Iz Ze Rite?

Academe has really become extreme.

News reports cascade about politically correct rulings of university administrators.  Admittedly most dispatches are carried by print, cable and some broadcast outlets often labeled conservative.  But one’s political leanings should not deter discernment of illogic.

George Will recently devoted an entire column to the growing wont of so-called educators to control speech.  One of his paragraphs begins: “The University of Tennessee’s Office for Diversity and Inclusion, worried that gender-specific pronouns (‘he,’ ‘she,’ ‘him,’ ‘her’), suggests gender-neutral noises (‘ze,’ ‘hir,’ ‘xe,’ ‘xem,’ ‘xyr’).”  Will, without commenting on his sentence, immediately goes to another university and its example.

He and we might note that the Tennessee neologists have done nothing more than promote substitute “words” for the identical meanings of English pronouns.  These are not new words that avoid gender.  No, masculine and feminine are recognized still.  “Hir” might even sound like “her” and both obviously refer to feminine gender.  So how logical is that?

But “male” and “female” are examples of “‘derogatory/oppressive language,’”  according to a syllabus written by a Washington State University female teacher, also cited by Will.

One person Will refers to in his column teaches “advanced feminist studies.”  She resigned from the University of Missouri, but a safe bet is that she -- excuse, please -- xe would approve of the suggestions from the UT diversity/ inclusion people.  

By the bye, doesn’t “diversity” “include” by its very definition?  The third meaning of “diverse” in the dictionary on this computer reads: “including representatives from more than one social, cultural, or economic group, especially members of ethnic or religious minority groups.”  Its example: “a diverse student body.”

A liberal arts college is included in nearly every university.  In the middle ages, universities concentrated on what were called the seven liberal arts: arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music (the quadrivium) and grammar, rhetoric, and logic (the trivium).  All of these studies trace their developments to the philosophers of ancient Greece.  Those “lovers of knowledge” or “philosophers” found truths that are -- well -- still true.  These truths are ignored by today’s tyro scholars to their intellectual peril.

“Higher education brought low” was the headline for Will’s column in The Washington Post.  He asked in his final sentence: “What, exactly, is it higher than?”