Brown University Now Using Gender Neutral Pronouns in Admissions Correspondence
“the note referred to the accepted student not as “she” but as “they.”
Brown University is using terms like “they” and “their” instead of “he” and “she” in official communications. This is madness.
James Freeman writes at the Wall Street Journal:
A Letter From An Ivy League Admissions Dean
Brown University in Providence, R.I. houses one of the country’s most selective undergraduate colleges. The Brown Daily Herald, a student-run newspaper, cites Dean of Admission Logan Powell in reporting that the school received a record-high 32,724 applications this year, and admitted just 8.3% of applicants.
Among those lucky few is the daughter of a Journal reader who is still trying to make sense of a letter the family received this week from Mr. Powell. Our reader’s bright daughter had already received news of her acceptance when a letter arrived that was addressed to her “Parent/Guardian.”
Oddly, the note referred to the accepted student not as “she” but as “they.” Dean Powell’s letter also stated that our reader’s daughter had no doubt worked hard and made positive contributions to “their” school and community. Our reader reports that his perplexed family initially thought that Brown had made a word-processing error. That was before they listened to a voice mail message from the school congratulating his daughter and referring to her as “them.”
We’ve read about the literacy crisis in the U.S. but would not have guessed that the problem extends to Ivy League administrators.
"They" are out of "their" "minds" | A Letter From An Ivy League Admissions Dean https://t.co/TjzscqYGB7
— Scott Johnson (@scottwjohnson) April 13, 2017
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Comments
How does an English teacher grade grammar these days?
These administrators would certainly fail.
Have we all not had enough of this nonsense?
Please, let’s all just start laughing when things like this occur.
Hold up the Alinsky mirror to these fools- ridicule them, laugh uproariously at the absurdity!
I’m “up to here” with it, and have been for decades. Some woman at a party I attended tore into me for my pronoun usage, but I was having none of it. I told her on no uncertain terms that it was not her place to correct me.
Her husband, a true needle-d1cked little woosy-boy if ever there was one, protested my dressing her down. I replied that HE had to take that from her but I did not.
Using a plural pronoun for a single antecedent is not “gender-neutral.” It is simply bad grammar. It reminds me of Ebonics, which was another fancy name for bad grammar. I’m reminded of my publisher’s Handbook for Authors, which states “Political correctness is never an excuse for using bad grammar.”
In this case, however, I suspect that the culprit is not political correctness, but sloth. It’s simply too much work for the Dean to look at each candidate’s materials and determine whether to use “he” or “she” or “it” (for those who say they don’t have a “binary” gender).
Like Hollywood, academia has hired so many simply based upon leftist politics that they have no talent on staff.