No more "he" or "she", use "xe", "zir" or "xir" says U of Tennessee

[brycejones]

Given the perpetual decline in state funding for higher ed, are we sure "taxpayer" money was really spent on this?

 

[Nebor]

Given the perpetual decline in state funding for higher ed, are we sure "taxpayer" money was really spent on this?

The fact that she's on staff at all is ridiculous. Who cares if it's taxpayer money or student loans paying her salary?

 

[michal1980]

How dare people give out a completely voluntary group of gender neutral pronouns!



Considering this it seems you're in a pretty bad position to be calling anyone stupid. Maybe you'd be well served with some more education, because getting this angry about voluntary guidelines seems pretty ridiculous.

That's how this stupidity always starts.

First liberals make it voluntary, next your intolerant if you don't use the new language, then we need to write laws to make sure everyone is referred to whatever the fuck liberals make up.

And if you don't agree, well your some stupid backward redneck that doesn't want to progress.

 

[BoberFett]

That's how this stupidity always starts.

First liberals make it voluntary, next your intolerant if you don't use the new language, then we need to write laws to make sure everyone is referred to whatever the fuck liberals make up.

And if you don't agree, well your some stupid backward redneck that doesn't want to progress.

As much as I often disagree with michael1980's POV, he's right on this.

Claim it's the slippery slope fallacy if you want, it's how these things work.

 

[Meghan54]

well your some stupid backward redneck that doesn't want to progress.

Seems that statement fits you rather well.

And it's not your, which is a possessive term, but YOU'RE, a contraction for "you are."

 

[Torn Mind]

Chinese in origin in some way ?

Just curious, as I speak none but it looks it a bit.

No, and you show how clueless people can be when it comes to languages they don't know.

The Chinese pronounciation is he/she is tā. The written language distinguishes between male and female.

他 -he
她 -she

 

[Torn Mind]

That's how this stupidity always starts.

First liberals make it voluntary, next your intolerant if you don't use the new language, then we need to write laws to make sure everyone is referred to whatever the fuck liberals make up.

And if you don't agree, well your some stupid backward redneck that doesn't want to progress.

You don't need to be redneck or stupid to be "anti-liberal".

 

[Rakehellion]

Chinese in origin in some way ?

Just curious, as I speak none but it looks it a bit.

It's completely made up.

 

[Meghan54]

When I went, college was the place for discussing controversial issues and radical thinking, it's how you developed the ability for learning to think independently.

That depends on the course, but really ?

If that is true these days, no wonder there is a large education problem.

And that was even courses out of Chaminade University of Hawaii in Honolulu, as you live there now, though I did not get a degree there.

Well, that's the way it was. Go to college, get exposed to beliefs that differ from your own, develop your own mind.


Now, there's a push to reign in the humanities, art, anything outside math and creationism science. Almost as if colleges are becoming vocational tech institutions, not colleges. Sad, really.

 

[DrPizza]

"Ze puts the lotion on hirs skin, or else ze gets the hose again."

Say that with a slight German accent... OMG! Univ of Tennessee is being overrun by Nazis! Oh no! Godwin's Law.

 

[1prophet]

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine...ng-of-the-american-mind/399356/#disqus_thread

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.

Something 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.

This new climate is slowly being institutionalized, and is affecting what can be said in the classroom, even as a basis for discussion.


During the 2014–15 school year, for instance, the deans and department chairs at the 10 University of California system schools were presented by administrators at faculty leader-training sessions with examples of microaggressions. The list of offensive statements included: “America is the land of opportunity” and “I believe the most qualified person should get the job.”


The press has typically described these developments as a resurgence of political correctness. That’s partly right, although there are important differences between what’s happening now and what happened in the 1980s and ’90s. That movement sought to restrict speech (specifically hate speech aimed at marginalized groups), but it also challenged the literary, philosophical, and historical canon, seeking to widen it by including more-diverse perspectives.



The current movement is largely about emotional well-being. More than the last, it presumes an extraordinary fragility of the collegiate psyche, and therefore elevates the goal of protecting students from psychological harm. The ultimate aim, it seems, is to turn campuses into “safe spaces” where young adults are shielded from words and ideas that make some uncomfortable.


And more than the last, this movement seeks to punish anyone who interferes with that aim, even accidentally. You might call this impulse vindictive protectiveness. It is creating a culture in which everyone must think twice before speaking up, lest they face charges of insensitivity, aggression, or worse.

How Did We Get Here?

It’s difficult to know exactly why vindictive protectiveness has burst forth so powerfully in the past few years. The phenomenon may be related to recent changes in the interpretation of federal antidiscrimination statutes (about which more later).



But the answer probably involves generational shifts as well. Childhood itself has changed greatly during the past generation. Many Baby Boomers and Gen Xers can remember riding their bicycles around their hometowns, unchaperoned by adults, by the time they were 8 or 9 years old. In the hours after school, kids were expected to occupy themselves, getting into minor scrapes and learning from their experiences. But “free range” childhood became less common in the 1980s.



The surge in crime from the ’60s through the early ’90s made Baby Boomer parents more protective than their own parents had been. Stories of abducted children appeared more frequently in the news, and in 1984, images of them began showing up on milk cartons.



In response, many parents pulled in the reins and worked harder to keep their children safe.
The flight to safety also happened at school. Dangerous play structures were removed from playgrounds; peanut butter was banned from student lunches. After the 1999 Columbine massacre in Colorado, many schools cracked down on bullying, implementing “zero tolerance” policies. In a variety of ways, children born after 1980—the Millennials—got a consistent message from adults: life is dangerous, but adults will do everything in their power to protect you from harm, not just from strangers but from one another as well.


These same children grew up in a culture that was (and still is) becoming more politically polarized.


Republicans and Democrats have never particularly liked each other, but survey data going back to the 1970s show that on average, their mutual dislike used to be surprisingly mild. Negative feelings have grown steadily stronger, however, particularly since the early 2000s. Political scientists call this process “affective partisan polarization,” and it is a very serious problem for any democracy.


As each side increasingly demonizes the other, compromise becomes more difficult. A recent study shows that implicit or unconscious biases are now at least as strong across political parties as they are across races.


So it’s not hard to imagine why students arriving on campus today might be more desirous of protection and more hostile toward ideological opponents than in generations past. This hostility, and the self-righteousness fueled by strong partisan emotions, can be expected to add force to any moral crusade. A principle of moral psychology is that “morality binds and blinds.” Part of what we do when we make moral judgments is express allegiance to a team. But that can interfere with our ability to think critically.



Acknowledging that the other side’s viewpoint has any merit is risky—your teammates may see you as a traitor.

 

[MongGrel]

No, and you show how clueless people can be when it comes to languages they don't know.

The Chinese pronounciation is he/she is tā. The written language distinguishes between male and female.

他 -he
她 -she

Why would saying I have no functional knowledge of it to begin with be clueless?

Thanks for the enlightenment, is that Mandarin or one of the other several variants ?

I'm not actually looking for a serious answer at this point.

 

[shira]

This shit is just getting rediculious now.

Seriously now we can't call a man a man and a woman a woman and let Caitlyn Jenner call itself whatever the hell it chooses

This kind of shit has to stop.

*head desk*

Why does it "have to stop?" What's wrong with treating people the way they want to be treated? What's wrong with being sensitive to the fact that a person's gender identity may not be the same as what their appearance suggests? Why would you NOT want to be aware of the differences in people?

The fact is that these differences have ALWAYS existed; but now, in 21st century America, it's become safer for people to be open about who they are, without fearing that society will punish them for falling outside of of an arbitrary set of rules about appearance, gender identity, and sexual preference. If it makes people happier, what's it to you to simply accept them? And if you don't feel very comfortable around them, simply move on.

 

[Sulaco]

But zen how vill I answer in my German accent??

Someone sink of ZE GERMANS!

 

[OverVolt]

That idea is shtako.

 

[LegendKiller]

Why does it "have to stop?" What's wrong with treating people the way they want to be treated? What's wrong with being sensitive to the fact that a person's gender identity may not be the same as what their appearance suggests? Why would you NOT want to be aware of the differences in people?

The fact is that these differences have ALWAYS existed; but now, in 21st century America, it's become safer for people to be open about who they are, without fearing that society will punish them for falling outside of of an arbitrary set of rules about appearance, gender identity, and sexual preference. If it makes people happier, what's it to you to simply accept them? And if you don't feel very comfortable around them, simply move on.

Because then it's not how people want to be treated, it's how somebody else is going to force you to treat everybody else, or they publicly shame you. Dissenting opinion is eliminating, which is ironic, since the whole goal is to allow dissenting opinions.

How about people just shut the fuck up and stop being pussies about everything.

 

[werepossum]

:hmm: All things considered, I find this no surprise.

What happened to Y'all ?

Exactly. Y'all is singular for both sexes. All y'all is plural for both sexes. (Apologies for offensively underestimating the number of human sexes, I took biology before they let stupid people teach it.)

On the bright side, if the University of Tennessee ever needs to bludgeon anything with a blunt object, they have the Vice Chancellor for Diversity handy.

 

[Pulsar]

Given the perpetual decline in state funding for higher ed, are we sure "taxpayer" money was really spent on this?

Think about this chick sitting in her office and figuring all this out. Now think about just how foreign her entire set of thought processes must be for this to even sound like a good idea. NOW think about the fact that yes, indeed, you do pay part of her salary.

It's idiotic. Any U of T alum, aspirant, or current student should be mortified.

 

[MongGrel]

Exactly. Y'all is singular for both sexes. All y'all is plural for both sexes. (Apologies for offensively underestimating the number of human sexes, I took biology before they let stupid people teach it.)

On the bright side, if the University of Tennessee ever needs to bludgeon anything with a blunt object, they have the Vice Chancellor for Diversity handy.

:thumbsup::thumbsup:

:biggrin:

 

[werepossum]

That's how this stupidity always starts.

First liberals make it voluntary, next your intolerant if you don't use the new language, then we need to write laws to make sure everyone is referred to whatever the fuck liberals make up.

And if you don't agree, well your some stupid backward redneck that doesn't want to progress.

Not liberals - progressives. Liberals are all about increasing personal freedom; progressives are all about limiting it, even to the point of making "he" or "she" hate speech and requiring "safe zones" where a legal adult can be protected from hearing anything he or she finds disturbing.

 

[werepossum]

:thumbsup::thumbsup:

:biggrin:

It works because one doesn't need to guess if a particular emo hot mess is a he or a she - or a ze, ze, or xe I suppose - to be polite.

 

[Double Trouble]

How the fuck did we get to this point? Hopefully we reach the point soon where we start throwing this shit out the window, along with the dipshits pushing it. Oh, crap, I probably offended dipshits

 

[1prophet]

That's how this stupidity always starts.

First liberals make it voluntary, next your intolerant if you don't use the new language, then we need to write laws to make sure everyone is referred to whatever the fuck liberals make up.

And if you don't agree, well your some stupid backward redneck that doesn't want to progress.

Oh no, it's not the "stupid backward redneck that doesn't want to progress" that they go after first, but the old school liberal type they view as a threat, because they are the ones who will support your right to free speech even if they don't agree with it.



Secret tribunals and accusations based on someones feelings you might have hurt, for everyone that has the ability to fight them how many would be silenced because of some fear.
http://chronicle.com/article/My-Title-IX-Inquisition/230489/
Part of article

My Title IX Inquisition

Things seemed less amusing when I received an email from my
university’s Title IX coordinator informing me that two students
had filed Title IX complaints against me on the basis of the essay
and "subsequent public statements" (which turned out to be a
tweet), and that the university would retain an outside investigator
to handle the complaints.

I stared at the email, which was under-explanatory in the extreme.
I was being charged with retaliation, it said, though it failed to
explain how an essay that mentioned no one by name could be
construed as retaliatory, or how a publication fell under the
province of Title IX, which, as I understood it, dealt with sexual
misconduct and gender discrimination.

Title IX was enacted by Congress in 1972 to deal with gender
discrimination in public education — athletics programs were the
initial culprits — and all institutions receiving federal funds were
required to be in compliance. Over time, court rulings established
sexual harassment and assault as forms of discrimination, and in
2011 the U.S. Department of Education advised colleges to "take
immediate and effective steps to end sexual harassment and
sexual violence." Since then, colleges have been scrambling to
show that they’re doing everything they can to comply, but still,
more than 100 of them are under federal investigation for violating
Title IX policies.

I should pause to explain that my essay included two paragraphs

about a then-ongoing situation on my campus involving a
professor who was himself the subject of two sexual-harassment
investigations involving two students. This professor subsequently
sued university officials and one of the students for defamation,
among other things. The charges had occasioned a flurry of backand-
forth lawsuits, all part of the public record, which had been
my source for the two paragraphs. My point in citing this legal
morass was that students’ expanding sense of vulnerability, and
new campus policies that fostered it, was actually impeding their
educations as well as their chances of faring well in postcollegiate
life, where a certain amount of resilience is required of us all

The email from the Title IX coordinator provided a link to
information about our university’s Title IX policies, which
brought me to a page containing more links. Clicking around, I
found information about the rights of accusers and what to do if
you’ve been harassed, though I couldn’t find much that related to
me. I did learn that Title IX protects individuals who’ve reported
sexual misconduct from retaliation — characterized as
"intimidation, threats, coercion, or discrimination" — but I failed
to see how I could have retaliated against anyone when it wasn’t
me who’d been charged with sexual misconduct in the first place.

I wrote back to the Title IX coordinator asking for clarification:
When would I learn the specifics of these complaints, which, I
pointed out, appeared to violate my academic freedom? And what
about my rights — was I entitled to a lawyer? I received a polite
response with a link to another website. No, I could not have an
attorney present during the investigation, unless I’d been charged
with sexual violence. I was, however, allowed to have a "support
person" from the university community there, though that person
couldn’t speak. I wouldn’t be informed about the substance of the
complaints until I met with the investigators.

Apparently the idea was that they’d tell me the charges, and then,
while I was collecting my wits, interrogate me about them. The
term "kangaroo court" came to mind. I wrote to ask for the charges
in writing. The coordinator wrote back thanking me for my
thoughtful questions.

What I very much wanted to know, though there was apparently
no way of finding it out, was whether this was the first instance of
Title IX charges filed over a publication. Was this a test case? From
my vantage point, it seemed to pit a federally mandated program
against my constitutional rights, though I admit my understanding
of those rights was vague.

What I very much wanted to know, though there was apparently
no way of finding it out, was whether this was the first instance of
Title IX charges filed over a publication. Was this a test case? From
my vantage point, it seemed to pit a federally mandated program
against my constitutional rights, though I admit my understanding
of those rights was vague.

A week later I heard from the investigators. For reasons I wasn’t
privy to, the university had hired an outside law firm, based in
another Midwestern city an hour-and-a-half flight away, to
conduct the investigation; a team of two lawyers had been
appointed, and they wanted to schedule "an initial interview" the
following week. They were available to fly in to meet in person —
the phrase "billable hours" came to mind — or we could
videoconference. The email contained more links to more Title IX
websites, each of which contained more links. I had the feeling
that clicking on any of them would propel me down an
informational rabbit hole where I’d learn nothing yet not reemerge
for days.

I replied that I wanted to know the charges before agreeing to a
meeting. They told me, cordially, that they wanted to set up a
meeting during which they would inform me of the charges and
pose questions. I replied, in what I hoped was a cordial tone, that I
wouldn’t answer questions until I’d had time to consider the
charges.

We finally agreed to schedule a Skype session in which they would
inform me of the charges and I would not answer questions. I felt
the flush of victory, though it was short-lived. I said I wanted to
record the session; they refused but said I could take notes. The
reasons for these various interdictions were never explained. I’d
plummeted into an underground world of secret tribunals and
capricious, medieval rules, and I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone
about it.

because I strongly believe that the Title IX process should be
far more transparent than it is, let me introduce some
transparency by sharing the charges against me.
Both complainants were graduate students. One turned out to
have nothing whatsoever to do with the essay. She was bringing
charges on behalf of the university community as well as on behalf
of two students I’d mentioned — not by name — because the
essay had a "chilling effect" on students’ ability to report sexual
misconduct. I’d also made deliberate mistakes, she charged (a few
small errors that hadn’t been caught in fact-checking were later
corrected by the editors), and had violated the nonretaliation
provision of the faculty handbook.

The other complainant was someone I’d mentioned fleetingly
(again, not by name) in connection with the professor’s lawsuits.
She charged that mentioning her was retaliatory and created a
hostile environment (though I’d said nothing disparaging), and
that I’d omitted information I should have included about her.
This seemed paradoxical — should I have written more? And is
what I didn’t write really the business of Title IX? She also charged
that something I’d tweeted to someone else regarding the essay
had actually referred to her. (It hadn’t.)

Please pause to note that a Title IX charge can now be brought
against a professor over a tweet. Also that my tweets were
apparently being monitored.

Much of this remains puzzling to me, including how someone can
bring charges in someone else’s name, who is allowing intellectual
disagreement to be redefined as retaliation, and why a professor
can’t write about a legal case that’s been nationally reported,
precisely because she’s employed by the university where the
events took place. Wouldn’t this mean that academic freedom
doesn’t extend to academics discussing matters involving their
own workplaces?

 

[Double Trouble]

From the article linked in the OP.

From the article:

"A statement from a university spokesman said: 'We would like to offer clarification of the statements that have been made referring to gender-neutral language.

'There is no mandate or official policy to use the language. The information provided in our Office of Diversity and Inclusion newsletter was offered as a resource to our campus community on inclusive practices."

How dare people give out a completely voluntary group of gender neutral pronouns!

Voluntary or not, it's completely retarded. While voluntary, it still came from the official school administration, which means it has the tacit support of the administration.

If I got my degree from UT, I'd be writing my school to let them know I would not be contributing any more money to the school until they send out a message stating the guidance was idiotic and get rid of every last moron who was behind it.

 

[K7SN]

I can't wait for some moron to use their gender neutral words like this "There are all kinds of people but they all can be called "he, she or them!" We'll really hear the gender neutral people whine.