Another example of the censorial character of modern universities is making its way around the internet.

According to the original article in Campus Reform (a conservative site), “Multiple professors at Washington State University have explicitly told students their grades will suffer if they use terms such as ‘illegal alien,’ ‘male,’ and ‘female,’ or if they fail to ‘defer’ to non-white students.”

The article goes on to point out that “several other WSU professors require their students to ‘acknowledge that racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, and other institutionalized forms of oppression exist’ or that ‘we do not live in a post-racial world.’”

Now, we at Intellectual Takeout are definitely concerned about the trend toward linguistic sanitization at today’s colleges, which has been highlighted in recent Atlantic articles here and here.   

BUT… the examples above are taken from courses titled “Women & Popular Culture,” “Introduction to Comparative Ethnic Studies,” “Introduction to Multicultural Literature,” and “Race and Racism in US Popular Culture.” I mean, come on, are students really that surprised about being marked down for failing to use inclusive language in these courses?

Presently, if students want to avoid being marked down for failing to adhere to inclusive thought or language, it would seem prudent to avoid courses with these and similar titles. In the future, I suppose, avoiding them or their influence on the wider college curriculum may become more difficult.