What is the “baggage” that makes master “a very loaded word”? It is that in one of its tertiary meanings, long since obsolete, and as part of a compound phrase (slave master), it could denote the owner or supervisor of slaves. It has no such connotation in current English. Nouns become obsolete when the things they denote cease to exist. It is possible you have seen a master sergeant or a quartermaster or a postmaster. You may have sat across a board from a chess master, even a grand master. You have perhaps sat at the feet of a Zen master. But no living person has ever seen a slave master. Slave masters have gone the way of the Master of the Temple and the Master of Ballantrae Hall. You can conjure one up only by taxing your imagination. If you live on a horse farm and you hear outside your window the sound of clip-clop, clip-clop, you do not think “Zebra!”—not if you’re sensible.
Since the new Dean of the College is a Professor of English, she must know all this. I presume she still chairs the Council of Heads, olim the Council of Masters. At Commencement one of the tasks of her colleague the Dean of the Graduate School, the former Master of Butler College, will be to present to President Eisgruber a sizable cohort of candidates for the conferral of what heretofore has been known as the master’s degree. Are they now to be heads’ degrees? Heads or tails? The one is no more, and no less preposterous than the other. Shall we never again hear a visiting maestro conduct in Richardson Auditorium? Will no visiting instrumental virtuoso ever again offer a master class? Will we cease to boast of the Old Masters in the Princeton Art Museum? Only a most determined (or predetermined) search for offense will find it in the words college master. Must our beloved English language always be the first victim of political confusion?