Yesterday we reported on how Johns Hopkins University had erased the existence of women by defining lesbians as “non-men.” To refresh your memory, here’s part of JHU’s “glossary” of terms:
This absurdity got wide coverage beyond Power Line, and evidently Johns Hopkins was embarrassed. Today Johns Hopkins removed the glossary entirely, and now has this in its place:
Even this got modified later in the day to this:
In other words, whoever wrote the definition of “non-men” is being thrown under the bus. “Pending review” means we’re never going to hear that phrase again, and in fact it is unlikely JHU will attempt another such glossary of correct-speech.
But let’s rewind the tape. A few months ago we and others reported on Stanford University’s glossary of discouraged terms as part of their “Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative.” Among their 160 terms to be avoided was “American,” because “This term often refers to people from the United States only, thereby insinuating that the US is the most important country in the Americas.”
When this glossary attracted public attention, Stanford quickly withdrew it.
Now let’s fast-forward to CCNY law school’s recent commencement ceremony, where the selected graduating student speaker delivered a vicious anti-Israel speech filled with anti-Semitic tropes. When the speech attracted a lot of public attention suddenly the administration of CCNY denounced the student’s address as “hate speech,” even though the dean of the law school can be seen applauding the student at the end of her speech, and, it is reported, the student had shared a draft of her remarks with the administration before commencement, and they didn’t raise any objection.
You can see a pattern here: when universities are exposed to public attention, they run for the hills and protest that they had no idea such craziness was going on under their roofs. “Wasn’t reviewed or approved” by responsible officials, they will say. CCNY will try to pretend that anti-Semitism among its students and faculty are a rare anomaly, but this is a lie. They know full well that their faculty, student organizations, and outside pressure groups are actively promoting anti-Israel BDS propaganda on campus, and they won’t life a finger to stop it. Likewise administrators know their DEI staffs are insane, but will do nothing to stop it.
Unless they get caught. Even then they won’t do much beyond damage control.
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