Newspeak for “Cancel.”

That’s what the University of Cincinnati has chosen to do to its now ex-instructor John Ucker in the school’s…reaction…to Ucker’s referring to our favorite virus as the “chinese virus.”

The school’s Dean of Engineering and Applied Science, John Weidner, said this about that:

These types of xenophobic comments and stigmatizations around location or ethnicity are more than troubling. We can better protect and care for all when we speak about COVID-19 with both accuracy and empathy, something we should all strive for.

Regarding that, I have a question for Weidner: what are his preferred pronouns for the Zika, Ebola, West Nile viruses? What self-identifications does he find acknowledge for the South Africa Variant, the UK Variant, the Brazil Variant of our favorite virus?

The school said last Friday that Ucker’s contract “would not renew”—that Ucker would be canceled—because he spoke with accuracy and without stigmatization or xenophobia and not from within the school’s Parameters of Preciousness.