Amherst College’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion last week issued a 40-page glossary of terms officials said they had created to spell out a common agreement on how to define words and phrases often used at the small liberal arts campus.
The “Common Language Guide,” emailed to the roughly 1,900 undergrads at the private college, broke down pages of terms under categories such as “isms,” “race and ethnicity, “gender identity,” “class,” “politics and policy,” “global power and inequality” and “disability.”
“This project emerged out of a need to come to a common and shared understanding of language in order to foster opportunities for community building and effective communication within and across difference,” the guide states.