Harvard’s motto is Veritas. Yale’s is Lux et Veritas. Oxford’s Dominus Illuminatio Mea. Cambridge’s Hinc Lucem et Pocula Sacra. Four institutions, four mottos, one shared orientation: toward truth, toward light, toward something beyond the inquirer’s own assumptions.
Whether those institutions still organise themselves around that orientation is an open question. Much of what now happens under their names treats knowledge as inseparable from the conditions under which it is produced — whose categories get used, whose questions get funded, which voices count as evidence. That attention is not wrong. Institutions claiming to pursue truth have enacted and concealed real injustices, and the disciplines that made those patterns visible did serious work.
What I want to hold onto is the older commitment the mottos describe — not as nostalgia, but as a working orientation for the kind of practice I do.
Here is what that looks like. Every organisation operates inside a frame: a prior structuring of what counts as a problem, what counts as evidence, and what counts as a solution. The frame does not present itself as a frame. It presents itself as the situation. This is what what-a-frame-is describes, and the consequence is frame-failure — when the problem is the frame itself, not execution within it.
The work is not to supply a correct frame and apply it. It is to surface the frame already in use, examine what it makes visible and what it occludes, and ask whether there is a better question underneath the one being answered. Sometimes the better question is simple and the current frame has just been assumed for too long. Sometimes it requires taking seriously a perspective the frame has been filtering out — which is where insights about positionality and standpoint genuinely help, because they name the mechanism by which frames exclude.
The orientation toward truth does not require the claim that any single account of the world is complete, or that objectivity means standing nowhere. It requires only the working distinction between more honest and less honest accounts — between a description that includes what it has left out and one that pretends it has left nothing out.
That distinction is enough to do useful work. It is what lux et veritas pointed toward, and it is as close to that orientation as organisational consulting gets: not the confident possession of truth, but a rigorous attempt to ask better questions than the ones already in play.
The mottos were never promises of arrival. They were descriptions of direction. Whether the universities that inscribed them still face that way is for those institutions to answer. The orientation itself remains available — to anyone willing to do the work.
Garden notes
what-a-frame-is — the foundational account of how frames structure what can be seen and concluded.
frame-failure — what happens when the problem is the frame itself, not the execution within it.
the-dimensions-of-not-knowing — extends the argument about the limits of any single epistemic position.