Administrators at the University of Tennessee decided Friday to remove a controversial Web post about gender-neutral pronouns after it drew headlines across the country and scorn from a slate of state lawmakers.

In a letter to the Board of Trustees, UT system President Joe DiPietro said he was “deeply concerned about the attention this matter continues to receive and the harm it has had on the reputation of the University of Tennessee.”

DiPietro added that, moving forward, UT-Knoxville Chancellor Jimmy Cheek will not allow any of the school’s vice chancellors to “publish any campus-wide practice or policy” without Cheek’s approval.

The shift comes after officials at UT spent a week defending the post, which encouraged professors and students to use gender-neutral pronouns. Officials released several statements saying the post, written by the director of UT’s Pride Center, was intended as a campus resource, not mandatory policy.

Those statements did little to quell the ire of Republican lawmakers, who called special meetings of the Senate Higher Education Subcommittee to review the post and “higher education governance.”

Read the article “University of Tennessee Reverses Pronoun Policy Calling for Neutral Pronouns Ze, Xe, Etc.” on tennessean.com.