Cardiff Metropolitan University (CMU) last week released a list of 34 ‘gendered’ terms which they request that staff stop using and replace with suggested alternatives. I’m all for gender equality and inclusion, and this should be a great idea. Except it’s not, for the said list smacks of censorship, and the list of substitutes is more problematic than Kellyanne Conway’s idea of a fact.

Every British citizen has the right to free speech within reason, and in their announcement, CMU stated that they are “committed unreservedly to the principle of academic freedom within the law”. So they should be.

Former Breitbart Editor Milo Yiannopoulos spawned another pearl of his own unique brand of wisdom last month when he decided to announce that: “you can get quite hung up on this child abuse thing.” The fervour which followed was deserved: defending paedophilia pushes the boundaries of free speech to breaking point.

“The English language is full of odd phrases that make no logical sense”

More generally, the NUS has a ‘No Platform’ policy which applies to organisations such as the British National Party and the Muslim Public Affairs Committee to try and ensure particularly abrasive groups lose the right to voice their views to large student audiences. Even this censorship is controversial for those who believe in absolute free speech, but that’s a topic for discussion elsewhere.

The immediate issue here is whether or not university students (who are, by the way, typically legal adults who can buy alcohol, get married, and stand for election in parliament) need to be told not to use the phrase ‘man power’ because it could be construed as gendered, and therefore offensive. Dr Joanna Williams, of the University of Kent, thinks such a decision is “insulting” and she is right.

The English language is full of odd phrases that make no logical sense: boxing rings are actually square, sweetbreads are neither sweet nor bread, and quicksand doesn’t always work quickly. So why ‘man hour’, ‘manmade’, and ‘man the desk’ should infer actions which are specifically male is baffling.

Such words, as Dr Williams continued, have existed for so long that any gendered connotations dissolved years ago. For a lot of the population, ‘police officer’ is already interchangeable with ‘police woman’ and ‘police man’, just as ‘tax man’ is used no differently to ‘tax inspector’. These are just phrases which have been carried through generations, and thus have stuck.

What is worse than critiquing historical phrases is some of the suggested alternatives. Substituting ‘working man’ with ‘tax payer’ presumes that everyone who works pays income tax, which is not true, and such a view is a noticeably elitist one. Neither is it appropriate to substitute ‘housewife’ for ‘shopper, consumer, homemaker’, because regardless of ‘context’, it is painfully presumptuous to think that all housewives do is spend their husband’s money and fluff pillows, rather than looking after young children and washing the clothes that their families need to wear on their backs.

“University of Birmingham and University of East Anglia have both banned sombreros to avoid the risk of cultural appropriation”

Exchanging ‘girls’ for ‘women’ falls flat on its face when aligned with the fact that the whole point of this initiative is inclusion; the latter is no less gendered than the former, and still fails to include anyone who could be agender or non-binary. CMU’s 2016-2020 strategic equality plan isn’t exactly a poster piece for equality though: the aim to reduce “identified gender pay gaps for work of equal value to below 5% by 2020” implies that as long as women receive salaries which are not outrageously less than their male colleagues, then that’s good enough. The final few thousand pounds of difference can just be forgotten.

Admittedly, Cardiff Metropolitan University isn’t the only institution of higher education which is guilty of mollycoddling their students. Birkbeck University has banned UKIP from their campus because of their “homophobia and islamophobia”. A wonderfully impassioned decision though this is, it does appear to forget the fact that students do read newspapers (in which UKIP are not infrequently featured) and do possess the autonomy to decide their political alignments for themselves, whether they come into contact with their chosen party on campus or not.

Can’t keep your hands to yourself?

The University of Birmingham and the University of East Anglia have both banned sombreros to avoid the risk of cultural appropriation, and students at Newcastle University are prohibited from dressing up as Caitlyn Jenner. I wonder what must have happened to incite this decision, but certainly not as much as I wonder why these institutions feel they can’t allow students to draw lines between appropriate and inappropriate for themselves, and then question why the media labels us ‘generation snowflake’. The mind boggles.

Students are at university because they want to learn, and this means they have the intellect to work out which words are appropriate, and which are not. I’m sure Cardiff Metropolitan have good intentions at the heart of these policies, for few topics are as important and topical as gender equality, but the equally crucial right to free speech becomes trapped when caged by excessively cautious censorship