Upperclassmen. It\u2019s a term people use on a regular basis to describe juniors, seniors, and sometimes sophomores. But have you ever thought that it might sound a little elitist? \u201cUpperclassmen\u201d is a term that suggests members of a higher class and those who identify as men. It\u2019s akin to using the term \u201cman\u201d to refer to all of humankind, such as \u201cwhen man first walked on the earth.\u201d<\/p>\n
Should we change this language? Or is it so ingrained in our culture that its elitist connotation has been lost, and students don\u2019t actively think about it when they use the term, so it’s not a problem? For a project at the Women\u2019s and Gender Resource Center<\/a>, I researched Dickinson\u2019s peer institutions to see if any of them had instituted class- and gender-neutral terms to use instead of \u201cupperclassmen.\u201d Yale University has changed their language in official documents and policies from \u201cfreshmen\u201d to \u201cfirst-year\u201d and \u201cupperclassmen\u201d to \u201cupper-level students.\u201d (Dickinson already uses first-year, rather than freshman.) I found it interesting that, besides \u201cupper-level students,\u201d I found no other alternative mentioned besides continuing to use \u201cjuniors\u201d and \u201cseniors.\u201d Yale, and other universities that followed suit, received some backlash from those who felt the college was trying to be the language police, but Yale clearly wrote in their statement<\/a> that they are not intending to police anybody\u2019s language; the switch in terms is meant for official university documents to make the atmosphere more inclusive for everyone.<\/p>\n What does it mean to switch to a gender- and class-neutral replacement for “upperclassmen”? It would mean erasing the elitist label and would create a more inclusive environment on our campus. But, is it necessary? Would it only be changed on official college documents? Perhaps it’s just a phrase everyone uses and they don’t mean for it to be exclusive; does that matter? Please take our survey<\/a> and share your thoughts.<\/p>\n Written by Angelica Mishra \u201919, WGRC student worker and Secretary of the Dickinson College AAUW chapter<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Upperclassmen. It\u2019s a term people use on a regular basis to describe juniors, seniors, and sometimes sophomores. But have you ever thought that it might sound a little elitist? \u201cUpperclassmen\u201d is a term that suggests members of a higher class and those who identify as men. It\u2019s akin to using the term \u201cman\u201d to refer…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2971,"featured_media":640,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-636","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","alt-left"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/officeofequityandinclusivity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/636","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/officeofequityandinclusivity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/officeofequityandinclusivity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/officeofequityandinclusivity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2971"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/officeofequityandinclusivity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=636"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/officeofequityandinclusivity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/636\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/officeofequityandinclusivity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/640"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/officeofequityandinclusivity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=636"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/officeofequityandinclusivity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=636"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/officeofequityandinclusivity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=636"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}