Standard American English does not exist, says Metropolitan State University’s writing center, but also it “is a social construct that privileges white communities and maintains social and racial hierarchies.” Yet the very MSU document damning standard English and calling for its rejection is written in—you guessed it—standard English. (MSU’s ‘linguistic white supremacy’ webpage has been taken down, but here are screenshots from the document).

You might think that a writing center’s goal should be to help students write clearly and intelligibly. No, no, no. Obviously you’re a racist if you think that. The goal of MSU’s writing center is to “be actively anti-racist,” to fight white supremacy, to challenge inequalities, and to “work to dismantle” oppressive systems.

Now, you might think that the best way to fight actual racism would be to train students to write eloquently against it. Again, you would be totally wrong. The way to fight racism, according to MSU, is to obliterate standards in writing and to refuse to teach students, and especially black and Hispanic students, how to write.

Maybe you think I’m being overly harsh here. That can’t really be MSU’s message, can it? MSU explicitly rejects the view that there can be “a ‘correct’ and ‘standard’ way to write and speak in American English.” MSU writes, “We fully support students in using their English (whatever that may be) in communicating their thoughts and ideas.”

MSU insists that instructors “keep grammar and mechanics to less than 10% of the overall grade.” After all, perhaps a student is just “making a choice” to write unintelligibly. Instructors should allow students to use “alternative types of ‘writing'” such as videos or podcasts, which might involve no writing whatsoever. Instructors should take it easy on plagiarism because a student might feel “overwhelmed” or might “lack the confidence to care about their work.”

Let me propose an alternate view: It is not racist to ask students to write clearly and intelligibly, and to follow basic ethical guidelines in their writing; it is racist to fail to ask all students to do those things. MSU’s writing center is so obsessed with seeing racism everywhere and with being “anti-racist” that it has embraced racist educational double-standards.

MSU’s recommendations create the presumption that, anytime a “white” (or “colonized” minority) instructor challenges anything written by a student who is black, Hispanic, or in some other minority group, the instructor is being racist. This promotes practices that hold white students to high standards and other students to lower standards or to no standards at all.

Grains of truth

No one is surprised that “You Aren’t Anything but a Hound Dog” never has been recorded. The Elvis Presley song, adapted from the song Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller wrote for Big Mama Thornton (based partly on older source material), makes three “mistakes” just in the title: It uses the non-standard word “ain’t,” uses a double-negative, and snips “nothing” to “nothin.'”

Sometimes, there ain’t nothin’ better than a well-placed “ain’t” in an essay.

My grandmother pronounced “wash” as “warsh,” as in, “Go warsh your hands for supper.” That comes from regional dialect. My mom picked up the same habit. I’m more used to hearing “wash,” as matches the spelling. But there was nothing wrong with my grandmother’s pronunciation.

I first learned of the MSU document from Brendan McDonald, who wrote a column for the conservative Campus Reform. Then Savana Kascak picked up the story for Complete Colorado. Their aim is to make the authors of the MSU document look like idiots, which, granted, ain’t that hard to do. But here I want to focus on what MSU gets right. (Fyi, source code suggests the now deleted document in question first was published in 2022 and revised in early 2025. I don’t know how the matter came to McDonald’s attention.)

MSU is right that “Standard American English” (SAE) is neither static nor governed by a central body. On the matter of dynamism, MSU points out that the term “ghost” recently has become a verb as well as a noun, meaning something like “to stop corresponding with someone for no apparent reason.” But no one ever has doubted that the English language evolves! That’s just a straw-man.

That no central authority dictates the contours of SAE hardly means that it does not exist. Compare: No central body lays out what is the scientific method, but obviously there is such a thing as a the scientific method that scientists should follow. One could rewrite the MSU document such that, using pretty much the same claims and bad arguments, it attacked the scientific method rather than SAE.

MSU is right that a biased instructor might treat a minority student unfairly for using a particular dialect in a way that is clear and contextually appropriate. MSU does at least mention “understanding” as a worthy goal. At the same time, a competent instructor will help students understand the difference between seldom-used and subculturally particular language and commonly used and broadly understood language. “Ain’t nothin'” is great for a rock song but bad for a scientific paper.

Unlike the era of, say, the U.S. Founding, today we regard certain spellings of words as correct. George Washington was a notoriously non-standard speller, making up such spellings as “necessaties” and “harvist.” MSU implies that we shouldn’t care how people spell words; I counter that standardized spelling helps us communicate clearly and efficiently, which is after all the point.

English, a Germanic language with deep Latin influence, is ridiculously non-phonetic in its spellings, which is one reason why many children have trouble learning it. By contrast, Spanish and Finnish (as examples) are much more phonetic.

Phonetic instruction is essential to learning to read English, but at a certain point children need to make the jump from strict phonics to standard English, which of necessity involves a lot of memorization and learning of rules-of-thumb. (Online dictionaries and modern spell-checkers help a lot.)

I’ve seen this in my ten-year-old. Once he got the idea of phonetic spellings, he ran with that, as is age-appropriate. Now my wife and I are having him go through the Spectrum spelling materials, and he’s progressing quickly with his standard spellings. If I took MSU’s advice, I’d insist that he be an “anti-racist” by spelling everything his own way. Of course, no one else would be able to easily read anything he wrote.

MSU is right that people who grow up speaking unusual forms of English typically learn how to “code-mesh” and “code-switch.” This is pretty common; for example, some Southerners drop their drawl and their “ain’ts” and their “all y’alls” when they move north.

But MSU overplays its hand here. It offers as an example of “code-meshing” Barack Obama talking about poverty. I challenge anyone to watch that clip and point out anything that reasonably could be described as anything other than Standard American English. If Obama had not been a master of common English and of tailoring his message to specific crowds, he never would have been president of the United States.

MSU obviously is right that instructors should avoid assignments that connect only to one subculture, such as one specifically about Christmas.

MSU also is right that instructors should not obsess about minor points of grammar and spelling and ignore the substance of a student’s work. Pointing out that a sentence is unclear and easily misinterpreted is one thing; ignoring the meaning of the sentence because of a minor error is quite another.

Generally I agree that MSU is right to call for “a more equitable classroom,” so long as equity here means teaching all students how to write clearly and effectively and holding all students to the same high standards. MSU instead falls into the trap of the “soft bigotry of low expectations.” Let’s hope that MSU’s instructors reject that aspect of the writing center’s advice.

Ari Armstrong writes regularly for Complete Colorado and is the author of books about Ayn Rand, Harry Potter, and classical liberalism. He can be reached at ari at ariarmstrong dot com.