It's terrible when your jokes fall flat. I told this one at a Trinity College debate last week.
The former leader of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev, was meeting the Chinese prime minister, Zhou Enlai (aka Chou En-lai), at a time when the two regimes were competing to be the true proponents of Marxism. "Comrade," said Khrushchev, "I must point out to you at the start that you have an aristocratic background, but I am from proletarian stock." Quick as a flash, Zhou Enlai replied: "Yes, Comrade Khrushchev." Then he paused: "And we are both traitors to our class."
When I told this apocryphal story at the Hist, it was followed by that exquisite silence when it is hard to tell who is most embarrassed, speaker or the audience. Admit it, we've all been there.
Afterwards, a friendly academic observed that the names, Khruschchev and Zhou Enlai, meant little to the young. Over his shoulder I could see pictures of Churchill, Kevin O'Higgins and de Valera, all former speakers at the Hist. Were they forgotten too?
I suspect not. The College Historical Society, (its full title) is very erudite and contributions from the students reached a high standard. When I was their age, if someone had made a joke about, say, Harry Truman and Gen MacArthur, I might well have looked blank.
If the Hist debate is any indication, then Ireland's future is safe. The motion was: "That the United Nations is another League of Nations", and the young speakers were very knowledgeable and well-prepared. Nobody at all confused the League of Nations with a football tournament.
But it seems our friends at the Industrial Development Authority are worried about the type of graduate Ireland's third-level institutions are turning out. In a submission to a major OECD review of third-level education, the IDA complains that foreign companies based in Ireland, "frequently find that core personal skills, including communication, interpersonal presentation and project management skills seem to be lacking in graduates entering the workforce".
One might quibble at the stilted language. Imagine two toffs in a Monty Python dialogue:
Q. What's Cyril like?
A. Oh, nice chap. Good core personal skills.
Q. Yes, but how is his interpersonal presentation?
A. Not bad, but a bit weakish on the project management side.
That reservation notwithstanding, the IDA's comments are a cause for concern. Of course, the IDA acknowledges significant progress has been made by the colleges, but "much more needs to be done". Or to put it another way: "A lot done, more to do."
I have had fairly sporadic contact with third-level education since the late 1970s but, any time I enter that arena, I come out slightly worried. Naturally we all believe "Fings ain't wot they used to be", but there is a new type of language in the air that amounts almost to a secret code.
I saw a very good example recently when a brilliant young university intellectual gave a talk about international politics. He happened to use the Latin phrase sui generis in the course of his speech and somewhat apologetically explained that it meant, in a class of its own, or unique.
It wasn't an academic event but I believe almost everyone had a university degree and some even had doctorates. So it was slightly shocking that a senior academic felt obliged to gloss this basic Latin phrase.
In the talk and the discussion that followed I heard other words that left me floundering but nobody felt the need to explain them. What on earth does "ideational" mean? I know that "normative" means "establishing a norm or standard", but it's a pompous little adjective. And what are you doing when you "unpack" an issue, as in, say: "We're starting to unpack the question of European security."
This is not an isolated example. Enter the portals of any third-level institution and it won't be long before you encounter this new type of rarefied discourse. Of course, there are many academics who still speak plain English and there are other jargon-factories around, such as Brussels, the civil service, even journalism.
One would hate to see the colleges turning into simple apprentice-schools for the business world but at the same time our future depends to a large extent on foreign, as well as native, industry. If the new generation of college graduates don't speak the same language as the rest of us how can they communicate? What hope, indeed, for their "core personal skills"?
Khrushchev would probably have sacked all the academics and replaced them with party functionaries. Zhou Enlai, I fancy, would have taken a long-term approach, encouraging the professors to read Jefferson, Lincoln and Patrick Pearse. He knew you couldn't rush things and that change takes time. After all, it is said that when Henry Kissinger asked him what was the significance of the French Revolution, Zhou Enlai replied: "It's too early to say."
John Waters is on leave