional committees,” he added, is “outside the bounds of acceptable professional conduct” and may “cross a line into sanctionable violations” (“Harvard’s Dean of Speech Sanctions,” The Wall Street Journal, June 19, 2024).

I know of a case like this. The director of a university center was fired from his position; he had signed a letter that expressed disagreement with a decision of the university administration. When you’re a director, he was told, you can’t criticize the administration publicly. A few weeks later, some assistant deans wrote a letter complaining that something the university president had done was not sufficiently progressive. They kept their jobs. But I suppose, as former Harvard president Claudine Gay famously said, whether speech is unacceptable “depends on the context.” No criticism of the boneheaded decisions of administrators can be tolerated on a campus that allows students to scream epithets at Jews and threaten them with extinction. All speech is “free,” but some speech is more free than others.

But since stories like these show that actual “academic freedom” is quickly becoming a thing of the past, like tenure, non-partisan scholarship, and faculty salaries on a par with that of even the lowest level administrators, I would like to take this opportunity to propose what I call “The 2 Ism Rule.” The rule basically says this. In any piece of academic writing, especially those written for the media or popular magazines such as The Atlantic or The New Yorker, writers are allowed a maximum of no more than two “ism” words, such as neo-conservatism, progressivism, post-colonialism, racism, sexism, size-ism, ageism, classism, or ableism. Writers cannot cheat by simply substituting alternative forms of the same with “ist” endings, such as ableist, post-colonialist, nor can they cheat by using an “ive” ending to refer to an entire category of diverse people to make broad generalizations about all “progressives” or all “neo-conservatives.” This should be treated with the contempt we reserve for people who say things like: “Well, you know what Jews are like,” or “the Irish are a belligerent people.”

The rule would go on to specify that if an ism word or any of its cognates is used (which should be rarely) then it must immediately be defined so the reader knows what is being implied. Thus, if the writer says, “conservatives, by which I mean people who are trying to destroy the country out of self-righteous greed” (you my substitute “progressives” there, if you wish; it’s basically the same), then the reader knows right away how the writer is using the word and has no need to go searching through the article to find out.

Writers would need to define their terms and say something like “racism, but which I mean opposing anything proposed by the Democratic Party,” or “sexism, that is to say, thinking that there is any contradiction between denying there should be any difference between men and women that would preclude women from obtaining any job on an equal footing with men while at the same time insisting that women should still get preferential treatment in hiring.”

Alternatively, writers might be required to add a glossary where they provide the necessary definitions, such as “Gaslighting, by which I mean providing data that undercuts the radical claims of my favored partisan group.” Or “fact-checking, by which I mean cherry-picking data to show that those opposing the radical claims of my favored partisan group are gaslighting (see definition above).”

Note, however, that writers would not be allowed to define a term this way: “post-colonialism, by which I mean an intersectionalist theory about imperialist social constructs by which racist and sexist patriarchies oppress various marginalized pre-colonialist, tribalist cultural identities.” This would be a clear violation of the letter and spirit of the 2 Ism Rule and would make the person subject to extra penalties, such as explaining to males who transition to female why they can still be guilt of sexism, even though there is no such thing as “sex,” only “gender.”

The ”2 Ism Rule” would be enforced, as most things are, by means of Title IX compliance. Adhere to the rule or lose federal funding. Colleges and universities would need to set up appropriate tribunals to police compliance, adjudicate guilt, assess penalties, and provide chances to repent, revise, and re-submit. Repeat violators would be required to give a public reading of George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language.” Violators would then be required to post prominently in their offices Orwell’s directives against use of dying metaphors (“stand shoulder to should with,” “ride roughshod over”), verbal false limbs (“render inoperative,” “militate against,” “exhibit a tendency to”), pretentious diction (“phenomenon,” epic,” historic,” “unforgettable”), and meaningless words (“sentimental,” “vitality,” “fascism”).

Some might object to these rules, but I would prefer to describe this new policy as an exercise of “common-sense-ism.”

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