Communication Without Understanding

January 2026

Communication, as listed among the University's core values, is perhaps the least contentious. In fact, it is the bipartisan true north for those who revere the modern University, and those who disparage it. Unfortunately, we are following the wrong star.

Communication has been elevated at the subordination of understanding, the very condition that makes dialogue possible, the foundation of the University. Most benignly, it operates as a way to not discourage student participation. More perniciously, it alienates our relationship to our senses, to truth, corrupting the foundations of western epistemology. What begins as an appeal to cultural contextualism devolves into epistemological relativism. Each step along the path, supported by a pessimistic strain of Parisian intellectual thought that dominates the ranks of academic research to this day.

The consequences of such a relativistic model of language are disastrous for cultivating understanding. Though pure adherence to linguistic relativism is rare in practice, its epistemic legitimacy becomes a pernicious crutch—corroding understanding and, worse, deliberately wielded as a defensive rhetorical weapon. Rather than striving to understand one another, we retreat into the safety of interpretation.

This January, Pope Leo delivered the State of the World Address, marking the first of the American spiritual leader's legacy. Among topics spanning international cooperation and spirituality, he pronounced "rediscovering the meaning of words" as one of the primary challenges of our time.

For us, claims of this nature elicit an immediate retort. Whether in the nasal-pitched tone of a middle school classmate or the pitiable warm tone of a professor, dismissals of "such naïveté" are authoritatively passed down. For all of our academic careers, claims striking the tone of "true," "real," or "meaning" are handled with the precise riddance. These things are for antiquity or the ignorant.

It plays out in the lecture halls as an appeal to social constructivity, to subjective interpretation, and to epistemological indetermination—perhaps metaphysical obscurantism—a regress that eventually arrives at relativism. Each step supported by a strand of Parisian intellectual thought which dominates the ranks of academic professors. The result is a University axiomatically relativistic.

Within the University the Socratic signage endures, while its object deteriorates. Communication inherits the ethos of the whole. The reorientation of communication as an ends, rather than the means. But communication without understanding is little more than noise—sine waves that bounce off our foreheads, meaning nothing. It is effectively indifferent from silence, but perhaps less pleasant.

We must then reject this corrosion of the state of dialogue and again place communication as the means to the ends of understanding. It is then that we build empathy and "rediscover the meaning of words."