This sort of thing used to be demanded by left-wing student groups. Now the faculty is doing it at some schools.
The College Fix reports:
Penn State faculty votes to remove ‘gendered, binary’ terms, but school noncommittalIn April, the Penn State University Faculty Senate passed a resolution to remove “gendered and binary” terms from Penn State course and program descriptions. But the school has not yet said whether it will adopt the resolution campus-wide.The recommendations in the resolution suggest terms like “freshman,” “sophomore,” “junior,” and “senior” be replaced with “first-year,” “second-year,” “third-year,” and “fourth-year.” It would also replace the terms “underclassmen” and “upperclassmen” with “lower division” and “upper division.”The resolution, which passed by a vote of 125-13, further recommends the school “move away from the use of gendered pronouns when referring to students, faculty, staff, and guests in course descriptions and degree program descriptions” by replacing “he/him/his and she/her/hers with they/them/theirs or use non-gendered terms such as student, faculty member, staff member, etc.”“The University, as with most all academic institutions world-wide, has grown out of a typically male-centered world,” reads the faculty senate website. “As such, many terms in our lexicon carry a strong, male-centric, binary character to them. Terms such as ‘freshmen’ are decidedly male-specific, while terms such as ‘upperclassmen’ can be interpreted as both sexist and classist. Terms such as ‘junior’ and ‘senior’ are parallel to western male father-son naming conventions, and much of our written documentation uses he/she pronouns.”The faculty recommend the school make these language changes to “recruiting materials, admissions materials, scholarship information, housing materials, other outward-facing documents, internal documents, and websites.”The school, however, has remained noncommittal.
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