U. of Illinois Plans an Online-Learning Venture

Actually hir is a gender neutral pronoun that has been developed to address an absence in the English language. It isn’t necessarily political in the way the other terms are.

As someone who filed a complaint about harassment based on race, national origin, sexual orientation, religion, and military status (it was a 100+ page complaint detailing a *lot* of stuff that happened over three years), I have a couple of things to remark about this.

You are right to advise people to avoid signing confidentiality agreements; that sounds a little sketchy. My institution never asked me to sign such a thing–is that common?

Since my case was clearly documented with photographs, emails, police reports, and very visible things, I felt it was a particularly egregious case. I honestly didn’t want to get anyone fired; I just wanted to be able to go to my job and be left alone. I don’t like the parts of your article above where you talk about getting people fired. 

We need less of people trying to get others fired. Really.

In serious cases of mine, where there was vandalism, a concerted effort to block contractual benefits/promotion, and sustained harassment for three years, the system often can’t deal effectively because there are so many minor cases being dealt with, involving one or two off-handed comments that had much smaller impacts.

Your suggestions above amount to collecting gossip and marshaling the equal opportunity office’s work hours to spend lots of time on he said-she said. It also seems to encourage things like people videorecording conversations with cell phones without people’s permission. 

If you spend a lot of time on gossip and minor complaints, then the bigger cases like mine often can’t be addressed.

Also, in my case, the “tenured faculty member trained in these matters” happens to be a leftist professor who protested against the conference I organized with a grant because she opposes the military and intelligence. She is also hostile to me because I am pro-life and, I suspect though cannot confirm, because I am queer but married to a woman. Often tenured faculty members are entangled way too much in the people they’ve worked with for thirty years to be objective or helpful.

All these cases should be referred to local Equal Opportunity offices run by the county, unions, or a student ombudsman with offices very far away from academic departments, staffed by people who have nothing to do with the faculty or student body. We need to keep university governance out of this business whenever possible.

Also, people need to lighten up. Getting offended by small comments just clogs up an overly clogged system.

I’m not sure we agree on many of these points, but I did not advocate unilaterally for faculty convicted of harassment to be fired:  what I said “Students, in particular, often assume that the faculty member in question will be acknowledged by the institution as a danger to all students and, as a consequence, fired.”  I then urge people filing a complaint to ask this question since it has been my experience that students assume that the faculty member *will* be fired (an expectation that does not jive with reality) without ever having asked the question.

Of course the corollary to your experience — “I just wanted to be able to go to my job and be left alone” — is that many people who are the object of discrimination and harassment are themselves fired (ie, do not get tenure) as a consequence of prejudice, or of complaining about it.  So that is worth taking into account, as is the possibility that a faculty member with tenure just might be arrogant/narcissistic/disturbed enough to keep doing the same thing over and over again.  And we can all name at least one person who would fit that description.  So what *would* you do about that person?

Final point:  confidentiality causes gossip and rumor, a forum where people’s reputations can be ruined without due process or without having the opportunity to apologize for behavior that might have been harmful. I don’t think there is anything in this post that advocates for increased surveillance — it is proper procedures that are at issue.

I find hir and ze to be grating, and much prefer the singular use of their and they.

Irritating addendum:

Presumably “hir” is prounced with a short “i,” and not hire. That means that orally, it’d be indistinguishable from “her.” On the other hand, an ostensibly genderless, singular possessive pronoun could be “hes,” pronounced hez. But orally, it would be practically indistinguishable from “his.”

So there isn’t any way to neologize (that’s a neologism!) a completely neutral singular possessive pronoun, i.e., one which could be thought to refer equally to either sex. (But that would still leave out out intersexed or polysexed people!) Since we’ve had centuries of the assumed masculine universal (“all mankind,” “when a poet read his works,” etc.), perhaps what Professor Potter and other fans of “hir” are after is a kind of linguistic reparations. All one has to do for that, however, is use “she” and “her” as the default pronouns until an historical balance in usage has been reached. Onward!

Apparently, in addition to moi, physioprof, Professor Potter (who bothered to defend, weakly, “hir”), and historiann, who asks me a direct, provocative question, bound to get a response, do.

“Threadjack” is better than “hir,” though, and the lesson to be learned is, I suppose, don’t come home a-drinkin’ with lovin’ on your mind. No, oops! sorry. That’s Loretta Lynn’s lesson. Mine is: Don’t crap up an otherwise nice post by inserting an awkard neologism, motivated by sexual politics.

Now we’re getting angry. “No–don’t answer” on a blog thread. My, my.

If an editor had circled “hir” in something I’d written, I’d either underline it with the comment, “Want to keep–rhetorical point,” or say, “Fixed–less disruptive with ‘his or her’.” Professor Potter could have done the equivalent earlier in the thread, at about the place where she invoked Fowler’s Modern English Usage to vague and faint effect.

Nice try: my alleged “intellectual politics” regarding “hir” putatively balancing Professor Potter’s “sexual politics” in regard to same.

Bottom line: I’ll bet we don’t see “hir” for “her” in future posts from Professor Potter. (If we do, it’ll have to replace “her” in every instance, or we’ll know that Professor Potter doesn’t really believe that “hir” is suitable for general use. And I don’t think she’d be quite that nose/face/spite about it.)

Against my better judgment, I would like to weigh in on “hir.” I’m all for neologisms, but hir just doesn’t work for me and I think for many people because the word intuitively looks masculine-oriented to English speakers and therefore has an opposite effect of its intent. English is such a Latin-rich language and in Latin, the “i” vowel denotes masculinity, vir (man, as in virality in English) or masculine gender and this is especuially true with pronouns like the demonstartive pronouns (hic/haec/hoc  for masculine/feminine/neuter). When I first saw “hir”, I immediately thought it was a word that I didn’t know but must have something to do to with masculine/masculine gender from Latin. English doesn’t use gender except for ships, but there is a great degree of the gender from the English language origins which have been imported into English.

I also immediately had an association with “hirsute” and not being a bear or a bear-trapper (or bear anything–I go to an entirely different week in P-Town), the association was somewhere between negative and neutral.

 ”an awkard neologism, motivated by sexual politics”

My understanding is that “hir” and “ze” are not motivated by “sexual politics”–whatever the fucke that even is–but rather by the absence of a gender neutral singular pronoun in English, so that you can refer to a single individual without specifying their gender. My objection to “hir” and “ze” is based on aesthetics and readability, not politics. I advocate the formal use of singular “their” and “they” for two reasons: (1) these words already exist, and so don’t jar the reader with “what the fucke is that word?” and (2) people already use them informally as singular.

I’m done with “hir,” and had returned to the main topic of Professor Potter’s OP some 37 minutes before histiorann came charging back to the neologism barricades. Ms. H either reads slowly, or doesn’t really care about what I say, which hurts my feelings. But there being three of us–physioprof, moi and now edwoof–offput by “hir” and willing to speak up about it constitutes a hint that the word isn’t going to catch on. (Remember “chairman” >> “chairperson” >> “chairperdaughter”?)

BTW, the “If [A] and [B] want to talk about [X] instead of [Y], they should start their own blog someplace else” defense is as old as Yoda, and not nearly as original.

If historiann hadn’t disturbed the embers of the “hir” kerfuffle, I wouldn’t have commented again on it. Before she weighed in again, I was happily re-reading Professor Potter’s “BDSM and Feminism” post and trying to find re-runs of Lingerie League Football on satellite.