Campus Reform is reporting that multiple professors at Washington State University have inserted into their syllabi rules for what students can and can’t say. If students don’t adhere to the professors’ speech codes their grades will suffer, they will be removed from class, and in some cases fail the course.

Here are some examples of what the college kids are faced with these days:

In Selena Lester Breikss’ “Women & Popular Culture” class, students risk a failing grade if they use any common descriptors that Breikss considers “oppressive and hateful language.

In Breikss’ class referring to women/men as females or males is considered offensive. Her goals for her students are that

[s]tudents will come to recognize how white privilege functions in everyday social structures and institutions.

I’m curious – how do you think she explains white privilege after two democratic presidential elections in favor of a black man? Did he cheat? Did he not really get all those white votes? It just boggles the mind.

The punishment for use of the banned words includes

removal from the class without attendance or participation points, failure of the assignment, and— in extreme cases— failure for the semester.

In Rebecca Fowler’s “Introduction to Comparative Ethnic Studies” course students’ grades will suffer

if they use the term “illegal alien” in their assigned writing. [They] will lose one point every time they use the words “illegal alien” or “illegals” rather than the preferred terms of “‘undocumented’ migrants/immigrants/persons.” Throughout the course, Fowler says, students will “come to recognize how white privilege functions in everyday social structures and institutions.”

They will certainly learn about privilege, but this one is more properly named elitism. And the university campus more resembles fantasyland than an everyday social structure or institution.

She goes on to say,

I will not entertain discussions that are not solidly grounded in textual evidence but are solely based on your personal “opinions” or preferences.

Luckily the bar is not too high for textual evidence. Her basis for banning the use of “illegal” comes from the AP stylebook:

White students in John Streamas’ “Introduction to Multicultural Literature” class, are expected to “defer” to non-white students, among other community guidelines, if they want “to do well in this class.”…. Streamas elaborates that he requires students to “reflect” on their grasp of history and social relations “by respecting shy and quiet classmates and by deferring to the experiences of people of color.”

Streamas—who previously generated controversy by calling a student a “white shitbag” and declared that WSU should stand for “White Supremacist University”—also demands that students “understand and consider the rage of people who are victims of systematic injustice.”…. [in the syllabus] Streamas [also] accuses Glenn Beck of being an “insensitive white.”

Why does any professor anywhere have a need to discuss Glenn Beck in the syllabus? It’s not as if he assigned any of Beck’s books. It’s so out of line. What gives him the belief that he has a right to impose his viewpoints on young people? The classroom is not without a hierarchy, and the professor holds the power. He’s The Man – speak truth to that power.

Several other WSU professors require their students to “acknowledge that racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, and other institutionalized forms of oppression exist” or that “we do not live in a post-racial world.”

What is a post-racial world and how will we know when we get there? Is it when everyone is the same color, or is it when we are blind to color? Oh wait, I think that’s what the conservatives have been saying for years – in order to stop discriminating based on race, we need to stop discriminating based on race. But for these professors, that’s not post-racial. Post-racial means what they perceive as Opposite World and that world happens when “people of color” take over, not as equals, but as oppressors themselves. They don’t want to share, they want to stomp.

UPDATE: 9/1/2015 – WSU has issued a statement in response to the syllabi requirements of some professors:

We are working with these faculty members to clarify, and in some cases modify, course policies to ensure that students’ free speech rights are recognized and protected. No student will have points docked merely as a result of using terms that may be deemed offensive to some. Blanket restriction of the use of certain terms is not consistent with the values upon which this university is founded.