Lili Loofbourow put up an amazing post yesterday about the way administrators in the University of California system have presented themselves in public statements about campus activism. It’s great and long and filled with important insights, and you should go read the whole thing. Here’s a taste, from somewhere in the middle:
Word choice seems trivial much of the time. “We” or “I,” “distress” or “regret.” But this use of “we” is not to be taken lightly. It is not a mistake to be cosmetically airbrushed out of the record. It is a persistent, unapologetic use of that pronoun “we” to drive home that he was in full control of what had gone on, and that he approved of it. It’s a rhetorical choice, the utter baselessness of which is revealed, in that second letter, through the admission that he had exactly none of the information he claimed to have carefully considered when making his first assessment of campus events.
This is a dead horse worth beating: the Chancellor of UC Berkeley
