Cheers! The University of North Carolina (UNC) has finally decided Christmas vacations and staff golf outings are no longer “microaggressions.”
After Campus Reform broke the news that the university had labeled the act of scheduling vacations around religious holidays as “potentially offensive behavior” in a list of “understanding microaggression” guidelines, the story gained national media attention. First, UNC responded by making the list of guidelines password-protected.
But now, the web page that initially featured the list of guidelines “does not exist,” displaying an “error” message.
“Last Thursday, the UNC-Chapel Hill Employee Forum posted an opinion blog on its website on the topic of microaggressions,” UNC Communications and Public Affairs Vice Chancellor Joel Curran wrote in a statement. “Those opinions were wrongly reported as University policy and/or guidelines; they are not.”
Curran said the “blog” did not represent UNC policy and was not intended as an official or “unofficial” guidebook. He added, “UNC-Chapel Hill has no policy, formal or informal, about microaggressions. The Employee Forum has since decided to remove the post because it was misconstrued as University policy.”
Curran said the webpage was intended to provide a “general overview about microaggressions—not to fully examine the topic, which is nuanced and complex.”
Currently, Christmas and other national holiday vacations are paid under university employee policy regarding religious observance. It seems as if the university won’t be taking that away from faculty members just yet.
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