Aug 1, 2015 4 min read

Colleges and universities are hotbeds of political correctness, where students are swaddled in a cocoon of “safety,” their most cherished ideas never challenged and intellectual rough-and-tumble kept at a canyon-sized remove.

That’s the line of higher education’s most vociferous critics, and there’s no doubt some exaggeration behind it. Given the hundreds of campuses across the United States, from public universities that serve working commuters to Ivy League institutions that instruct the cream of the academic crop, they are too numerous and too varied to be painted with just one brush.

Yet when a story moved on the Associated Press wire last week about a “bias-free language guide” that has been cooked up at the University of New Hampshire, we had to concede that the critics were, in at least one case, onto something.

According to the AP, the guide was put together by students and faculty at UNH two years ago, but attracted few eyeballs until a conservative website, Campus Reform, wrote about it. Even the university’s president was seemingly in the dark about it and took pains to stress the language guide was not campus policy carved in stone, and that he was “troubled and offended” by many parts of it.

The university’s chief executive might well have decided he was troubled and offended after he quit giggling. Among the highlights of this language guide is the suggestion that referring to someone from the United States as “American” might be offensive to some because it fails to take into account those who hail from South America.

Oh, c’mon.

And there’s more. Rather than refer to an individual with a lot of money as “rich,” the guide says they should be designated a “person of material wealth.” Someone who is a poor is “a person who lacks the advantages that others have.”

How about that ninetysomething member of the alumni association? Don’t call them an older person, elder, senior or senior citizen. Instead, the preferred terminology is “person of advanced age.” If someone is overweight, they should not be described as such. Instead, they should be called “a person of size.”

We can only imagine how a history textbook would read if all this politically correct argot, and more like it, were slapped down on the page. And, heck, let’s throw in some modern-day buzzwords for the fun of it: “Franklin Roosevelt was a great North American. He was a person of material wealth, but became differently abled after a bout with polio as he approached middle age. He marshaled an impressive skill set and thought outside the box to bring about long-lasting achievements, such as the New Deal, which included programs to assist persons of advanced age and people who lacked the advantages that other people have. Roosevelt also led the United States (not America!) through World War II, alongside British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, a person of size.”

Lest anyone think otherwise, we believe the elderly, South Americans, the rich, the poor and people of all sizes and shapes should be accorded dignity and respect. But we also think people should feel free to speak simply and directly, and not have to fear that using everyday, accepted terminology will somehow offend some fragile, overly sensitive soul. Referring to a rich person as “a person of material wealth” is to render language bloodless and anodyne. And since we’re writers, why would you want to use five words when two will do?

We’re human beings, not androids.

And, as such, we should be allowed to speak like human beings. Or “persons of water, hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, blood and bone.”