Tag: universities

University language guide says ‘grandfather,’ ‘housekeeping,’ ‘spirit animal’ are ‘problematic’ words

A University of Washington language guide is calling everyday words used by Americans “problematic.”

The University of Washington Information Technology department released an “inclusive language guide” that lists a number of “problematic words” that are “racist,” “sexist,” “ageist,” or “homophobic.”

According to the guide, words such as “grandfather,” “housekeeping,” “minority,” “ninja,” and “lame” are considered “problematic words.”

For example, the language guide states that the word “lame” is considered problematic because it’s “ableist.”

“This word is offensive, even when it’s used in slang for uncool because it’s using a disability in a negative way to imply that the opposite, which would be not lame, to be superior,” the guide states.

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Wokery beyond parody as university slaps a TRIGGER warning on George Orwell’s 1984 as it contains ‘explicit material’ which some students may find ‘offensive and upsetting’

As one of the greatest works in Britain’s literary canon, Nineteen Eighty-Four sounds a chilling warning about the dangers of censorship.

Now staff at the University of Northampton have issued a trigger warning for George Orwell’s novel on the grounds that it contains ‘explicit material’ which some students may find ‘offensive and upsetting’.

The advice, revealed following a Freedom of Information request by The Mail on Sunday, has infuriated critics, who say it runs contrary to the themes in the book.

Published in 1949, Orwell’s dystopian story – set in a totalitarian state which persecutes individual thinking – gave the world phrases such as ‘Big Brother’, ‘Newspeak’ and ‘thought police’.

Its plot centres on Winston Smith, a government employee who is arrested and tortured over an illicit love affair, but it also makes powerful points about what can happen to a society that doesn’t cherish academic freedoms or its own history.

Yet it is one of several literary works which have been flagged up to students at Northampton who are studying a module called Identity Under Construction. They are warned that the module ‘addresses challenging issues related to violence, gender, sexuality, class, race, abuses, sexual abuse, political ideas and offensive language’.

In addition to Orwell’s book, academics identify several works in the module that have the potential to be ‘offensive and upsetting’ including the Samuel Beckett play Endgame, the graphic novel V For Vendetta by Alan Moore and David Lloyd and Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing The Cherry.

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Wharton Students Reveal the Disconnect Between Elite College Kids and Reality

A professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania inadvertently went viral when she revealed how out of touch some of her Ivy League students are with the reality that those of us who aren’t among the elite experience every day.

Nina Strohminger, a professor of legal studies and business ethics, tweeted, “I asked Wharton students what they thought the average American worker makes per year and 25% of them thought it was over six figures. One of them thought it was $800k. Really not sure what to make of this (The real number is $45k).”

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Penn State professor: Maybe masked drunk drivers should speed through ‘pro-covid’ neighborhoods

A Penn State University professor recently compared those who say mask and vaccine mandates violate their personal liberties to drunk drivers.

“Why is it a parent’s right to endanger the lives of other people’s kids and of teachers?” Professor Edward Fuller tweeted Sunday. “Maybe ppl wearing masks should just drive drunk and speed thru the neighborhoods of pro-covid parents as a way to exercise their freedom and rights.”

Fuller, an associate professor of education and director of the Penn State Center for Evaluation and Education Policy Analysis, has since deleted the tweet and switched his account to private.

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University offers professors $3K to ‘redesign’ courses with social justice, ‘anti-racist’ content

University of Memphis faculty are getting $3,000 stipends to redesign courses that further diversity and “social justice.”

The university is offering stipends to 15-20 faculty in two installments after “syllabi redesign” and course completion are finalized. 

The $45,000 – $60,000 project is part of the university’s “Eradicating Systemic Racism and Promoting Social Justice Initiative,” presents the effort as “an opportunity for interested faculty” to promote the commitment to “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Social Justice.”

Scott Sundvall, assistant professor of English at Memphis, told Campus Reform that the stipends evolved from a discussion during a department meeting about which courses could be applied to a social justice minor. 

Sundvall said that the stipends for redesign “may seem ideological” but is “really not as radical” and a “good idea.”

“It is imperative that no area of the curriculum is excluded,” an Eradicating Systemic Racism and Promoting Social Justice Initiative report stated. “[I]t is the nature of race oppression for it to find ways to operate invisibly, and in turn to produce conceptual spaces that are mistakenly judged to be ‘race neutral.’”

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Law student government rejects free speech group because debate can cause ‘real harm’

For the second time recently, Emory Law School in Atlanta is dealing with a controversy involving a student-run organization seeking to squelch debate in the name of preventing harmful speech.

Its Student Bar Association, the law school equivalent of student government, denied a charter to the Emory Free Speech Forum (EFSF) in part based on the “lack of mechanisms in place to ensure respectful discourse and engagement” at its events, such as a moderator.

This could cause a “precarious environment” and “potential and real harm” on fraught topics such as race and gender, “when these issues directly affect and harm your peers’ lives in demonstrable and quantitative ways,” the rejection letter said.

A charter comes with eligibility for university funding and the use of university resources. Given Emory Law’s “well-established promotion of free speech values” and EFSF’s “overlap” with other chartered groups, the letter said, “we fail to see a need” to fund it.

A week earlier, three law professors pulled their essays from a forthcoming issue of the Emory Law Journal in response to student editors ordering one of them to remove “insensitive language” from a “hurtful and unnecessarily divisive” critique of the concept of systemic racism.

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‘White people should commit suicide as an ethical act,’ Duquesne professor says

He defended a proposition by a fellow professor

Duquesne University Professor Derek Hook said there are merits to the argument proposed by another professor who argued that it would be ethical for white people to kill themselves.

The anti-critical race theory group Mythinformed MKE posted the video recently. “This is part of an ‘anti-racist’ discussion on ‘nice white therapists held by the [American Association for Psychoanalysis in Clinical Social Work],” the group wrote on Facebook. The video appears to be from a summer session hosted by Hook, though the content is not otherwise publicly available.

“White people should commit suicide as an ethical act,” the top of a presentation by Hook said.

He quoted from a South African philosophy professor named Terblanche Delport, who wrote in 2016 about white people killing themselves.

Delport allegedly made similar comments in 2016, in reaction to racial division in the former apartheid state.

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Political science professor claims in Politico essay that Constitution is enemy of Democracy

The day prior to the one-year anniversary of the Jan. 6 Capitol breach, Politico magazine ran a guest column by a political science professor who argued the U.S. Constitution has become a threat to democracy.

Corey Robin, a professor at Brooklyn College and the City of New York Graduate Center, wrote a piece titled “Republicans Are Moving Rapidly to Cement Minority Rule. Blame the Constitution.” 

In the piece, he argues the modern Republican Party and the Constitution are preventing the “national majority,” meaning the Democratic Party, from legislating effectively.

“Driving the initiatives of the Republicans and the inertia of the Democrats are two forces,” Robin writes. “The first is the right’s project, decades in the making, to legally limit the scope and reach of democracy. The second is the Constitution, which makes it difficult for the national majority to act and easy for local minorities to rule.” 

In the essay, Robin also criticizes constitutional facets of the American electoral process including the Electoral College and the Senate, all for the purpose of repeatedly leveling anti-Democratic accusations against the GOP.

“Democracy is not just the enemy of the Republican Party. It is also the enemy of the Constitution,” he writes. “Americans associate the Constitution with popular liberties such as due process and freedom of speech. They overlook its architecture of state power, which erects formidable barriers to equal representation and majority rule in all three branches of government.”

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Saint Louis University Threatens to Expel Student for Posting Flyers Promoting Conservative Speaker’s Event

Saint Louis University is threatening to expel or suspend a student for posting flyers advertising the Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh’s off-campus speaking event, according to the Young America’s Foundation.

The student, James Dowling, was told in a Dec. 9 videoconference with school administrators that he could face expulsion for his “inappropriate conduct” and “failure to comply,” according to YAF.

Dowling, a member of the Saint Louis University College Republicans group, was putting up flyers advertising Walsh’s off-campus event on Dec. 1 when nearby SLU administrators, uncomfortable with the presence of SLU’s name on the same flyer as the SLU College Republicans, told him to take them all down, according to YAF.

Dowling reportedly offered to cross out the names on the flyers with a marker, but the administrators wouldn’t accept the compromise.

In a letter dated Dec. 9, the SLU Office of Student Responsibility and Community Standards sent Dowling a letter detailing his alleged breaches of SLU’s “Community Standards.” The letter also noted that Dowling would be required to attend a hearing for his “Suspendable Violations.”

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Too good to fact-check? Academic journal publishes hoax on conservative takeover of higher ed

Aprestigious academic journal has egg on its face for publishing a hoax paper that claimed to find widespread concerns about “undue” conservative influence in higher education.

“Right-wing money strongly appears to induce faculty and administrators … to believe that they are pressured to hire and promote people they regard as inferior candidates, to promote ideas they regard as poor, and to suppress people and ideas they regard as superior,” according to the abstract in Higher Education Quarterly.

Peer reviewers failed to perform basic due diligence on the paper submitted in April and approved in October, neglecting, for example, to verify that authors “Sage Owens” and “Kal Alvers-Lynde III” were UCLA professors as they claimed. Owens even used an encrypted email service for correspondence with the journal.

They didn’t check whether the conservative foundations named as active funders of higher education actually existed. The “Randy Eller Foundation” is made up, while the Olin Foundation shut down in 2005.

The author who goes by Owens told The Chronicle of Higher Education that the journal didn’t even ask to see their data: “Every page has some glaring errors.”

The authors’ stated names provide a clue when spelled as an acronym: “SOKAL III.” That indicates this is the second successful hoodwink tracing its inspiration to physicist Alan Sokal’s famous parody of leftist “gibberish” in the journal Social Text in 1996.

“We wanted to improve over previous hoaxes by publishing in what was supposed to be a reputable journal,” Owens wrote in an email to Just the News. 

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