http://finance.yahoo.com/news/yale-students-title-certain-professors-204700754.html
Although master is a very widely used word, from master degrees, to chess master, to master of ceremonies.
This title was not racist in origin, to the best of my knowledge. I think that Yale was following the practice of the older British Universities. “Master” is a common term for the head of a college within Oxford or Cambridge University, although some colleges have a “President,” or use another designation for the head of the college. “Master” most likely comes from the Latin “Magister.”
However, I think that it is time to drop it now, at Yale. The movement of the title across the Atlantic led to new connotations of the term, which are very unwelcome.
They can use “house parents” instead. B-)
A student at a Canadian university demanded that her degree read “Mistress of Arts” instead of Master of Arts. Took the university to court. She lost.
Surprised this did not happen before at Yale. It will most likely be changed. I consider myself a moderate on the scale, But seriously, Master and Mistress in this day?
The folks need to watch Downton Abbey to see how things change. Haha
OMG, what doesn’t micro-aggress these millenials???
What next? A complaint that a “Batchelors” degree is sexist???
I was at Yale 40 years ago and thought the “Master” title was pretentious even then. On the rare occasions when I spoke to Hans Frei, the master at my residential college, I carefully avoided using his title.
Could they use “Head of House” instead? Or is that too hierarchical? How about “Adult Companion”? Is that dismissive of the adulthood of the students? How about “That Guy/Gal that they assigned to us”? Is that too binary gender normative?
“Master” seems pretty tame to me. If female, the term “Madam” could be used; that way you avoid the oft-pejorative “Mistress.”
Or, as @Consolation suggested: “Head of House.”
Oye, granola head stupidity rears its ugly head, where everything is based around a certain meaning of a word that somehow offends someone. While Master to me sounds pretentious, all full of what I like to call the British pompous fat-head school of things, racist it isn’t. I heard the same thing in technical discussions, where some twit objected to the term master/slave processes, master/slave is used in technology and engineering, on cars there are master and slave cylinders, and so forth. Likewise, I heard some other idiot object to someone using the term “black ice” as being racist, since it implied black was negative (the black refers to the fact you can’t see the ice, because of the color of the pavement, which happens to be black).
This is one of the reason that serious incidents of bullying and vile language can get dismissed in some quarters as being ‘pc’ or being ‘too sensitive’, there has been enough of this frippery that it provides an excuse to overlook truly bad use of language.
Real instances of racism, sexism, oppression get ignored because of nonsense like this.
I’m beginning to think this PC activist thing is a hobby for some people.
Then they should get rid of “masters” degrees because the title refers to a level of expertise.
The more interesting debate is the name of Calhoun College. It’s named for John C. Calhoun, the SC senator who defended slavery as being “good”. Oddly, he also argued - being a white southerner of the era - that a minority should have the right to veto certain laws hostile to its interest. That has been cited in this era by African-Americans. The debate is real because Calhoun also served the nation in many capacities: he was Vice-President and Secretary of War, etc. And he died over a decade before the Civil War so we can’t actually hang that on him. People I know who were in Calhoun are split over this.
In general, I find this idea offensive that anyone who hears a word a certain way can determine the meaning. Remember the “water buffalo” incident at Penn? Guy is disturbed by some girls making noise and he tells them to stop it, that they’re acting like water buffalos, which in his culture means loud and unruly because water buffalos can’t be tamed. The women heard it as a slur on their color and it became a huge investigation: because what matters is not what you meant but how someone else hears it.
I’ve imagined scenarios where I define some word as offensive and insist on an apology … but the word has to be innocuous because that would be the joke. People want to define reality from their viewpoint. And the word “master” is an example: you may hear it and think “slave” but that’s your reality. An example on this forum recently was a question about whether a bakery was being insensitive with a sign that one person though could be taken as bringing up a past incident of abduction. That’s subjective reality again. Objective reality uses words and meanings that are defined in broad context.
How about male/ female connectors? That’s sexist too. Lol
Or tran-sister (groans at self)
Sex education through electronic components?
@prezbucky one could argue that “madam” has had it’s own identification troubles.
haha yep. Running an escort service, right?
What if we removed the “d” to make it the more rustic version?:
Ma’am
Harvard uses “Master” also, although to the best of my knowledge no one is complaining about it. It’s a recent complaint if they are. In fact is says “House Master” right on the a Harvard bachelor’s diploma, since the Master is one of the four officials who sign it.
Harvard has a lot of old or unique terminology. For example RAs in the freshman dorms are called “Proctors,” and the RAs in the upperclass Houses are called Senior Tutors, although I heard rumors they were changing that to Resident Tutors or some such thing.
The term “Residence Adviser” may trigger students who come from homeless shelters.
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