Field work term removed due to potential offense.
I think the controversy over "wokeness" is overblown and some anti-woke types are awful in their own right. But this is an example of genuinely stupid wokeness. A few thoughts:
I'm am immigrant. But until I read this article, I had no idea the term "field" should be offensive to me. You can say that's because I never worked in an actual field. But the same is true of the vast majority of current immigrants (only a small percentage are agricultural workers, and even they don't all work in fields).
It should be obvious that "field," like many words, has different meanings in different contexts. Most of them in no way evoke slavery, or even menial agricultural labor.
If tenuous indirect connections make "field" offensive, the same is true of "practicum" (their suggested replacement. After all, "practicum" came into English from Latin. And the prevalence of Latin terminology in academia traces back to the Roman Empire. That Empire, of course, oppressed many nations and peoples. For example, Jews. Just think of all the horrible things the Romans did in Judaea, including the destruction of the Temple (considered by many Jews to be the worst tragedy in Jewish history prior to the Holocaust). Come to think of it, I should be deeply offended! USC's use of Latin terminology here triggers me and makes me feel unsafe.
If you think the argument in Point 3 is stupid (and it is!), the same applies to USC's reasoning, too.