Faculty, Rejoice: Gmail Can Now Translate “Deanspeak”

We are thrilled to announce that Google Translate has recently added “Deanspeak” to its suite of language-detection tools. In addition to offering translations from Spanish, Arabic, Chinese, and other languages, Google Translate can now render your college administrator’s opaque prose into plain (if terrifying) English.

Now, rather than attempt to read between the lines of the latest email from the Subdean for Academic Affairs and Climbing Wall Management, simply click on the ADMINISTRATOR LANGUAGE DETECTED icon to reveal the message in simple English and determine the threat level to your department, program, or mental health.

When passed through the Deanspeak translator, a subject line such as “Academic Prioritization” instantly transforms into “May the Odds Be Ever in Your Favor.” (If a more campus-specific translation is desired, the Deanspeak Plus option¹ can reveal the more precise rendering: “German Goes Kaput”). An email titled “Seeking nominations for a Task Force” becomes “Five poor saps forced to complete a meaningless task over the summer for zero compensation.” And “Construction Update” turns into “Whitewater polo course nears completion; humanities professors can enjoy thirty more years of inhaling asbestos.”

The Deanspeak translator instantaneously deciphers even the most officious obfuscation. “We continue to identify key performance indicators and leverage strategies to optimize retention” is more easily understood as “We’re hemorrhaging students.” The Teaching and Learning Center’s directive to “implement an actionable shift in student-centered attendance policies” translates simply to “give up now; football’s always gonna win.” Meanwhile, recent communications exhorting faculty to “craft deliverables to vertically integrate AI into the classroom” becomes “we have no fucking clue how to deal with ChatGPT—you’re on your own (and on the hook).”

As a bonus for faculty working at institutions where administrators multiply faster than Gremlins at a waterpark, the Deanspeak tool can clarify your college’s tentacular administrative structure. The president’s announcement that the college will be “reconfiguring our organizational composition to align with our comprehensive approach to student success” will render as “another unruly subdean devoured its offspring, so we have hired One Dean to Rule Them All.”

The Deanspeak translator can even filter out your administrators’ most common gobbledygook. Default settings include “deliverables,” “synergy,” “assessment,” and “shared governance,” but users can customize the filters according to their campus’s particular brand of dysfunction, transforming high-frequency phrases such as “after careful consideration” into the more accurate “the answer was no before I received your message.”

Another helpful feature for faculty includes the ability to reverse-translate your unfiltered responses into prose appropriate for your administrators’ tender ears. Instead of exercising restraint when responding to the call to resubmit the past fifteen years’ worth of enrollment data (sorted by student zodiac sign and DSM diagnosis) to the newly configured and—fingers crossed—recently debugged online management system by noon the following day, let the Deanspeak translator smooth out your snark. “Hell no, I will NOT waste another damn minute on this soul-sucking task” instantly becomes a message of joyful compliance: “I thank you, sir, for the timely reminder and will submit the report forthwith.” (Google engineers are working to correct the occasional confusion between Deanspeak and Dickens that arises due to college administrators’ penchant for excess verbiage and baroque sentence structure.) Meanwhile, “If I have to justify my department’s existence one more fucking time” seamlessly transforms into “Our department continues to meet the Student Learning Objectives and enrollment benchmarks as outlined in the latest Strategic Plan for Saving Our Bacon.”

The translator also has an audio function that can be activated during faculty meetings to provide real-time renderings of your administrator’s responses to questions from That One Professor. In this audio mode, “We’re considering multiple options” instantly translates to “Gah! Why did I leave time for questions? Action item: eliminate entire program.” Meanwhile, when the dean utters his refrain, “Thank you for all your hard work,” the faculty will simply hear, “Sorry, we have no money to pay you.”

The one downside to utilizing the Deanspeak translator is that teachers will no longer be able to play Nimble BINGO, in which professors can accrue points based on the number of campus buzzwords they receive via email during a semester. Past prizes have included the coveted “Get Out of Faculty Meeting Free” pass, in which the winner not only gets to skip the last meeting of the year but also receives a dramatic roundup of all the tea from their Grumpy Senior Colleague who has held a grudge since 1969 and starts all his sentences with “When I was at Yale…” While faculty may miss the “110 Percenter Prize” awarded to the instructor who valiantly consumes the most jargon without succumbing to crippling self-hatred or a murderous meltdown, we anticipate they will be more than compensated by never again having to decipher the meaning of “scaleable solutioneering.”

During this initial rollout phase, staff who use the Deanspeak translator will also have access to additional languages currently in beta testing, including Stuspeak (which translates “hey did i miss anything” to “I’m only here to play lacrosse and video games”), Zespeak (which helpfully replaces “they” with “he” or “she” for your pronoun-befuddled colleagues), and Mespeak, which can magically transform any professor’s negative self-talk into a steady stream of unicorn emojis and Lizzo-inspired affirmations— “You gonna shine with linear regressions today, you bad stats bitch!”

¹ Available for a monthly fee, easily deducted from your retirement savings or healthcare benefits.