Syllabus Week brought more than the typical boredom pandemic to Washington State University.
When some Critical Culture, Gender and Race Studies classes” syllabi discouraged the use of offensive terms, including “illegal aliens,” “female,” “male” and “tranny,” Internet mobs shrieked that WSU”s quality of education had suffered a dramatic decline.
The uproar caused WSU administration to release a statement reaffirming a commitment to free speech rights and promising to work with faculty members to revise the syllabi in question.
However, before blustering in outrage at the punishment, it”s important to examine the context the syllabi were presented in.
Aleya Ericson
Students in classes discussing race, class, gender and sexuality should expect an examination of vocabulary and our society at large. The instructors at WSU forced students to change their vocabulary in an effort to make students learn the impact that language has on others.
Granted, the penalties for using banned words seemed unduly harsh at first glance. For some of the classes in question, students could face grade penalties or even fail the course entirely for repeated use of offensive terms.
For WSU professor Selena Lester Breikss” class, students who used the terms in class would be corrected so they could learn from it. Allowing students to learn from their mistakes is the foundation of education, so this did not seem unreasonable.
The language requirement within the WSU syllabi is more akin to common practices within teaching foreign languages than the freedom of speech crackdown many saw it as. Within some foreign language classes, a common practice is to force students to use whatever language they are learning for the entire period in order to practice words or phrases that may not have been practiced otherwise. Students choosing to study a foreign language should have some expectation of real-world application, after all.
The same principle holds true for students of critical culture, gender and race studies. College students studying cultural differences should expect to gain a vocabulary that is appropriate to use at a job within the field.
The benefits of using the correct vocabulary to refer to people of different genders, races and cultures are seen regularly in the news. Comedian Damon Wayans calling the women who accused Bill Cosby “un-rape-able” is just one example of why there will always be a need to study and teach the importance of language.
Some of the language forbidden by the classes has even fallen out of favor by the general public. The Associated Press stopped using the term “illegal alien” in the AP Stylebook in 2013, as part of a larger effort to label people instead of behaviors.
So by forcing students to learn inoffensive terms, the WSU instructors were also striving to teach them to use proper terminology as well.
It”s disappointing that the WSU administration felt the need to cave to public pressure on the fears of abridging freedom of speech and to force the professors to mend their syllabi. The professor’s goals were understandable and would have helped students better understand the class curriculum as well as the new world they are about to enter into.
Aleya Ericson can be reached at [email protected]