Cascading emails; Or, bizguistics and power in modern academia

The other day, everyone in arts and humanities and adult continuing education at my university received from our head of sector a remarkably unremarkable email. I presume everyone across the university got the same one forwarded to them too, or, rather, cascaded to them too.  It was unremarkable in the sense that we receive emails like this one all the time these days, and remarkable for exactly the same reason. I’m not going to mention the name or job title of the original sender. I have no wish to criticise any individual I work with, and in fact no reason to do so. That person was doing a perfectly fine job, given the job s/he is given to do. And indeed that’s the point—this is about institutions speaking, not individuals. 

The email originated from my university’s Marketing Department following instructions from something called the Service Excellence Forum. It provided an “email template signature and generic external email response ... in line with the University’s branding and Welsh Language Scheme.” The template gave us “eg John Smith,” “eg Development and Marketing Manager / Rheolwr Marchnata a Datblygu Busnes” of “Commercial and Campus Services / Gwasanaethau Masnachol a Champws” in “Estates and Facilities Management / Rheoli Ystadau a Chyfleusterau”. Finally, the email’s sender (not the person of the job title above) requested that heads of sector “cascade” the template to all their staff.

I have no problem with the idea of a generic email signature. Our work-email accounts belong to our universities and so our employers have a right to see that they’re being represented in them in pretty much whatever way they wish. And for a Welsh University to require us to use Welsh seems to me to be entirely right in all possible ways. And in fact, as a non-Welsh speaker, I’m grateful that someone’s gone to the trouble of providing some Welsh for me for this purpose. That said, it would be nice to know whether “the University’s branding” came first as a matter of literary elegance or because someone felt it matters more than Welsh, or because Welsh is part of our branding (as opposed to being quite properly a cultural/political representation of the native language of Wales, where the University is). I expect it has nothing to do with literacy elegance. Indeed, my problem with the email is with how all this was communicated, specifically the bizguistics*, and what that represents about who runs universities today.     

I did a small amount of research (in the Oxford English Dictionary) on the word that caught my attention most: “cascade.”  It comes from the Italian cascata, from cascare “to fall,” and entered English via French in the mid-seventeenth century, at about the same time as religious fanaticism. It is of course usually used as a noun, meaning “a small waterfall, typically one of several that fall in stages down a steep rocky slope.” But also meaning “a process whereby something, typically information or knowledge, is successively passed on,” as in accord with the usage above. Although it can also mean “a stunt performed for cinematic imitation or entertainment,” which may also accord with what was going on above. And it’s a verb too, most commonly meaning “(of water) pour downwards rapidly and in large quantities,” but also “pass (something) on to a succession of others.”  It has other meanings too, or had them, including being an archaic slang term for vomiting.   

So, its usage in the email above is not wrong. Nevertheless, it was chosen from a number of more familiar alternatives, including “communicate,” “pass on,” or, by far the most obvious one, obvious because it’s embedded in the language of the act of emailing itself, “forward.”  But, rather, the one chosen was from the lexicon of bizguistics, not surprisingly perhaps, coming as it does from the Marketing Department via the Service Excellence Forum. And as every department must have mission statements, business plans, etc.  And because, as 2008 and its consequences are proving, as is proven at least once every generation, profit motives and big-business methods are the foundations of all things that are excellent. Anyway, also, those alternative words or terms carry no suggestion of hierarchy, whereas “cascade” carries the implication of a downwards direction of communication. Some dictionary definitions, as above, use “pass on,” but the term originates from “fall.” Water and other things may move in various directions, but when they cascade we understand that they go down. Who knows how consciously, deliberately, or precisely people use words when they use them, but certainly to me as a recipient of this email I heard the instructions being cascaded down. That is, from the Marketing Department and the Service Excellence Forum *down* to ordinary academic staff.  And the example used in the template itself?  It’s not e.g. Dr Whatsit or Professor Thingummybobs of the Department of Something Studies.  No, it’s the Development and Marketing Manager of Commercial and Campus Services in Estates and Facilities Management. Those are the people who run the place, after all.

*The word bizguistics is a new one, as far as I can tell. I checked on Google and it’s not there, so I claim it as my own invention. I like it because as a badly spelt and hideously inelegant neologism it imitates with perfect irony what business people, at least in their corporate incarnations, do with language. Indeed it seems to me almost to embody what they do. A bizguis might be a monster that consumes words as greedily as it does everything else, mangling them in its gurgling intestines, and then noisily cascading them as a toxic stream of stinking diarrhoea.  Rather as large corporations consume people, digesting whatever of them they can use, and then shitting out what remains of their souls.