From National Review's Jim Geraghty:
Apparently, the leadership of the University of Southern California’s Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work decided to “remove the term ‘field’ from our curriculum and practice and replace it with ‘practicum,’” declaring, “this change supports anti-racist social work practice by replacing language that would be considered anti-Black or anti-immigrant in favor of inclusive language.”
....Talk about a policy that is out in left fie-, er, I mean, out in left practicum....But maybe decisions like this are necessary so that all students have a level playing fie-, er, practicum.
Yeah yeah. But I can hardly blame Geraghty for his little joke. He couldn't have written it if we weren't doing stupid stuff like deciding that "phrases such as going into the field or field work may have connotations for descendants of slavery and immigrant workers that are not benign."
If field has painful "connotations" for descendants of slavery and immigrant workers, then so do:
- cotton
pick- spade
- passage
- hoe
- black
- lash
- plantation
- crop
- exploit
- traffic
- etc. etc. etc.
This list could go on forever. But guess what? We're not the only ones who do this. Rep. Virginia Foxx, Republican of North Carolina, has renamed the Committee on Education and Labor to the Committee on Education and the Workforce:
Why does that matter?
“Labor” is an antiquated term that excludes individuals who contribute to the American workforce but aren’t classified as conventional employees. “Labor” also carries a negative connotation that ignores the dignity of work; the term is something out of a Marxist textbook that fails to capture the accomplishments of the full spectrum of the American workforce.
....Language matters. Using outdated terms like “labor” creates an overt bias towards union bosses while widening fissures created by Big Labor between workers and employers.
There are those connotations again! Foxx must have lab-, er, thought hard to come up with this. But I don't have time to belab-, er, make a big thing of it right now. A friend just called and needs a ride to the hospital. She was watching Love's Lab-, er, Efforts Lost when she suddenly started lab-, er, having contractions.
I wish we could knock this off. There are a small number of words that really ought to be either avoided or banned altogether in polite society. But it's hard to make the case when we've already made laughingstocks of ourselves by pretending that words like field and labor are insults to various categories of people. Can we please get hold of ourselves?
Work doesn't give you dignity, bargaining power gives you dignity. There's no dignity in a crummy low-wage job and everyone knows it. But of course, Republicans want to pretend that employers won't blatantly take advantage of non-unionized labor by paying them as little as possible so the CEO can be lavishly rich.
Maybe USC should focus on that instead of being self-parodically woke. Picking stupid fights about language is a great way to pretend you're doing something about social justice so no one starts asking questions about how much the college president makes.
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"Labor" -> "Workforce" makes a lot more sense than "Field" -> "Practicum". After all, putting a field hand on the same level as a software engineer is harmlessly egalitarian. But "practicum" sounds elitist and about as far from egalitarianism as possible.
The point is not whether the synonyms are good fits. The point is that some crazies out there feel compelled to use a synomym and force others to do the same.
There are no people in history who workforce harder to widen the fissure between workforcers and management than conservatives.
Management who truly admire the dignity of workforces and how they can be workforced to toil the day away for ever greater dignity and noble selflessness.
Don't be one of those idiots who mindlessly use nouns as verbs.
Apparently, the weirdnoise was, "Whoooooosh."
I think you mean 'who mindlessly verb nouns'.
Another thing that would be right in their practicum might be to ban all books written before, I'd guess, about a year ago, because those people were all obviously terrible, and their pages wreaking floods of (paper! they're made of paper!) of poison, doctrine and bad intentions, traps for the innocent.
And here I was under the impression that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis was considered bullshit. Who knew I could be programmed to be a communist simply by seeing the word "labor?"
BTW, Karl Marx did not invent the word labor. The Romans did, though it may have an even earlier provenance in Indo-European since there is a possible Sanskrit cognate (source: Eric Partridge, A Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English).
And here I was laboring under the impression that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis was considered bullshit. Who knew I could be programmed to be a communist simply by seeing the word "labor?"
BTW, Karl Marx did not invent the word labor. The Romans did, though it may have an even earlier provenance in Indo-European since there is a possible Sanskrit cognate (source: Eric Partridge, A Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English).
but have you tied an onion on your belt, as was the fashion?
jfc. language changes. and nothing says “old man shouts at cloud” more than complaining about language changing.
Get off my dam practicing!
I meant get off my dam practicum!
How can USC adopt a word that spell check autocrorrect doesn't even recognise?
Whoops! Damn WordPress!
I usually agree with you on most things. Here, however, I think you're wrong. "Field" is typically used in ethnographic research. Doctors don't go out to a "field" to help their patients. Field reinforces the perception that there is a real separation between provider and client.
In reality, a social work degree involves a part-time internship ("fieldwork") and then a course where that work is discussed in a group with a professor who can offer mentorship. It is precisely a practicum.
This is a total non-issue and is indeed how many schools already talk about it.
The change (from "fieldwork" to "practicum") is sensible. It is the letter that tthey sent about that is imbecilic (and gives the impression that they want to get rid of the word "field" completely).
I will say that it's rather distasteful to see the romanticization of the "plantation-style house" as viable design language of modern homes, detached from its historical context.
Me too. The whole fascination with Southern plantations is troubling.
That said, Obama would often vacation in Hawaii at a place called Plantation Estate. That wasn't long ago but it might draw a few comments if it happened today.
Obama was also against gay marriage at the time.
Hawaiian plantation homes are different, in that they refer not to plantation owner homes, but to plantation worker homes. And those plantation workers were contract workers.
But it still holds a negative connotation, in my mind, on account that these plantation worker homes were starkly bare, though not as bare as slave housing in the South.
Julian Sanchez:
A prediction: At some point in the near future, fundamentalist groups like Answers in Genesis will realize they can reframe their demands to control school curricula in social justice jargon about feeling “excluded” by exposure to ideas that conflict with their dogma, and a depressing number of skittish progressive administrators will absolutely fall for it.
Yep!
Work on the Newspeak Dictionary plays no favorites.
But even Orwell didn't anticipate this. In "1984" the sentence 'This field is free from weeds" is given as acceptable Newspeak.
Orwell wasn't an American.
I don’t know. “ Lilies Of The Practicum” has a certain biblical ring to it.
😂
Between this and the Hamline firing, this has been an embarrassing week to be a liberal.
Still better than being conservative, which is embarrassing every week.
This stuff is silly and ridiculous, and I'd like to think smart people should no better. A good rule of thumb: don't make yourself easy to mock.
I don't feel embarrassed about things other people do, but I think it's unfortunate because it gives the other side, and media in general, an easy target to the point out the excesses of things considered woke / liberal. Meanwhile, GOP governors like DeSantis are doing things for more dangerous and harmful. The excesses of USC and Hamline make it easier for the GOP to get away with its abuses.
At Hamline, at least, a number of groups, inc. Muslims, are asking for the school to reinstate the adjunct professor it had let go.
"FAR more dangerous..."
I don't read National Review, but I wonder how much coverage it gives to what Republicans are doing.
Don't play down the Hamline thing. They essentially gave the most orthodox version of one religion veto power over their curriculum and HR.
Maybe they should find the people who tell Jews that all of the hatred focused on Israel totally isn't antisemitism that showing a painting made by muslims according to their school of fiqh isn't islamophobic.
I'm hardly defending "the Hamline thing." I said it was "silly and ridiculous." I think the decision was wrong.
But the injustice of a small private college failing to renew the contract of one adjunct professor is a relative molehill compared to the mountain of injustice that a guy like DeSantis is doing to education in Florida. There is no equivalence, though that tends to be (at best) how nonpartisan media reports it.
Muslims themselves are supporting the teacher. That's noteworthy.
The stupid reaches all the way across the ideological spectrum. It's more concentrated on the right, but by no means confined to the right.
I’m still wondering how we managed to offend all those monkeys by calling a disease monkeypox.
Somehow I can’t see Roger Daltrey and Pete Townsend writing “Out here in the practicum”. Btw spellcheck doesn’t acknowledge Practicum as a real word.
There's something seriously wrong with the inability of (some of) us Lefties to use language in a way that actually communicates. Every new slogan, every neologism (Latin Ex, anyone?) does little more than open the liberal/progressive side to justified ridicule, and negates the purpose of the "new" wording.
Pardon me while I go out to pre-weed the back "practicum".
As a die-hard Red Sox fan I wish I could be in Fenway on Opening Day when the teams take the practicum
This strikes me as representing bureaucratic tendencies, not "wokeness," liberalism, or, really, even academia. Bureaucrats, no matter where they reside, come up with changes to make themselves feel more than a cog in the wheel. I doubt anyone outside the USC school of social complained about their terminology to which they were responding. It's a make-work invention, not a political act.
This list could go on forever. But guess what? We're not the only ones who do this. Rep. Virginia Foxx, Republican of North Carolina, has renamed the Committee on Education and Labor to the Committee on Education and the Workforce:
In other words, there's no difference at all at those who wish to see certain words banned because they offend the particular listener. It doesn't matter what "side" of the spectrum they are on. They're just simply illiberal. All of them.
Let me start off by saying that I don't have any big issue with the use of "field" or "fieldwork" either.
But let's riff on your headline and ask what do you, Jim Geraghty and I have in common? We are all older white males.
So maybe what we think about this is not that important. The important actors here are the School in question and the black Americans it serves or hopes to serve or attract to it as students or faculty. What do they think?
Has anybody quoted a black person on this, one way or another? Not that it would be definitive, because, news flash, black people have different opinions.
But this is exactly the sort of thing that I, an older white guy prefer to let pass. It doesn't concern me. It has no effect on me. Why should I even care? Let the people who are involved figure out how to address racial history. I will do that in my own back yard.
Don't think less of yourself on account of being an older white man. It doesn't devalue your opinion.
A lot of so-called "inclusive" language is based on nothing more than one random anonymous complaint coming from someone claiming to be a member of a marginalized group, saying they're offended by a piece of normal language because of something that would never occur to most people, and then it gets picked up and treated as gospel by people looking for a new way to virtue-signal. The process is not inclusive in the least, and not representative of anyone except a small number of extremely online leftists... and it never seems to occur to them that the complainer might actually be a troll.
Use your own sense and do your own critical thinking. No matter who you are.
Best of luck to all the pregnant persons as they go into workforce...
fwiw I generally agree with this kind of thing, but it has been taken a bit too far.
However, workforce, to me, smacks of the same neoliberal sentiment that led to calling people resources or even capital. It dehumanizes them, making it easier to dismiss them. Also, it breaks the tie to the labor movement, whether in the 1930s or earlier; you can be sure that's part of the goal. Republicans want everyone to think big academia is a hotbed of lefty wokeness--and there are certainly places that might (but so what)--but big research institutions are often way more neoliberal than progressive. Mirowski has a lot to say about that.
I agree with this. But in the case of "field" I think it was always a stupid word. "Practicum" is non-Anglosaxon (widely used in German speaking places) but otherwise accurate. The people who labor in the fields are agricultural workers, not social workers. No?
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