The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a nonprofit devoted to campus free speech, is really pissed at Yale University. Apparently Yale requested that the Freshman Class Council halt production of a T-shirt that quoted a character in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise saying “I think of all Harvard men as sissies.”
According to an article about the matter in Inside Higher Ed:
Concern that forms of “sissy” are insulting to gay people and others led the [Yale] student group to change plans, although FIRE maintains that university officials strongly encouraged the move, in ways that may have squelched free speech. FIRE maintains that the term “sissy” long ago stopped being strictly an anti-gay slur, and now is just another way to say “wimp.” Yale has yet to respond to the letter.
Apparently calling someone a wimp is totally okay.
