Faculty Senate Votes to Approve the Campus-Wide Inclusive Language Initiative

The Faculty Senate in close partnership with the Office of Diversity and Community Engagement is happy to announce a significant step towards creating an academic environment where students, faculty, and staff feel supported and safe regardless of their abilities, age, economic class, ethnicity, gender, race, religion, sex, and sexual orientation.

As part of this University’s ongoing efforts to cultivate a welcoming campus climate, The Faculty Senate Diversity Committee introduced the Inclusive Language Initiative. The Faculty Senate voted to approve the committee’s recommendation that the University removes any non-inclusive, ableist, gendered, male-centric, sexist, and classist terms, and pronouns when referring to students, faculty, staff, and guests and replace them with inclusive terms and pronouns. These changes should apply to all University’s written materials, including recruiting materials, admissions materials, scholarship information, housing materials, other outward-facing documents, and websites, as well as internal documents such as course and degree program descriptions.

These proposed changes would result in revising statements such as “Once the student has been accepted to the University of Hartford, he/she should submit current documentation to the Director of Access-Ability Services” and replacing it with “Once the student has been accepted to the University of Hartford, they should submit current documentation to the Director of Access-Ability Services.” Along the same lines, academic grouping titles that stem from a primarily male-centric academic hierarchy such as freshman/sophomore/junior/senior should be replaced with first-year (1 -year), second-year (2 -year), third-year (3 -year), fourth-year (4 -year).

The Senate looks forward to working with all constituencies to implement this change over the coming year.