You shall not pass.

The year is 2012 and I’m sitting in a packed auditorium to hear John Searle speak at my university. As a passionate linguist, it is a pleasure to hear the famous philosopher go on about language in all its forms and rant about culture on the side. One concept in particular he’s known for: Language is more than just words. It performs actions - subtly so in ‘mmh’ (when you’re listening to someone) and very obviously so in ‘I promise to call you’.

Speech acts can have many different functions, and whereas small acts like asserting something that’s already widely known (‘It’s raining’) don’t usually have much of an impact, others, especially declarations, can alter your life in an instant - since we all believe, more or less by force, in a set of social rules that will grant certain people power over your life through certain words. ‘I declare you husband and wife’ is the most prominent example - those few words have vast legal implications.

One function such declarative language can assume is that of gatekeeping. You have a certain request and a person or institution will, by law or silent agreement, have the power to grant this request or deny it. Go about your day and you will find many examples of that; a clerk reluctantly applying a discount code you brought that actually expired two days ago, an insurance denying your claim about the roof damage due to storm, city council approving your building permit (after, like, ten thousand years) or Instagram denying your request to take down a post that steals your content. It’s everywhere.

Gatekeeping can play a valuable role in society. After all, applying a set of standards to something and determining whether or not it meets them is the only way to execute quality control, whether that’s in food, tech or training of professionals. If ‘everything goes’ became the norm for, well, everything, we would be lost. We sure are grateful for background checks for anyone working with children and we certainly rely on regular check-ups for trains, planes and buildings, just to name a few examples.

Gatekeeping is performed by different bodies these days, but outside of algorithms, it’s mostly still humans (and even the algorithms are trained on human behavior). The verdict, in the form of a ‘yes’ or ‘no’, ‘you’re in’ or ‘you’re out’, uttered vocally by a human or in a standardized letter, can have vast implications. In this sense, language really is action.

2012 was not just the year I heard John Searle speak (one of the most fun talks I’ve attended during my uni years), it was also the year my scholarship was up for review. I was in my fourth semester, studying German and Latin for a teaching degree for secondary schools, and the only reason I had been able to pick up this degree was because of said scholarship. My first university had been close enough to home for me to take the train every day, even though that meant an hour each way on top of my long uni days, lab afternoons and my side job - and picking Biology as a second subject because nothing else was available for me there. I was burnt out pretty quickly and also pretty unhappy with the education in general, so a change was due. The only issue: money. I simply couldn’t afford moving out of my childhood bedroom to a different city, not even with my job and BAFöG (which, quite frankly, was a joke - they gave me 78 bucks per month).

Luckily, due to my good grades in my a-levels and social engagement, I had been awarded a scholarship just before the first semester was over. It covered my living expenses and helped me make the transition to a new university. I still worked on the side from time to time but was otherwise able to focus on my degree - and with over 50 h of expected workload each week, I also simply had no other choice.

The scholarship was preliminary, meaning a review would be up after some time. You had to prove that you were still among the top students of your subject. I had been talking to my professors who were to hand in performance reviews and although it had been a rough start in Latin for all of us (40 % of our class, including me, failed the first translation course), at that point I was pretty confident that I was doing okay.

Rule of law had it that my performance review in Latin had to be signed by the head of the department in order to be handed in. Chance had it that this was the professor in whose class I had failed in my first semester. I wasn’t exactly looking forward to that conversation but I was assuming that based on said performance reviews and my grades in my other courses, I could convince him.

That is, until I walked into his office. He looked at me with this mix of incomprehension and ‘tough luck’ and said, ‘Ms. Koßmann, you failed my course. That means you haven’t understood much. I can’t sign this.’ The following short conversation was ugly, especially when he said that my scholarship was like Mount Olympus and only the best deserved it. His language softened somewhat when he understood that his ‘no’ might mean that I would have to give up my entire future because I couldn’t afford studying without financial help. Like, at all. I mean, it was a state university, not a private school. I already lived out of town in an uninsulated flat share to save money. If it wasn’t going to work here, it wasn’t going to work anywhere. And yet, he refused his signature, despite the fact that it wasn’t even about being accepted into the scholarship, it was simply about continuing to receive it. He had seen me fail in one exam, and for him, that was enough. I left the office crying, humiliated and very unsure of my future. One word, ‘no’, could send me back home, without any idea how to continue in life.

The idea behind gatekeeping is structure. We put things into subgroups to make our lives easier. We don’t have to evaluate every little thing every time we encounter someone or something. Pre-formed labels given by authority figures will give us information and help us distribute people and resources according to their properties. And I had just been handed the ‘unworthy’ sticker.

Through social rules, spoken and unspoken, we grant some people the power to decide over our fate, and in this world where we have schedules with five-minute appointments, standardized forms and call centers, these decisions often depend on many things but not the validity of our claim. If my professor would have taken the time to learn about my previous achievements outside of his course, he might have discovered that I had won a prize for my outstanding a-level exam in Latin. He might have learned that I had won several prizes in regional Classics competitions. He might have understood that I was the first in my family to go to university at all. He might have changed his mind. But in those five minutes he had between his lecture and some other duties, he had to base his decision on the little he knew about me already - my grade in my first exam at uni.

On my journey with endometriosis and other chronic conditions, I’ve had this experience many times. Stressed and mentally absent doctors rush into their office where I have a hard time getting a word in before they tell me their verdict, sometimes without even so much as an exam. Whether or not I could have access to life-altering surgery depended on the opinion of doctors who saw me for as little as five minutes. Again, sometimes without so much as an exam. And to make that clear, many of the doctors who denied me surgery would have changed their mind, had they taken the time to look at my condition properly. Which is not just a wild guess - you just need to look at the results of the surgery. No, it wasn’t ‘just period pain’ (whatever that means anyway).

As John Searle says, speech is an act, but the same act means two different things to two different people. My professor and some of the doctors who told me ‘no’ were, in their mind, probably just protecting a sort of sacred elite space where only the worthy ones can enter, whether it’s a scholarship or the group of those who are ‘sick enough’ to receive help. It sounds cynical when I put it like this but I actually understand where they’re coming from. It’s your job to make distinctions, you worked your way up past many obstacles to get there, you have little time, so you do what you do. And in the case of surgeries, you also want to protect people from undergoing procedures they don’t need.

However, I’m a perfect example of what happens when your gatekeeping is rushed, lacks empathy and understanding or comes from the elitist idea that someone has to be subjectively ‘worthy’ to receive help. I was being told ‘no’. But I still needed the money and I still needed the surgery. So I still pursued both things, it had just become even harder to get them and I did it with almost a guilty conscience.

In 2012, I talked to my scholarship representative and my other professors. Eventually I was granted the permanent scholarship without the needed signature. I graduated with an average of 1,7 (B+) three years later, all thanks to the financial support I had continued to receive. In 2022, after the procedure being denied several times in previous years, I received surgery for endometriosis and have been mostly pain-free since. While I don’t hold a grudge against my doctors or my professor, it still left the uneasy feeling that in this world, if you’re not born with enough power and money to make your own decisions at all times, you will be made to feel unworthy many times, especially while you’re vulnerable.

To the surprise of no one, I have since embarked on the quest of making myself financially and otherwise as independent as possible from institutions, insurances and other impersonal authorities. Denial in and of itself is not the issue. I received many ‘We’re sorry, but’ letters in my life as I applied to assistant teaching jobs abroad, publishers for my novels or modeling opportunities. It’s part of all of my careers and I found that I usually recover from rejection rather quickly. However, medical and financial help in dire situations is a very different story, especially if the delivery of rejection makes you feel like you are the problem. I have seen sides of the legal, medical and social system that I can’t unsee and yes, it made me lose my trust.

Trust that gatekeeping is being done based on reason and empathy, and not based on how well someone liked the lunch they’ve just had (there are studies, I invite you to read up on that). Trust that people take their time to distinguish between someone who just came for the money grab and someone who actually needs help. Trust that people are aware of their power and have been trained to use it wisely. Because on the surface, it’s really just a few words in a long work day, a little speedrun side-quest that the gatekeeper might even forget about shortly after, but for the person on the other side, it changes everything.

The ‘no’ I received was so many speech acts in one. It was expressive (‘I don’t think you deserve your scholarship’). It was assertive (‘You are not part of an elite’). And it was commissive (‘I won’t sign this’). But the strongest feeling of helplessness came from the declarative part. ‘I declare you unworthy of my support.’ Even if I didn’t want to, a part of me secretly said, ‘He’s probably right.’ The curriculum was insane and we regularly had students in tears in class because we couldn’t keep up with the workload, but I worked as hard as I could. And when I did get my permanent scholarship, for a long time I thought of myself as an imposter because I wasn’t getting straight As, didn’t have an entire dictionary rent-free in my head, wasn’t joyfully leafing through Oxford editions of Ovid in my spare time (which consisted mostly of memorizing 15 pages of grammar rules each week).

As humans, we are territorial, and funny enough, when we had it hard in life, we are sometimes more likely to make other people’s lives just as hard. In passing, when explaining to me why he deemed me unfit for the honor that my scholarship came with, my professor mentioned that he hadn’t received one when he was younger. I think we’re sometimes stuck on the idea of not making it ‘too easy’ for younger generations, thereby making it too hard. His financial gatekeeping hadn’t worked, but the psychological stuck with me for a long time, also because of the way it had been delivered.

When I graduated in 2015, I already knew I wasn’t going to end up being a teacher. Apart from many other things, the idea of just being another gatekeeper, rushing through my day and casually distinguishing between ‘worthy’ and ‘unworthy’ students through grades and performance reviews, left me feeling empty. Sure, there are correlations between school performance and later performances at uni or in jobs, so it’s not entirely arbitrary, and I was obviously proud of my success in school. But to put it with John Searle, I was done with all these declarative speech acts. I wanted to work in a world which wasn’t constantly about whether or not someone is ‘good enough’.

In late 2015 I visited Oxford university. If anything screams ‘academic elite’, it’s this place. I could have applied for a masters’ there but I decided not to, mainly because the expected workload would have had the same effect on my mental health as in my previous degree - and I would once again have had to rely on a scholarship to finance it.

I loved the tour, though, and unfortunately missed Sir Ian McKellen, who had been invited to the colleges numerous times over the years. As to be expected, when giving motivational speeches in front of students, he is often heard saying: ‘And study hard or … you shall not pass.’ (If you haven’t watched Lord of the Rings, this won’t make sense to you, I’m afraid.) The quote in the movie is an impressive example of a speech act (granted, a bit of actual wizardry is probably also involved), but it also shows that the power of words is ultimately limited and life can prove you wrong. Yes, Gandalf prevented the Balrog from passing the bridge, but he also fell into darkness with it. Basically, just because someone says you won’t pass a test, won’t be fit for a certain job, won’t be ‘good enough’, doesn’t mean this is any final verdict over you, and certainly not your character. Gandalf underestimated the Balrog, just like you will be underestimated many times in your life.

Don’t let that define you.