Is steering people to use opinion-neutral words an effort to make them better communicators or is it bordering on political strong-arming?

As with anything, it depends on who you ask. As NIU’s Freshman English Committee experiments with guidelines pushing students to use inclusive language and therefore become better communicators, opponents point to history.

“This agenda is broadly shared by most organizations of minority students, feminists and gays,” read a special report in Newsweek magazine. “It is also the program of a generation of campus (tenured) radicals who grew up in the 1960s and are now achieving positions of academic influence.”

The series of articles, not opinion columns, came out in December and was titled “Thought Police.”

Similar feelings are shared a little closer to home. So too are supporters of language guidelines. But proponents are more willing to talk in public than opponents because they’re afraid of political back-lashes and career-bashing.

One professor referred to the analogy of 1930 Italy.

As with most languages, when speaking Italian the speaker can address a person in two ways; one for the intimate relation and one for public relation. In Italian, lei is the formal address and tu is the intimate address. This form of address has been a pattern of modern Italian for 200 years.

The pattern meant nothing to most. But Mussolini saw the use of lei as feminine and, consequently, a degenerate way of speaking Italian. The purpose of the fascist revolution, Mussolini insisted, was to restore Roman virility.

The good fascist did not use lei; they used voi. Anyone who used lei was guilty of a crime against the state.

“Language is not something that is fixed. To believe that is historically ignorant,” Lois Self, director of Women’s Studies, said. “Language is constantly evolving. As sex roles change, language changes inevitably. ‘He’ was not a generic term until the 18th Century,” she said.

Self said she would support an “inclusive language” policy that would help students speak to their audience.

“Sometimes it is the most patriotic who are least concerned to keep other people’s cultural rights protected,” Self said. “We have to be careful not to stifle debate or argument, but it must be pointed out to students that their audience is broad.

“We all fall back on stereotypes,” Self said. “Treating people like individuals is difficult.”

Lois and husband Robert, director of freshman English, feel inclusive language is not part of the politically correct agenda. However, opponents feel stipulations on freedom of speech is “just a foot in the door,” as one opponent said.

“The inclusive language policy is just the opposite of political correctness,” Robert Self said. “There is a generality to talk in general. The policy tends to be exclusive.”