Hello, and welcome to ATP’s, Really Dumb Things, They Said. I’m Barry Nussbaum. Pennsylvania State University’s Faculty Senate passed a resolution on, “inclusive language,” that will rid the university of alleged paternalistic labels such as freshman, junior, senior underclassman, and upperclassman.

The Senate Committee on Curricular Affairs passed the removal of gendered and binary terms from their program descriptions. They are now introducing resolutions that will change the language because we live now in a male-dominated society.

“The university has grown out of a typically male-centered world. As such, many terms in our lexicon carry a strong, male-centric binary character to them.” The resolution says “Terms such as freshmen are decidedly male-specific, while terms such as upperclassmen can be interpreted as sexist and classist. Terms such as junior and senior are parallel to Western male father-son naming conventions, and much of our written documentation uses he or she pronouns.”

Did you get all of that? So, according to resolution, another goal of the resolution is to replace gender pronouns such as he, him, his, she, her, hers, with vague pronouns such as they, them, theirs, or other nongendered terms, such as student, faculty member, staff member and so on. Course descriptions are the target of proposed gendered language changes too.

The resolution provided an example of a proposed edit.

Terms such as upperclassmen and underclassmen were also switched to lower-division and upper-division. Oh, I feel better already, don’t you? The resolution was signed by 26 professors and administrators.

These poor abused freshmen at this university are just unable to learn because of the label of being a first-year student, and on top of that, being called a freshman left them nearly unable to learn. Oh, my gosh, such abuse.

What a dumb place to go and pay for an education.