When I find the occasion to drive to the UB campus, I am greeted by a giant banner that proudly proclaims:

DETERMINATION DRIVES DISCOVERY

In other words… Obviously this is some alliterative Stoic-rebrand as identity nonsense. It used to say “UB, here’s how”?!??! So whatever I guess. But if this was a student FYC thesis statement, this would be my feedback:

• Who makes the determination?
• How do we describe the mechanism of driving on the media on which it acts?
• Is “discovery” meant to be a unadulterated good such that anything that drives it must also be good?

I mean what the actual fuck, right? Maybe this is hyperbolic but I can’t help it if I feel nauseated when I drive past this sign going to work. And I’m not kidding about that. This inanity disgusts me.

B.

(What can I say? Grade inflation.)

hmmm… I’d probably need to run that through ChatGPT and clean it up before I put it on a student’s paper. Fortunately, students rarely make claims this poor and ill-considered.

The absurdist part of this idiomatic idiocy is that it elides the source of the determination. I mean, who determined that computer science would lead to a high paying job such that students are determined to get that degree but many will discover they are not up to the task, or at least that is what will be determined by the university via the students’ GPA. If you are a professor then funding agencies and editorial boards determine the merits of your work and whether or not you will be permitted to do it. Promotion and tenure boards make determinations, and sometimes faculty get found out or discovered.

Can’t we be done with the “Through determination Columbus discovered America” sentence? Not only for its particular claim but also for its structure? How about through determination scientist and engineers discovered they had destroyed the climate? Were they determined to destroy the climate? You think the answer is no I’m sure, but it’s not that easy, because who does the determinating?

Who is the determinatoratorer? It’s some broken nesting doll of miscommunication for sure. So like I said in my last post, we can imagine the teachable moment as one where the teacher (as an actor that is made/composed to act) forces students to consume a slurry of pressure-cooked scorpion and frog, calls them cannibals, shoots them (and leaves).

What does that mean? It means determination drives discovery.

To clarify: