OPINION:
The unwary, which includes most of us, should step lively if stumbling onto the campus of the University of Michigan. You might offend by saying “good morning” to someone who is having an awful morning. Your obliviousness to the pain of others would be unforgivable, if not yet illegal.
The university has a new “Inclusive Language Campaign,” spending $16,000 for signs, banners and other reminders to students (and maybe even to a few professors) to avoid hurting feelings with an unthinking word spoken in haste.
Some of the words seem innocent enough, and no doubt are on saner campuses elsewhere: insane, retarded, gay, tranny, gypped, illegal alien, fag, ghetto and raghead. Certain phrases are forbidden, too. You can’t say, perhaps after flunking a test in calculus, “I want to die.” That might offend someone who has just botched a suicide attempt and is doomed to continue on this dirty, rotten planet. Don’t say “that test simply raped me,” either. You must respect the rules of the campus rape culture.
The idea, university spokesman Rick Fitzgerald tells the College Fix, which monitors campus nonsense, is that the Inclusive Language Campaign tries to “address campus climate by helping individuals understand their words can impact someone and to encourage individuals to commit to creating a positive campus community.” (And perhaps someone in the English Department could help a university spokesman with the spoken language.)
This is the campaign’s first semester and it has its fans. One junior, whose name will be withheld as an act of kindness, tells the Michigan Daily, the student newspaper, that she thinks it’s “a great program because it will improve the day-to-day language of students on campus by providing education around words that are offensive.”
Some of the verboten words may sound obscure to intruders. The word “tranny” is said to perpetuate “transphobia,” which sounds like the legitimate concern of someone with a noisy transmission in a 10-year-old Pontiac, but actually implies that someone whose biological sex does not align with his preferred gender (meaning sex) is “abnormal, wrong or aberrant” and is offensive to those who “identify as transgender, gender queer, or gender-nonconforming.”
“Gypped” is forbidden because it “perpetuates racism by implying that individuals of certain ethnic groups are dishonest, fraudulent or cheaters.” The word “gypsy” is offensive, the university says, to people “who identify as Romani or Jewish.” It’s not clear why the university goes out of the way to include Jews. The word “gyp” derives only from “gypsy,” native to Romania.
The campaign has posted a Facebook page with “inspirational” quotes, personal stories and even a video to demonstrate how “to address a person by the correct pronouns.” The inevitable workshop “brings bystander intervention skills to first-year housing residents [i.e., freshpersons] for the purpose of building safe, inclusive and respectful communities.”
“Bystander skills” do not necessarily include the ability to administer a punch in the nose to answer insults. “This program is intended to be educational, not regulatory,” says the university spokesman.
Nevertheless, some students with the ability to notice the camel’s nose under the tent flap have asked how the reinforced speech code “reconciles with the university policy on free speech,” which “encourages open and vigorous discussion and strives to maintain an environment where the free exchange of ideas and opinions can flourish.” The discussion can apparently be vigorous, and ideas and opinions can flourish — but just not too vigorous, and flourish only in modest ways.
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