YES, THIS IS EMBARRASSING NATIONAL PUBLICITY: University of Tennessee tells staff and students to stop using ‘he’ and ‘she’ – and switch to ‘xe’, ‘zir’ and ‘xyr’ instead No, I won’t be using these terms in my classes, though this is just some stuff on a website, not a directive sent to the faculty or anything as some seem to think. And yes, the University of Tennessee seems to have imbibed a huge dose of PC Kool-Aid all of a sudden. Faculty speculation is that it has something to do with pressure from the Obama DOJ, but I don’t really know. One suspects, however, that this will produce budgetary skepticism from the state legislature, which will probably wonder if we don’t have more administrators than we have useful work for them to do.

UPDATE: It’s already being mocked by an influential State Senator.

Repeatedly.

Plus: “State Rep. Bill Dunn, R-Knoxville, said he thought the suggestion was a joke. ‘And then I found out it was true, at which point I thought, “Are we really paying somebody to come up with this stuff?”‘ he said.”

Plus:

State Sen. Paul Bailey, R-Sparta, wrote on Facebook: “First it was eliminating the Lady Vols. Now this? I doubt if parents spending over $15,000 a year expect this kind of nonsense education from the University of Tennessee. My advice would be find something better and more productive to do.”

Yeah, I think there will be questions asked about budgets and priorities.