In another step toward ensuring that American universities become some of the last places where free speech is tolerated or allowed, the University of Missouri has begun training its faculty to monitor their own speech — as well as that of their peers — for a lack of “inclusive terminology.”
The university’s Chancellor’s Diversity Initiative, through a training document titled “The Language of Identity — Using inclusive terminology at Mizzou,” is admonishing professors and instructors to vigilantly consider their own speech in order to avoid alienating students of diverse backgrounds.
The document, made public Wednesday by The College Fix, provides faculty with a four-page glossary of PC-culture terms such as “ableism” (“discrimination or prejudice, whether intentional or unintentional, against persons with disabilities”) and inclusion (“the intentional action of including groups in society who may otherwise be vulnerable, excluded or marginalized.”)
Amber Cheek, the university’s Americans with Disabilities Act compliance manager, reportedly told more than 70 faculty at one seminar that they needed to begin thinking of tactful ways to let their peers know when they’ve said something that — by PC-culture standards — is insensitive.
“We all live in our own cultural experiences … and there is always going to be a large group of people who don’t want to get out of that or who want to stay in their comfort zone,” she said, according to the report. “So — you have to draw them out. And sometimes the best way to do that is to pose your [chastisement] as, ‘Here is how to be a better coworker, here is how to be a better professor.’”
The Fix also notes that Missouri had only recently enacted a law — the Campus Free Expression Act — forbidding public universities from limiting student speech to designated “free speech zones.”