Public service announcement for new students and parents. Yale is moving away from using the term “freshman” in its official documents. Incoming students are called “first years”. May sound awkward to those of us from the older generation, but it rolls of my newly graduated senior’s tongue effortlessly.
https://yalecollege.yale.edu/deans-office/messages/first-year-upper-level-guide-yale-colleges-usage
http://catalog.yale.edu/first-year-student-handbook/
Just sharing.
Hogwarts much?
That has always been the idiosyncratic usage at the University of Chicago. It was one of many ways large and small that that institution signalled its divergence over more than a century from the American collegiate model. What is Yale’s motivation? Is it merely p.c. rectitude?
Gosh. My son, a white straight student who just graduated, had no idea how bad he had it. It’s a good thing he was oblivious :))
At my daughter’s graduation from Yale (2015) my son was (who just graduated from Swarthmore) was sitting on a chair minding his own business and a woman sat down next to him and expressed much the same thoughts as the post three above. My son (CIS while male) found the minimum to say to stop the conversation. Does that person even have a kid at Yale to base those opinions are or is this some sort of feverish imagination?
And what got that rant started was using the term “first years” instead of “freshmen”? Swat has being doing that for AGES. Makes sense IMHO.
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Obviously been gone for more than a minute getting my graduate settled in grad school in London. Sorry my statement of fact started such a firestorm. Thank you @skieurope for standing in the gap for me. I found a couple more to delete also. Carry on.
University of Virginia has always used the terms first-years, second-years, third-years, fourth-years. Is Yale just using first-years, but sticking with the sophomore, junior, senior designations?
Don’t even get me started on UVA’s use of “grounds” instead of “campus.”
Grounds is perfectly fine, and “college grounds” is actually a very old Scottish/English designation of a more unrbanesque or enclosed space. Before the word “campus” was created in Princeton to describe its very rural college grounds, Harvard used to call its own “yard”. Nowadays, Harvard’s yard only refer to older grounds of the campus. In time, everyone ended up using the word campus…
Its cool how Virginia uses the old words though. Very Victorian, like its buildings.
Stanford still lovingly calls its campus the “farm”, harkening to a time when, like Princeton, the college grounds “consisted of a perfectly flat field with no enclosures”, hence a campus.