Stanford Language Guide Considers the Word ‘American’ Harmful
“Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative”
This is where the academic left wants to take the country. People need to stand up and say no.
The College Fix reports:
Stanford language guide warns against saying ‘American’
A 13-page language guide at Stanford University warns against, among many things, using the word “Americans” because the term “often refers to people from the United States only, thereby insinuating that the US is the most important country in the America.”
“Americans” is one of dozens of words and phrases listed in the “Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative,” which came under scrutiny this week after it was brought to light by The Wall Street Journal on Monday.
The university hid the guide behind a password after it started getting media attention, but the Journal saved a copy.
Its editorial scorched the university for guide, which editors argued is so “stupid” — one of the words on the naughty list — it’s hard to believe it’s not satire:
You can’t “master” your subject at Stanford any longer; in case you hadn’t heard, the school instructs that “historically, masters enslaved people.” And don’t dare design a “blind study,” which “unintentionally perpetuates that disability is somehow abnormal or negative, furthering an ableist culture.” Blind studies are good and useful, but never mind; “masked study” is to be preferred. Follow the science.
“Gangbusters” is banned because the index says it “invokes the notion of police action against ‘gangs’ in a positive light, which may have racial undertones.” Not to beat a dead horse (a phrase that the index says “normalizes violence against animals”), but you used to have to get a graduate degree in the humanities to write something that stupid.
The Journal goes on to make a very strong point: this is what happens when a university maintains 2,288 faculty and 15,750 administrative staff for a student population of 16,937 students, as is the case at Stanford.
The guide states its goal is to eliminate “harmful language, including racist, violent, and biased (e.g., disability bias, ethnic bias, ethnic slurs, gender bias, implicit bias, sexual bias) language in Stanford websites and code,” as was developed by the IT Department.
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“Blind studies are good and useful, but never mind; “masked study” is to be preferred. Follow the science.”
But since science proved masks don’t work, neither will your studies.
I have to say I’m partial to the argument that people shouldn’t use the term “American” as a synonym for “US resident,” but the solution to that isn’t to BAN the term, it’s to teach people to use it properly.
I see so many people who don’t understand that the vast majority of people swarming our border are “Americans.” Even Mexicans misuse the term “Norteamericano” to mean “gringo,” when in fact they are as much North Americans as we are.
I used to teach a cross-cultural communication class. The available textbooks all had a bit about the “American” thing, and each had similarly stupid substitutions, such as “United Statians.”
Meanwhile, none of the Hispanic students in my classes want to be called American. They’re Colombian, Venezuelan, etc. Even the ones of, say, Puerto Rican parents but born in the continental U.S. don’t consider themselves American.
There are platoons of highly-paid “Diversity” and “DEI” administrators at all of these universities. Most of them aren’t qualified to do anything that’s actually useful (like teach math), so they are constantly trying to find projects that they are capable of doing. That’s not easy.
This kind of a rule book may seem silly to anyone with a modicum of common sense, but it’s all that these people can do. I expect to see many more of these absurd rule books coming out of DEI offices.
This Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative is from Stanford’s IT dept.
I’m sure they still have master and slave storage arrays.
“People need to stand up and say no.” Yep, it’s is a battle worth fighting.
If politics is downstream from culture, as Breitbart said, what is culture downstream from? I’d say the expression of thoughts and beliefs — namely, language.
Native American not a problem?
I hope this makes more people understand that anything issuing from an American university (and via its influence all Western universities except maybe those in Eastern Europe) is to be met with skepticism, to speak with restraint. This includes the mental equipment of graduates who can do nothing but bitch about the usual intersectional “oppression,” who wonder why none of the work they can find after graduating is “meaningful,” and why nobody plays along with their racist BS but their former classmates who are now working in service jobs, policing customers’ language at Starbucks or recommending the Filet ‘o Fish from the McDonald’s menu.
The usage guide is no surprise, nor is the apparent fact that there is nearly one “administrator” for every Stanford student.
That says it all.
When you want to control the narrative, you ban the words that make discussion possible. Orwell wrote a couple of books; I suppose they are banned now.
The numbers here are a bit misleading. Staff aren’t just administrators, but also people working in labs who aren’t faculty or PI’s. A typical lab might be headed by one PI faculty member with 4-10 “staff” working under them, and they are distinct entities from the useless administrators. Ditto the cooks and housekeeping and maintenance and other facilities staff. I’m not saying that the university wouldn’t be better off and more productive with a reduction of 1000 or so administrators, but not all of those 15,000 listed are those types of functionally useless people.
Why is Stanford even getting any “air time” with this? It appears to have a long history with indigenous oppression and was founded by a white railroad tycoon who passed legislation and recruited volunteers for US Army battalions that hunted and killed hundreds of Native Americans.
https://stanfordpolitics.org/2017/10/28/overdue-encounter-with-past-indigenous-oppression/
You can tell this is a place of Higher Learning by all the Words that bother them.