CharacterSet Problem

CharacterSet Problem

I am using jQuery .load() to load some html files into my "master" page. The users who are creating the html files are using MS Word. I've noticed that MS Word inserts this meta tag:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=windows-1252" />

Because I am loading the pages using .load(), there are some characters that do not get encoded correctly and little boxes show in their place.

Can I override that meta tag inside the html files created in MS Word? If not that, what would be my best way to get the characters be interpreted correctly when I load the html pages? I know I can use MS Word, open the file and save as a filtered web page which fixes the issue, but there are a couple thousand pages and I'd like to find a different way.

In my index.html page, I have this meta tag character set defined, which I tried changing to match the one created by MS Word, but that did not work.
<meta charset="utf-8" />

Example Code:

// I get the url of the html file (created by MS Word) that I want to load into my "master" html page.
var url = "\somepath\somepage.htm";

// I use the load method of jQuery and load the page into a specific section of // my "master" html page.
$("#specificsection").load(url);

The loaded html shows unrecognized characters. How can I get the unrecognized characters to be recognized? Is there a javascript where I can change the meta tag and have it work?