UNC student paper will no longer use the word 'freshman'

[rangerrebew]

UNC student paper will no longer use the word 'freshman'
 
Chris Nuelle
Ohio Campus Correspondent
 
on Sep 22, 2015 at 12:29 PM EDT
 
In the "interest of inclusivity" The Daily Tar Heel will now use gender-neutral language in its stories.
Words like "freshman," "spokesman," and "chairwoman" will no longer be used.

The Daily Tar Heel, the student newspaper at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, has decided it will no longer use the word “freshman.”

According to an article in Monday’s edition, “n the interest of inclusivity, The Daily Tar Heel will from now on use gender-neutral language in its stories… we all see a pressing need to be inclusive in the way we write about people.”

“UNC is such an interesting campus, always challenging its students, faculty, staff and administration to be more inclusive..."    Tweet This

The student publication will undergo several changes, including the use of the term “first-year” in place of “freshman.” Additionally, the paper will use gender-neutral terms such as “spokesperson” and “chairperson” instead of “spokesman” and “chairwoman.”

In other instances where a gendered term would be commonly used, the paper says it “will find a gender-neutral alternative.”

In 2010, student groups at UNC Chapel Hill petitioned then Editor-in-Chief Andrew Dunn to revise the newspaper’s language policy. Dunn stayed firm and refused to change the policy, stating that the next editor could change it.

“We are in the business of communication,” Dunn stated. “The terms that we use, like ‘freshman,’ are the ones that are most recognizable.”

According to the paper, Dunn was simply upholding the AP Style Guide’s decision to use “freshman” instead of “first-year students.”

The Daily Tar Heel’s current editor in chief, Paige Ladisic, told Campus Reform the paper decided to make these changes to align with the changes the university made several years ago.

“UNC is such an interesting campus, always challenging its students, faculty, staff and administration to be more inclusive, more understanding and more accepting, and UNC actually changed from "freshman" to "first year" in 2009 or so,” Ladisic said. “For five years, the DTH stood by the AP Stylebook's ruling on this and disregarded the university's ruling, and I never considered challenging this myself.”

Ladisic said while the term “freshman” has never struck her the wrong way a lot of her staff and other students have voiced the discomfort they feel by “being gendered in words like “freshman” or “spokesman.””

“One important thing all of us had to think about was that we don't serve ourselves, the journalists, at the DTH — we serve our readers,” Ladisic added. “And if our readers care about something, we should respond responsibly. That's what we are trying to do here.”

http://www.campusreform.org/?ID=6823

[andy58-in-nh]

As with so many other of our college campuses, and in spite of its proud Person-tory, UNC now risks entering an intellectual No Person's Land.

Really: is "Tar Heel" a gender-neutral term? Doesn't it depend on whether the heel in question is spiked or slingback style or perhaps, on the bottom of a boot, where one suspects today's faculty members might find directions for pouring urine out of it, alas, to no effect?

Oh, well. As James Brown once sang, "It's a Person's World". And increasingly they're displaying signs of person-tal illness.

[mountaineer]

Couldn't they say "freshperson"? As long as they're going to be ridiculous about it, why not?

[EC]

How about "fresh meat." Or "new fish."

[aligncare]

I thought universities were supposed to be about diversity. Shouldn't they be celebrating diversity? Isn't biology all about diversity? Why do they want to erase social indicators of biological diversity? Chairwoman and chairman are fine words.

They should find something better to do with their time while at University.

[EC]

You are being old fashioned, my friend. Diversity is only "good" if it offends no one and no one is offensive. The patrimony is offensive, as s the existance of white cis males who believe in self reliance and responsibility - AKA men.

In related news, Cosmo is running yet another article asking "Where have all the men gone?"

[aligncare]

I recall being in junior college when I first saw that 'Miss' was replaced with 'Ms', removing the marital aspect of being female -- or, biological unit (in today's parlance).

Since Mr was never tied to a man's marital status, it made sense to me at the time. But in subsequent years I saw there was a much deeper and darker motivation. Marriage as an institution was under attack.

And here we are. Most young people today eschew marriage preferring cohabitation, and Obergefell blurrs the lines even further.

What will marriage look like in 200 years? Will it even be a part of social norms? And what of children? Where will they fit in to this new world?

[EC]

I could give you a hundred different scenarios - all logical extrapolations of today's trends, and not one of them would be right. People are pretty unique in their ability to screw anything up, given the chance.

[rangerrebew]

In related news, Cosmo is running yet another article asking "Where have all the men gone?"

Gone to soldiers every one (Pete Seeger) - NOT.  They're wearing crash helmets to drive tricycles, learning to get "in touch" with their gentler side, but certainly not to the democratic party.

[mountaineer]

The Coddling of the American Mind

In the name of emotional well-being, college students are increasingly demanding protection from words and ideas they don’t like. Here’s why that’s disastrous for education—and mental health.
Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt
The Atlantic, Sept. 2015

omething strange is happening at America’s colleges and universities. A movement is arising, undirected and driven largely by students, to scrub campuses clean of words, ideas, and subjects that might cause discomfort or give offense.

 Last December, Jeannie Suk wrote in an online article for The New Yorker about law students asking her fellow professors at Harvard not to teach rape law—or, in one case, even use the word violate (as in “that violates the law”) lest it cause students distress. In February, Laura Kipnis, a professor at Northwestern University, wrote an essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education describing a new campus politics of sexual paranoia—and was then subjected to a long investigation after students who were offended by the article and by a tweet she’d sent filed Title IX complaints against her.

In June, a professor protecting himself with a pseudonym wrote an essay for Vox describing how gingerly he now has to teach. “I’m a Liberal Professor, and My Liberal Students Terrify Me,” the headline said. A number of popular comedians, including Chris Rock, have stopped performing on college campuses (see Caitlin Flanagan’s article in this month’s issue). Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Maher have publicly condemned the oversensitivity of college students, saying too many of them can’t take a joke.

Two terms have risen quickly from obscurity into common campus parlance. Microaggressions are small actions or word choices that seem on their face to have no malicious intent but that are thought of as a kind of violence nonetheless. For example, by some campus guidelines, it is a microaggression to ask an Asian American or Latino American “Where were you born?,” because this implies that he or she is not a real American. Trigger warnings are alerts that professors are expected to issue if something in a course might cause a strong emotional response. For example, some students have called for warnings that Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart describes racial violence and that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby portrays misogyny and physical abuse, so that students who have been previously victimized by racism or domestic violence can choose to avoid these works, which they believe might “trigger” a recurrence of past trauma.

Some recent campus actions border on the surreal. In April, at Brandeis University, the Asian American student association sought to raise awareness of microaggressions against Asians through an installation on the steps of an academic hall. The installation gave examples of microaggressions such as “Aren’t you supposed to be good at math?” and “I’m colorblind! I don’t see race.” But a backlash arose among other Asian American students, who felt that the display itself was a microaggression. The association removed the installation, and its president wrote an e-mail to the entire student body apologizing to anyone who was “triggered or hurt by the content of the microaggressions.”  ...

Read the rest of the article and reader comments.

[rangerrebew]

Couldn't they say "freshperson"? As long as they're going to be ridiculous about it, why not?

I don't think that is specific enough.  I think first year uterusless biological unit is much smoother than he or him.

[musiclady]

Gone to soldiers every one (Pete Seeger) - NOT.  They're wearing crash helmets to drive tricycles, learning to get "in touch" with their gentler side, but certainly not to the democratic party.

I guess they took ol' Pete seriously and considered themselves chastised by the line "when will they ever learn?"

Now they are learning not to be men.

What a sorry state we are in........