In efforts to create a more gender-inclusive environment, the Graduate Center at the City University of New York will no longer use gendered salutations in official written correspondence with current and prospective students and third parties.

Syracuse University should follow the Graduate Center’s example in order to create a more respectful and inclusive environment for transgender students, as well as individuals who do not conform to the gender binary.

An internal memo from administrators to faculty and staff at the Graduate Center described the policy as a component of an “ongoing effort to ensure a respectful, welcoming and gender-inclusive environment,” according to the Wall Street Journal.

The Graduate Center’s Interim Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs Louise Lennihan wrote in the memo that the elimination of “gendered salutations” will better “accommodate properly the diverse population of current and prospective students” and encouraged faculty and staff to begin addressing students by first and last name only.

In banning its employees from using gender-specific salutations, such as “Mr., Mrs. and Ms.,” the Graduate Center is making a strong, progressive statement as a public institution that targets discrimination at a formal level of which university administration has control.

In choosing to identify students by the names they themselves have approved as appropriate, the university is placing the comfort and respect of the students above a socially-constructed, gendered formality.

The policy is an extension of the Graduate Center’s new preferred-name policy, which provides students with the opportunity to go by a moniker other than their legal name on university documents, including course rosters, student identification cards and student email addresses.

In the interests of gender inclusivity, SU administration should enact a policy banning gender-specific greetings and pronouns in official written university communication from administration to all audiences, from campus services to the campus community, and between faculty and students.

Current and prospective student should not be welcomed to a school by administrative informational materials that gender the student automatically, which, in doing so, has the potential to contribute to the erasure of that student’s identity.

However, the intent of such a policy should not begin and end at the administrative level, but should extend to syllabi and classroom materials distributed on campus between students and professors.

More so, the omission of gendered possessive pronouns, such as his and her, in university materials would also present the campus community and visitors with a more inclusive and welcoming academic and social climate.

Although the CUNY policy has faced criticism on the Internet, as comments trailing articles label the new practice as a ridiculous result of the courtesy of political correctness, the needs of marginalized students must come first. A lack of considerate and educated opinions should not obscure the fact that an individual’s own creation of identity is the sole aspect of our being we have control over.

However, in an environment as formal and educated as that of a university, students should not be greeted by a term that is placed upon them.

For Syracuse University to recognize that gender-specific greetings are an outdated and unnecessarily formality would set a national example for a more inclusive future at public and private institutions alike.

Alexa Diaz is a freshman magazine journalism major. Her column appears weekly. She can be reached at adiaz02@syr.edu and followed on Twitter @AlexaLucina.

Published on February 4, 2015 at 12:15 am