EAST LANSING, MI – From the same university that brought you “talking in third person puts you in better control of your thoughts, feelings and behavior,” Michigan State University is now dictating to its students what is acceptable terminology when referring to COVID-19.
And what is acceptable to the Word Police at MSU when describing the virus? Just two words: Novel coronavirus. And the disease contracted with the virus may be called COVID-19 or SARS CoV-2. Any and all terms besides those are unacceptable and shall apparently be deemed terms of hate.
Can I assume that their history department now teaches about the H1N1 pandemic of 1918, rather than the “hateful” Spanish flu?
As originally reported by The Morning Watch, Dr. Ray Gasser, the Executive Director of Residence Education and Housing Services (REHS) sent out an email.
In that email, Gasser pointed to avoidance of hate and discrimination as one of the eight steps to take to make the pandemic response “more manageable for us all.”
With Editor-in-Chief and author Sergei Kelley’s permission, here is their take from the inside. Kelley writes:
“In an email sent by the University on April 2, 2020, eight recommendations were given to handle COVID-19. Staff, faculty, and students were encouraged to sign MSU’s ‘Hate Has No Home Here‘ pledge.
Sent by Residence Education and Housing Services (REHS), the recommendations will make ‘this process more manageable for all of us.’ The term ‘novel coronavirus’ was stated as the ‘correct term’ and ‘no other names are acceptable.’
Listed before their eight recommendations, are multiple paragraphs advertising MSU’s ‘Hate Has No Home Here’ statement. Included is a link where students, faculty, and staff can sign the pledge. MSU alleges by signing, you could show ‘support of an inclusive and hate-free community.”
Being called an ‘upstander,’ MSU highlights we stand up to ‘racist, dog-whistle, ageist, xenophobic, classist or other speech that divides our community.’ Further, the MSU community should, ‘especially stand up against the denigration of anyone in our Asian, Pacific Islander, Desi American (APIDA) community at this time and in the future days… because we are seeing a rise in anti-APIDA racism.’
Cited in this recommendation, is the racist incident reporting website ‘Stop AAPI Hate’ for acts against the ‘APIDA community.’ Additionally, MSU’s email further says ‘words matter. This disease does not discriminate.’
Other recommendations are listed, including to ‘Share financially’, ‘Be kind and patient with one another,’ and ‘Take care of yourself.’
Weeks ago, The Morning Watch reported on a statement by the Asian Pacific American Student Organization (APASO) of MSU. It cited coronavirus disinformation, unnecessary panic, and ‘decontextualized videos and memes’ as ‘intolerable acts’ leading to discrimination of Asian students at MSU.
Similarly, Lyman Briggs College of MSU released an email saying coronavirus has caused fear and anxiety. Furthermore, ‘this epidemic may be new, [but] the racist and xenophobic discourse and images on the news and social media are all too familiar.’
MSU’s campus remains open and some students still reside on campus. Classes have been moved online and finals will further be in virtual formats. In addition, MSU announced summer classes will also be online.”
So, just a few things to highlight.
First, this is the same university where the Associated Students of MSU (student government) voted less than a month ago to legislate a requirement to recite the following acknowledgement the following at the start of each General Assembly meeting. Parts of that resolution reads:
“WHEREAS, We acknowledge the real ways that the State of Michigan, Michigan State University, and residents of this Land have benefitted [sic] from the forced and systematic removal of Anishinaabeg and other Indigenous peoples from Michigan.
WHEREAS, ‘Although land acknowledgements are powerful statements, they are only meaningful when they are coupled with authentic and sustained relationships with Indigenous communities and community-informed actions.’
RESOLVED, ASMSU will perform the Land Acknowledgement of Michigan State University at the first General Assembly meeting of the new session by reading the following:
‘Michigan State University occupies the ancestral, traditional and contemporary lands of the Anishinaabeg – Three Fires Confederacy of Ojibwe, Odawa and Potawatomi peoples. In particular, the university resides on land ceded in the 1819 Treaty of Saginaw. We recognize Michigan’s 12 federally recognized Native Nations, historic Indigenous communities in Michigan, Indigenous individuals and communities who live here now, and those who were forcibly removed from their homelands. In offering this land acknowledgement, we affirm Indigenous sovereignty, history and experiences.’
RESOLVED, ASMSU will perform a shortened Land Acknowledgement at the beginning of each full session, General Assembly meeting following the start of a new session:
‘Michigan State University occupies the ancestral, traditional and contemporary lands of the Anishinaabeg – Three Fires Confederacy of Ojibwe, Odawa and Potawatomi peoples. The university resides on land ceded in the 1819 Treaty of Saginaw.’”
Secondly, Gasser’s email states that people must “stand up to racist, dog-whistle, ageist, xenophobic classist or other speech that divides our community into us and them” as it pertains to COVID-19.
So, who exactly is the ‘us’ and ‘them’ then? Considering that the “politically correct” crowd seemingly believes that only white people can be guilty of most of the “isms” that he mentioned, one must assume he is referring to white staff, students and faculty.
And with their ideology that says sexism is only committed by males, now we can assume that he is referring to the guys as well.
Speaking of gender, even CNN is reporting that COVID-19 is killing men at higher rates then women. In some places they are dying at a rate of two to one.
Must be all of that male privilege.
Oh, and also, death statistics for COVID-19 are only being broken into male and female. What about all of the other infinite number of genders we keep hearing about?
They must be immune.
Leave it to left-leaning academia to turn something that does not discriminate based on race, religion, color, gender or political ideology, into a way to get on their soapboxes to preach moral superiority on diversity.
This is not the first story Law Enforcement Today has shared of this type of thought and speech policing on American college campuses.
Remember this one form a year ago?
I want to take a moment to say thank you to a couple of groups of people. First, thank you to the men who solidified our Bill of Rights. Second, thank you to the men and women who have fought to maintain our way of life to make sure that in 2019, I have still have the freedom afforded me by the framers in the 1st Amendment.
It is that very amendment that allows me to say what I am about to say, the very same that allows Law Enforcement Today to print the following.
Unfortunately, there is an assault on that very freedom on our college campuses and we cannot allow it to continue unchecked.
On March 21, 2019, President Donald Trump signed an executive order making federal funding for colleges and universities contingent on their assurances that speech will be free on their campuses, and not one-sided, as it has been.
There has been an onslaught of activity meant to silence the conservative voices on campuses across this country. While most administrators are adamant that the schools they represent are inclusive of all points of view, many of them work covertly to be bastions of leftist ideology. Other campuses are not so covert, operating completely in the open.
The latest politically correct terms from #Massachusetts’ Amherst College https://t.co/DeWv6ozmCz
— RT (@RT_com) March 26, 2019
Amherst College is trying to respond to accusations that they are attempting to stifle the very speech that the President’s executive order is trying to protect.
The college released an online document called the Common Language Guide that was created by the Office of Diversity and Inclusion Resource Center Team. The team included the following statement to open the document:
“This document was created by the Resource Center Team within the Office of Diversity & Inclusion in collaboration with various campus partners as a guide to common, shared language around identity.
This project emerged out of a need to come to a common and shared understanding of language in order to foster opportunities for community building and effective communication within and across difference. This is a list of carefully researched and thoughtfully discussed definitions for key diversity and inclusion terms.
It is by no means a comprehensive list, but it is a good place for us to start. We understand that language around identity, privilege, oppression and inclusion is always changing, evolving and expanding. If there is a term that you feel should be included here, please let us know.”
Before we dive into the contents of the actual document, we need to address a few things in the opening statement.
- In collaboration with various campus partners. This obviously did not include any groups that lean right in their ideology.
- Common and shared understanding of language. I would struggle to believe that the verbiage used would be common place in the every day conversations of conservative campus groups.
- Carefully researched and thoughtfully discussed. By whom? I am not seeing this as something agreed upon by right-leaning students.
The 40-page guide includes groupings of General Terminology, Isms, Race and Ethnicity, Gender and Gender Identity, Sexual and Romantic Identity, Class, Politics and Policy, Global Power and Inequality and Disability. While we will not be able to cover the entire guide, it can be found in its entirety here.
(Wikipedia Commons)
The Inclusion Resource Team ran the gambit of the typical trigger words like inclusion, microaggression, power, privilege and social justice.
They also went so far as to make sure that anyone reading is aware that while women can be just as prejudiced as men, they CANNOT be just as sexist as men (See the definition on Reverse Oppression), marginalized communities cannot oppress other communities because they do not have access to institutional power, and that heterosexism is a pervasive system of beliefs and practices that manifest across societal/cultural, institutional and individual domains that centers and normalizes heterosexuality.
This guide addresses the pay gap, based on median salaries of all working men and women.
There statistics exclude careers choices, education levels, etc. IRT defines capitalism as an economic and political system in which a country’s trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state.
They further define it as an exploitative labor practice that affects marginalized groups disproportionately. Legal/illegal is apparently a highly racialized term to describe a person’s presence in a nation without government-issued immigration status.
The guide wrote a glowing definition of Black Lives Matter, but no mention of Blue Lives Matter. They claim capitalism is an exploitative system, but no mention of socialism. They define heterosexuality is a “hyper-infatuation” with the opposite sex yet define homosexuals merely as someone who is attracted to the same sex.
President Trump’s executive order on free speech at USA colleges can’t come soon enough.
Defund these a-holes!
UMass Amherst: Conservative Student Rejected from Serving on Student Government | Breitbart https://t.co/rWeDnrDkuN via @BreitbartNews
— PatriotForEver (@DonCamp29856335) March 25, 2019
But, by all means, the group that authored this guide is all about free speech with no bias. They walked through these conversations in a fair and balanced way.
They researched and thoughtfully discussed just exactly how to paint the picture of inclusion for all points of view and creating a safe place to converse and have a free and intellectual exchange of ideas.
Wait. That is not quite accurate.
The reality is that this guide and the people at Amherst College who wrote it have an agenda. This agenda is not friendly to people who lean right. This agenda is not friendly to those who are part of the LEO community or to the people who support them. This agenda is the exact reason that the President had to issue and executive order to safeguard free speech in colleges.
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