The University of Tennessee’s Office for Diversity and Inclusion, worried that students might be uncomfortable with gender-specific pronouns (“he,” “she,” “him,” “her”), suggests gender-neutral noises (“ze,” “hir,” “xe,” “xem,” “xyr”). The University of California system’s sensitivity auditors stipulated that “hostile” and “derogatory” thoughts include “I believe the most qualified person should get the job” and “America is the land of opportunity.” The University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point’s list of racial microaggressions includes “America is a melting pot” and “There is only one race, the human race.”
Some Johns Hopkins University students proclaimed themselves microaggressed by the possibility of a Chick-fil-A restaurant on campus. (Chick-fil-A’s chief executive defines marriage as Barack Obama did until 2012.) Mount Holyoke College canceled its annual production of “The Vagina Monologues” because it is insufficiently inclusive regarding women without vaginas and men who, as the saying goes, “self-identify” as women. “Gender,” said a student, “is a wide and varied experience, one that cannot simply be reduced to biological or anatomical distinctions,” and the show “is inherently reductionist and exclusive.”
Writing in the University of California at Berkeley paper, two geographically challenged students objected to a class featuring Plato and Aristotle and other “economically privileged white males from five imperial countries (England, France, Germany, Italy and the United States).” A branch of the University of California at Irvine’s student government passed a resolution against the display of flags. Written by a student in the School of Social Ecology ( “transformative research to alleviate social inequality and human suffering”), the resolution said flags are “weapons for nationalism” and “construct” dangerous “cultural mythologies and narratives” and “paradigms of conformity” and “homogenized standards” and interfere with “designing a culturally inclusive space.”
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