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Back when I thought I was pre-law, I took a Constitutional Law course in college. I loved every minute of it. It was just after the Bork nomination to the Supreme Court got, well, Borked, so opinions were strong on all sides. I was disappointed to learn later that most of what most lawyers do doesn’t involve arguments about the boundaries of free speech or the textual plausibility of arguments based on penumbras formed by emanations. (Extra credit to anyone who gets the reference!) As a budding political theorist, I loved the intersection of high concepts with actual cases, and the ways that various justices used the law to reach their preferred conclusions. Which they very much do.
It was there, of all places, that I first heard the word “elastic” used to describe words. I had heard it used to describe fabrics, and in an econ class, I had heard it used to describe price sensitivity. But in Con Law, I learned that a term like “ordered liberty” was “elastic.” In that context, “elastic” meant that it could be stretched pretty far (or crunched pretty small) to cover any number of desired or feared meanings. Those meanings often presume a culture, and therefore change with that culture; for example, a “reasonable expectation of privacy” only makes sense as a standard if we agree on what’s reasonable. There’s no objective measure of “reasonable.” And elasticity isn’t necessarily bad; sometimes, strategic ambiguity (“all deliberate speed”) can provide room for coalitions to form.
That came to mind over the last few weeks, as I keep reading or hearing about legislation -- federal and state, proposed and passed -- designating certain money to be used for costs “related to” COVID-19.
“Related” is an elastic word. As is “cost.”
Some examples are easy. When the college had to buy a full site license for Zoom, in order to run classes remotely, that was a direct consequence of the pandemic. It’s pretty straightforward.
But that’s a small part of the picture. The real fiscal damage isn’t always that direct.
For example, we’ve already taken a multi-million dollar cut from the state as a consequence of the collapse of sales and income tax revenues caused by the shutdown. By any reasonable definition, that’s a cost. And it’s obviously related to the pandemic. But it’s not at all clear that using it to replace evaporated operating funding will pass muster.
If enrollment drops as a consequence of limited access to the physical campus, we take a hit in tuition revenue. Again, that’s a cost, and it’s related to the pandemic. But that’s unlikely to hold up, either.
For years, we’ve rented out the arena on campus to local high schools (and some junior high schools) for graduation ceremonies in late May and June. This year, we couldn’t. That’s revenue we counted on -- it was in the budget, based on previous years’ worth of track record -- but didn’t receive, due to the shutdown. That’s a cost, and it’s a direct consequence of the pandemic. But we’re having a hard time with that one, too.
In these cases, words properly understood as elastic are being applied in implausibly strict ways, in order to achieve a desired outcome. It’s an old move; I recognize it when I see it.
In the case of the pandemic, though, this level of hair-splitting is not, well, reasonable. The effects of the pandemic are expansive; our understanding needs to be expansive, too. Instead of putting all manner of strings on the funding, each string subject to parsing by all and sundry, it should just go into operating budgets. Let colleges do what they have to do. And don’t just apply that to colleges! The same should go for states, K-12 districts, and hospitals. Pandemics are, by definition, sweeping; trying to minimize cost by parsing language is missing the point.
The time and money spent arguing over the relative elasticity of “related” could better be spent actually saving students, communities, and, yes, colleges. Leave the parsing as an exercise in the classes themselves, where they can be great fun. If we can afford to run them.
