Hexi Huang week 3 A03

This week's reading was primarily about the silencing of certain actions that are not in the interest of the academic institutions. It appears that Universities have a dark underbelly of policymaking that is not in the best interest of students but for maximizing profit for those in power. It is interesting to see this, especially because conventionally we see universities as a glowing standard for moral, ethics and the pursuit of truth and knowledge. Underneath this pristine image is the administrators in power trying to squeeze every drop of money out of students as possible. This effort is definitely understandable, aren't most, if not all of us here getting an education so we can earn more money in the future?

And then DeBoer started talking about the leftist movement of policing language which is a topic I think about a lot. I think there is merit in being sensitive to other people's situations, but the sterilization of language is not the way to accomplish it. Creating new words to replace another "offensive" word gets rid of certain visceral emotions we have associated with that word. I think the explanation to that some of these leftists are uncomfortable with these feelings and uncomfortable with being uncomfortable. In my opinion, the path to knowledge and anything, in particular, is laden with uncomfortable situations and the more we are able to be uncomfortable the more we are able to accomplish.

All of this week's reading reminds me of how we discussed in class that the concept of race was fabricated to keep people divided and concentrate power towards the top, and this makes me wonder, are there mechanisms similar to these at play in the world of academia? Could this movement to sanitize language also be dreamt up somewhere to control us?

10202221836024084. (2017, March 23). Why Political Correctness Bothers Me – Bullshit.IST. Retrieved from https://bullshit.ist/why-political-correctness-is-destroying-literally-everything-95b6c0152b4e

DeBOER, F. (n.d.). Why We Should Fear University, Inc. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/13/magazine/why-we-should-fear-university-inc.html?_r=0