Oklahoma Christian University announced Friday that it will give a double dose of mobile technology to incoming students starting in May — an Apple laptop computer and an iPhone (or an iPod Touch, which is essentially an iPhone without the telephone function).
The move follows the announcement last month by Abilene Christian University that it would give iPhones to all incoming students starting in the fall. That university does not have a laptop program. In fact, a committee of faculty members and administrators had been looking into requiring laptop ownership, but decided on the iPhone project instead.
The move represents a major platform shift for Oklahoma Christian, which since 2001 has given students PC’s. To announce the switch, the university produced a YouTube video that parodies Apple’s television ads in which a character representing a PC spars with a character representing the Mac about which machine is better. Oklahoma Christian’s president, Mike E. O’Neal, appears in the video.
John Hermes, chief technology officer for Oklahoma Christian, said in an interview Tuesday that the university got Apple to throw in the iPhones and iPods for a small additional cost over that of the laptops. “They rolled it into a package deal, and it worked out to be less than what we were paying for our mobile technologies” from the university’s previous laptop provider, Dell, he said.
Mr. Hermes said the university did not consider giving out only iPhones instead of laptops, as Abilene Christian is. “There’s so much that you can’t do with an iPhone,” he said. “I still think that the laptop is so important.” —Jeffrey R. Young
20 Responses to Another University to Give Away iPhones or iPods
dank48 - May 16, 2012 at 9:41 am
If top-down language change worked, we’d all be speaking Esperanto.
It’s bracing to be reminded that English is not the only language with the gender burden. So many writers have complained–legitimately, of course–about the use of the masculine as a default, as if English were the only language on earth afflicted with this problem. Hardly.
What’s interesting is the things that slip through, both ways, because people no longer recognize them as gender-specific forms. Check out brewer/brewster, weaver/webster, etc.
I still don’t understand people’s objection to singular indefinite they, in use by many, perhaps even most English speakers for centuries. Even if the specious arguments against it were valid, which they aren’t except in the minds of the Mrs. Grundys, it’s far less jarring than s/he, not to mention hen.
jffoster - May 16, 2012 at 11:02 am
Maybe we could abandon English and adopt isiZulu. No masculine or feminine gender in that language. Of course it does have 12 to 14 other genders, but what the hell?
Nathaniel M. Campbell - May 16, 2012 at 1:02 pm
I’d just like to say that if any of my students handed in papers using made-up words such as “ze”, “hir”, “e”, “eir” (unless it’s a misspelling of the Gallic name for Ireland), etc., their sentences would be marked through with red ink. Before reading this column, I had never come across such substitutions; and if I had used such substitutions either in my academic papers or in reports when I worked in businesses outside academia, my advisors/editors/bosses wouldn’t have known what to do with them.
So I suppose it’s fine if you want to promote “Ze nursed hir baby” in your classroom, but the moment students try to get a job with sentences like that littering their cover letters, they will fall back to writing “She nursed her baby.”
James W. H. Howard - May 16, 2012 at 3:21 pm
I agree that the declamation of rules is too easy and unnecessarily restrictive.
As a writer and a teacher of writing, I’ve found it useful to take note of what pronouns we use in our writing. Some examples are obvious, like not using second person in writing.
Gender is also important, because our pronouns present particular assumptions about gender even when such assumptions are not appropriate to a context. The sentence “Ze nursed hir baby” is silly unless the person being discussed is biologically female but does not identify as a woman, or unless the author is clearly trying not to make any assumptions about gender assignation at all. Because gender identifications are an opt-out rather than opt-in system, most writers and readers would normalize the gender to “she” and “her” unless they were aware of objections.
So the use of gender pronouns, like many other usage choices, comes down to context, audience expectation, and authorial intention. Forcing the use of one kind of pronoun teaches nothing but obedience to a rule that, like all rules, isn’t always appropriate. If that means that students commit what seem to be unnecessary aberrations, I will point out the implications of their usage rather than painting it in red ink.
misanthropic789 - May 16, 2012 at 3:54 pm
Add me to the list of those who don’t get all the objections to ‘they’. If we are going to follow political correctness so far as to remove gender from language, then using a word with which we are already familiar seems preferable to making something up. I personally refuse the use things like ‘ze’ and ‘hir’ and will go out of my way to avoid them. Instead of saying “S/he was gardening” I will say “The resident was gardening”. However if I said “They were gardening”, everyone would know what I was talking about and the prose would be clearer. So here’s hoping that the same force that adds words to the language and new definitions as slang appears will see fit to add intuitive uses to words we already have.
magyar - May 16, 2012 at 4:20 pm
I haven’t come across these made-up pronouns either, but if there is an argument in favour of them it is demonstrated in your assumption in “she nursed her baby”.
(Incidentally, there are no gendered pronouns in Hungarian.)
jffoster - May 16, 2012 at 4:47 pm
Nor any other kind of gender in Hungarian. Nor in Japanese, nor in Turkish, . …..
dank48 - May 16, 2012 at 4:56 pm
Among the nice things about singular indefinite “they” is that it’s been in use for centuries; no need to coin new definitions or forms.
The belief that “they” has to be plural is right up there with the notion that it’s “wrong” to end a sentence with a preposition, to split an infinitive, to begin a sentence with a coordinating conjunction, or to disbelieve in the Easter Bunny, Santa Claus, and the Tooth Fairy.
magyar - May 17, 2012 at 4:21 am
We do have gender-specific words, though: (man, woman, boy, girl, aunt, uncle, and so on).
jffoster - May 17, 2012 at 8:27 am
Szervusz, Magyarúr!
And the honorific suffixes, {-úr} and {-né}, (equivalent of English ‘Mr.’ and ‘Mrs’. . However, these such words and suffixes are not gender. These are sex specific, that is, sex referential terms. The choice between a noun that refers to males and a noun that refers to females has no effect on the choice of, or grammatical alternations of , anything else in the sentence or neighboring sentences. I.e. there is no agreement triggered by the choice of sex specific referencial nouns and thus no gender. (Contrast with your demonstratives ez, az which do take agreement suffixes triggered by their head noun’s case and number, but not by their head noun’s anything else.
This constrasts with English third person singular personal pronouns he, she, it (and their oblique cases) because the choice of one of these is triggered by the gender of its antecedent noun. English noun gender is largely sex-reference determined.
BTW for other readers, the acute accent over those Hungarian suffixes above indicates a long vowel, not a stressed vowel. Hungarian words, as with most Fenno-Ugric languages, are with rare exceptions (usually borrowed) stressed on the first syllable.
billdaviswords - May 18, 2012 at 6:00 am
I think perhaps I should have complained while learning Spanish in high school where I was forced to refer to myself as una persona (“feminine”!) But seriously, Dank48′s comment about Esperanto is spot-on. Top-down change will never happen and shame on the professors who arrogantly try to force some odd bit of jabberwocky on their students. There already is a gender-neutral 3rd person singular form widely in use (and historically, as well), and that is “they” (and all it’s various cases). That takes care of all the problems except one: it removes gender specification (which is not really an issue, anyway); it gets rids of awkward forms such as “he/she/it” or “man or woman,” etc., where they at too wordy; and it avoids nonsensical forms like “hen” (cluck! buck! bu-uuuuck!). AND the form is already widely in use. The only remaining problem has to do with ill-informed grammar police who try to stop its use. And if any of them would prefer “hen” instead, well… I will stop here.
harleymc - May 19, 2012 at 2:38 am
Unless of course it was a man nursing his baby or the gender of the person nursing the baby was unknown.
Hilarious to see that in a discussion about gender neutrality in language the possibility that men rather than women might nurse totally escapes you.
harleymc - May 19, 2012 at 2:41 am
Apparently the act of nursing is gendered.
James W. H Howard wrote a response to a blog after she nursed her baby.
billdaviswords - May 19, 2012 at 4:57 am
A (biologically normal) man cannot nurse his baby. He can feed it. Nursing is gender-specific.
But the issue in this post is not about the various REASONS for gender neutral language, but how such language might be adopted. Top-down, legislated artificial forms will never catch on. A perfectly grammatical and historically accepted choice is already in use: “they”
jffoster - May 19, 2012 at 8:09 am
Nursing is sex specific.
Nathaniel M. Campbell - May 19, 2012 at 2:56 pm
I’m amused that you somehow assume from my comment that “the possibility that men rather than women might nurse totally escapes” me. It did not totally escape me, but neither is the first impression one would have in trying to parse the sentence, “Ze nursed hir baby” Indeed, Prof. Ferriss admits as much in telling us that her partner found the sentence “nonsensical” — or is Prof. Ferriss’ partner as unwittingly gender biased as I supposedly am?
But you’ve left the major question unanswered: do you know of anyone who would actually hire your students if their cover letters were littered with made up words like “ze” and “hir”? In my experience, hiring managers would assume that these were typos, indicating a lack of seriousness on the part of the applicant; and the application would be tossed in the waste bin.
harleymc - May 19, 2012 at 10:30 pm
I’ll put this down to a misunderstanding by me of American English.
I’m reading between the lines here but it appears from your response that american English gives ‘nursing’ an equivalency to the Australian English ‘breastfeeding’. While that usage of ‘nursing’ can have the same meaning in Australian English it is not often used as there are ambiguities with other meanings such as caring for (an ill person) or of simply holding and soothing a child.
Most Australian mums would be horrified if someone who offered to nurse an infant tried to breast feed them.
magyar - May 20, 2012 at 5:13 am
“A (biologically normal) man cannot nurse his baby. He can feed it. Nursing is gender-specific.” That just isn’t true, is it? Nursing a sick child, nursing a grievance, nursing my mother, and so on: the use of nurse to mean breastfeed is only one, narrow, meaning.
And, yes, I know that the point of the original article was about top-down imposed forms but it is disingenuous of anyone who says “most writers and readers would normalize the gender to “she” and “her” …” to later claim they considered the possibilty that a man can nurse.
lairdwilcox - May 22, 2012 at 2:49 am
Gender seems to have been with us for a long time, along with gender differences. We’ve developed something of a cult to either eradicate or deny those differences but it really isn’t going to do much good. The differences will remain, and they probably should. The torture that we put one another through in pretending that differences don’t exist, don’t matter or aren’t there for a good reason is the tragedy of it all.
Like nearly everything else, in gender what you see is what you get. What might be nice is if the fanatics and ideologues would go find a hobby or something else to occupy their time.
propergramma - May 23, 2012 at 7:21 am
The idea isn’t to deny the differences, pretend they don’t exist, etc. The point of gender-neutral pronouns is that we don’t have to remark on a person’s gender every time we refer to… him. We know that differences in race exist, but we do not have special pronouns that refer only to South Asians.
It’s remarkable how reliably readers can misunderstand this simple point.