As Texas A&M University continues to come under scrutiny over leftist hires, a former student revealed a reading assignment for a required course that teaches engineering students to use non-gendered language.
Engineering students are required to take a technical writing course. In one of the course’s readings, “Howdy or Hello? Technical and Professional Communication,” a chapter teaches students how to use pronouns in business emails.
“If you do not know the recipient personally, never use titles such as Mrs., Ms., or Mr. as you cannot assume gender, marital status, or profession,” reads the chapter. “If the gender of a person and/or their personal pronoun use are not known, use their entire name like this: “Dear Sam Jones.”
The chapter also teaches students to use “gender identifying pronouns” when closing their emails.
“Depending on your audience, consider including your gender identifying pronouns (particularly if you are cisgender) to normalize gender inclusivity in technical and professional communication and to help ensure you are addressed properly. However, if you are transgender or nonbinary, you are not obligated to do so if you find this transparency uncomfortable or risky.”
Teaching “gender inclusivity” isn’t the only issue the university is being criticized over.
Texas Scorecard has also reported on TAMU’s dedication to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion principles. In June, TAMU attempted to hire DEI-promoting professor Kathleen McElroy as the head of the journalism program. After the university’s president resigned from her position over the McElroy scandal, the board of regents then appointed Mark Welsh as the president. Welsh is known to support DEI principles, believes in white privilege, and previously served as an Obama appointee to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
TAMU also came under fire for planning to restrict the school’s responsiveness to public records requests after they received an open records request from The American Accountability Foundation. The request was regarding the TAMU nursing school’s support for DEI. TAMU claimed the requests were “threatening and amount to harassment.”
Senior Director of State Coalitions at the Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life, Scott Yenor, told Texas Scorecard that a good first step in reversing the “ideological madness” taking place in the university is to discipline faculty.
“Some problems in academia come from the top-down, like racial preferences in admissions, mandatory training in implicit bias, or metrics for hiring minorities. Others come from the bottom up, as individual faculty act on their own ideological inclinations to require students to use fake pronouns,” said Yenor. “Generally, the A&M administration has created an environment to encourage its faculty to mandate leftist ideological inclinations.”
Texas Scorecard reached out to TAMU but did not receive a response by publication.
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