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Comment by ajvs | Hacker News Reader

> if Standford didn't have the equivalent of this

A few days ago Stanford published some guide on words you can't say like "American" and "grandfather", so it seems the universities are total opposites in their stances now.

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The guide was a proposal of how materials put out by a single department's website at Standford should be structured.

https://itcommunity.stanford.edu/news/update-elimination-har...

It took only a couple of minutes to find this out.

Given it was still published by the Stanford (not "Standford") admin and the link you posted doesn't do much to disavow its contents, I'd say it's pretty clear that the spirit of the guide is still very aligned with the political spirit of the university.

If Stanford wanted to do the right thing, they could very easily distance themselves and say that this kind of language policing isn't something they support. Instead, they double down.

"Its aspiration, and the reason for its development, is to support an inclusive community"

It took only a couple minutes to find this out :)

The document says it’s about education, not policing. Insofar you can consider it to police anything, it would apply to the Stanford IT department, not Stanford students or faculty. All departments that communicate with the outside world police their language, whether explicitly or implicitly. That a department has a list of words they don’t want to use in their communications is not surprising or interesting.

It seems like you're explaining something everyone's already very aware of. Nobody's under the impression these policies were made for Stanford students to abide by. That said, it's perfectly reasonable to cast judgement on an institution for the actions of one department, it'd be strange for one to suggest the two be conceptually separated. If Stanford is happy to employ language-policing for its IT department, it's not hard imagine similar policies creeping into place elsewhere in the institution. Decisions like this don't happen in a vacuum.

> Nobody's under the impression these policies were made for Stanford students to abide by.

This is not the impression I’ve gotten in the discussions I’ve had regarding the document.

> If Stanford is happy to employ language-policing for its IT department, it's not hard imagine similar policies creeping into place elsewhere in the institution.

To be clear, Stanford has always policed the language on its websites. Like I said, any department (in any org) that communicates with the public will police its language. The only thing notable here is that some people disagreed with the particular list of words when it was made public.

They don't need to distance from anything, as noted, it was never part of any policy, it was a discussion-piece / list of suggestions within a single department

To disavow such discussions would be to disavow free speech and expression.

And even if it was a suggested form of "policing", Free speech does not become stronger by obsessing about shaming and ostracizing those who disagree with its concepts.

It's a strange premise that a department should operate in complete autonomy from its parent institution. Is that your mental model of all departments at Stanford? That they can do, say, and publish arbitrarily, and any action on the institution side is a disavowment of free speech?

That's a take on academia I'm unfamiliar with.

the premise is that a couple of people (more accurately, the CIO council) in the IT department said "I think future changes to the site should consider these points". And academia generally does have websites per department.

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Realistically, almost anyone at any university can put content onto university websites / servers. This isn't some crazy notion of website usage: the same applies to this very site too.

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