Stanford posted something call the "Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative" on its website. It was available to anyone with the link. Essentially, it was a list - a very, very, very long list - of forbidden words. Just to give you a flavor of it, the phrase "trigger warning" is listed as a Bad Thing because "the phrase can cause stress about what's to follow. Additionally, one can never know what may or may not trigger a particular person." You are instead to substitute "content note." (Oddly, the use of "trigger" as a verb is OK despite it's gun-related image.) See below:
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| Click on image above to clarify. |
When yours truly first saw the list this past Sunday, he first thought it might be a Sasha Baron Cohen-type joke, a parody, something like the fictional Professor Dr. Nira Cain-N’Degeocello, ostensibly from Reed College, who arrives on a bicycle wearing an NPR T-shirt and beads.*
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| Dr. Nira Cain-N’Degeocello |
Apparently, Stanford's bad word list goes back several years but the link began to circulate recently after a posting [at https://itcommunity.stanford.edu/ehli] on an official Stanford website. Once it began to circulate and attract external critical commentary, Stanford quickly put it behind a password. However, as might be expected, by then, the Wall Street Journal had captured the bad word list and re-posted it for anyone to see:
https://s.wsj.net/public/resources/documents/stanfordlanguage.pdf.
As you might also expect, it came with an editorial (that got picked up in other news sources):
Parodists have it rough these days, since so much of modern life and culture resembles the Babylon Bee.** The latest evidence is that Stanford University administrators in May published an index of forbidden words to be eliminated from the school’s websites and computer code, and provided inclusive replacements to help re-educate the benighted.
Call yourself an “American”? Please don’t. Better to say “U.S. citizen,” per the bias hunters, lest you slight the rest of the Americas. “Immigrant” is also out, with “person who has immigrated” as the approved alternative. It’s the iron law of academic writing: Why use one word when four will do?
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 Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative is a “multi-phase” project of Stanford’s IT leaders. The list took “18 months of collaboration with stakeholder groups” to produce, the university tells us. We can’t imagine what’s next, except that it will surely involve more make-work for more administrators, whose proliferation has driven much of the rise in college tuition and student debt. For 16,937 students, Stanford lists 2,288 faculty and 15,750 administrative staff.
The list was prefaced with (to use another forbidden word) a trigger warning: “This website contains language that is offensive or harmful. Please engage with this website at your own pace.”
Evidently it was all too much for some at the school to handle. On Monday, after the index came to light on social media, Stanford hid it from public view. Without a password, you wouldn’t know that “stupid” made the list.
Source: https://archive.vn/YJWo7#selection-279.0-547.222.
Here's the basic problem. The Stanford bad word list feeds every stereotype on the right of academic "wokeness." Maybe that image doesn't matter for wealthy private institutions such as Stanford. Maybe that image doesn't matter for UC in politically "blue" California. But it matters for many other public institutions in other locations and it matters for many private higher ed institutions without Stanford's wealth. There has been much attention paid of late to declining public confidence in higher ed, doubts about the worth of a college degree, etc., with a sharp divide on political lines:
Public confidence in higher education’s ability to lead America in a positive direction has sunk steeply in recent years, falling 14 percentage points just since 2020. Two years ago, more than two-thirds of Americans said colleges were having a positive effect on the country, according to a survey conducted by New America. In the most recent version of the survey, released Tuesday, barely half agreed. As with other recent public-opinion polling, New America’s findings reveal a yawning partisan gap. While nearly three-quarters of Democrats saw higher education’s contributions in a positive light, just 37 percent of Republicans did...
Full story at https://www.chronicle.com/article/americans-confidence-in-higher-ed-drops-sharply.
Of course, folks are free to put up lists of bad words - or anything else that flickers through their minds - as individuals. But when such items appear on official university websites, they create ripple effects, negative externalities. Words do matter, particularly those that seem to speak for a major university and which are inevitably seen as representing all of higher education. Think before you post on official university websites.
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*(Sasha) Baron Cohen in the TV series "Who Is America?" kept Reed in the dark and apparently went to semi-great lengths to create a digital footprint... ahead of his interviews. The professor’s Twitter bio identifies him as “Dr. Nira Cain-N’Degeocello, Proud Democrat. Lecturer on Gender Studies at Reed College. Co-Principal at Wildfields Poly-Ed. Stay at home Male Mom.” And according to Amazon, Cain is the self-published author of Being Food: Living Life in the Food Chain, Immoral Toddlers, The Freedom Illusion and The Third Gender: A Collection of Essays. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/07/16/talk-show-host-says-sacha-baron-cohen-posed-reed-professor-new-show-american. To see a clip:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doHkeXK8BXs.
**A parody fake news website: https://babylonbee.com/.
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