Campus Radicals Bully Library of Congress Into Making Subject Headings Less Useful but More Politically Correct

01 Apr, 2016 by Dave Blount

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As adolescent campus radicals have known for at least a generation now, push the authorities and they will move — so long as you push them to the left. This has been extended beyond the liberal educrats running higher education to the liberal bureaucrats running the federal government:

The Library of Congress is nixing the term “illegal alien” from its international subject headings in response to student activists at Dartmouth College who complained that the wording is dehumanizing.

An alliance of students at the Ivy League institution who advocate for immigration reform [a.k.a. amnesty] first sent a petition to the Library of Congress in 2014 urging staff to instead use the term “undocumented” to describe those in the United States illegally, The Dartmouth reported.

The Library of Congress has announced that it will use “unauthorized immigration” and “noncitizen” to replace “illegal aliens” in its bibliographical records. The Library of Congress Subject Headings is the most commonly used library indexing tool in the world.

The Dartmouth Coalition for Immigration Reform, Equality and DREAMers, or CoFIRED, worked with library associations across the U.S. to push for the changes. …

Officials at the Library of Congress in 2014 initially rejected CoFIRED’s petition advocating to replace “illegal alien” with “undocumented immigrant,” arguing then that the terms are not synonymous.

But it didn’t take them long to knuckle under anyway, sacrificing library science to political compliance.

In a sensible word, subject headings would be chosen on the basis of what best helps people find the information they need. In our world, they are chosen on the basis of political correctness.