McGill OSS, July 11, 2019

1. The word is in the headline and nowhere else

The article’s body never calls me a guru. The word appears only in the title and the URL. Those are the parts that travel: search results, social shares and citations all carry the headline, not the text. Wikipedia’s biography of me cites this article nine times, and each citation repeats the title “Popular Health Guru Sayer Ji…” So the one label the article never defends is also the part most people see.

2. “Guru” is a religious title, used here as a put-down

Inclusive-language guides now list the casual use of “guru” as appropriation from Hindu and Buddhist traditions (Pratt Institute). McGill’s own digital style guide asks writers, “unless it’s critical or relevant to your content,” to “avoid descriptors of a person’s race, age, religion, gender, abilities, and sexuality” (McGill). Nothing in the article depends on calling me a religious teacher.

3. Why my name makes it worse

“Ji” is my father’s Korean family name (지). He studied engineering at Seoul National University and came to the United States on a scholarship in 1962 (heritage page).

In Hindi, Punjabi and other languages of the Indian subcontinent, “-ji” is a different word: an honorific suffix added to a name or title as a mark of respect, as in Gandhiji. “Guru-ji” means “respected master” (Wikipedia, “-ji”). People often take my surname for that suffix.

Put “Guru” in front of “Sayer Ji” and the headline reads like the way you’d address an Indian spiritual teacher. Three things happen at once:

• A Korean family name becomes an Indian honorific. My father’s surname, carried from Seoul, is made to stand in for a South Asian term of reverence.
• Two cultures become one caricature. Korean ancestry and Hindu and Sikh religious vocabulary are merged into a single generic “Eastern mystic,” the stock figure who sells wisdom to Westerners.
• Two sacred or personal words become the joke. The religious title is the insult, and my family name supplies the punchline.

I regard that as racially demeaning. I am not claiming the author meant it. I’m saying that’s how the headline reads, and that a university office whose job is checking claims could have checked what both words mean.

What I asked for

• Replace “Popular Health Guru Sayer Ji” with a neutral descriptor, such as “GreenMedInfo Founder Sayer Ji,” and keep the rest of the title as written.
• Change the URL to match and redirect the old one, so existing links, including Wikipedia’s, still work.
• Add a one-line editor’s note recording the change and the date.

What I did not ask for

• Any change to the article’s criticism of GreenMedInfo or of me.
• Removal of “with His Bachelor’s Degree in Philosophy.” It’s accurate: I hold a BA in philosophy from Rutgers (1995).
• An apology.

What the article gets right

• The author praises GreenMedInfo’s Research Dashboard as a tool he “wish[ed he] could recommend.”
• My degree is described accurately.
• His views on how GreenMedInfo selects studies are presented as his opinions, and they are his to hold. I answer them on the corrections and methodology page.

Correction requests

1. Oct 31, 2026

   I asked the author, with the Office’s director copied, to retitle the article for the reasons above. Reply requested by November 21, 2026. Response: pending. The full text of the letter is below.

2. Nov 1, 2026

   This record published. Any response will be recorded here.

If OSS changes the headline, this page will say so the same day. A separate request about the Office’s 2021 article is logged on its own record page.

The letter as sent

Sent October 31, 2026, 9:41 p.m. ET, to Jonathan Jarry, with Joe Schwarcz, Director of the Office for Science and Society, copied. Subject: “Request to retitle the July 2019 article: ‘Health Guru Sayer Ji’ misuses a religious title and my Korean surname.”

Dear Mr. Jarry and Dr. Schwarcz,

I am writing about one word in the headline of the Office for Science and Society article published 11 July 2019, “Popular Health Guru Sayer Ji Curates the Scientific Literature with His Bachelor’s Degree in Philosophy” (link). This is separate from my 15 October request about the 2021 article, and I am not asking you to change any of the article’s criticism of my work. The request concerns the label “guru” in the title and URL only; the word does not appear in the body of the piece.

Why the word is a problem

1. “Guru” is a sacred title, not a generic noun. In Hindu tradition the word means “dispeller of darkness” and denotes a religious teacher who leads a student toward liberation (Hindu American Foundation, “8 Things You May Want to Know About Gurus,” link). In Sikhism the title is reserved for Guru Nanak, his nine successors and the Guru Granth Sahib, and applying it to anyone else is considered improper (SikhNet).
2. The sense your headline uses is the derogatory one. Collins English Dictionary gives, as a second sense of “guru,” “derogatory: a leader or chief theoretician of a movement, esp a spiritual or religious cult” (dictionary.com). The scholarly literature describes the same pattern: in the West the word “is sometimes used in a derogatory way to refer to individuals who have allegedly exploited their followers’ naiveté” and “is also employed more generally for wellness gurus focused on alternative medicine” (Gressett, “Gurus in America,” Journal of Asian Studies 65(4), 2006, as summarized at Wikipedia, “Guru”). Your Office uses the phrase the same way for other subjects it criticizes, for example “a medical doctor turned health guru” in the February 2021 article on Zach Bush (McGill OSS). A headline that borrows a religious title to signal “charlatan” is using someone else’s sacred vocabulary as an insult.
3. Inclusive-language guidance already flags this usage. Pratt Institute’s inclusive-language guide lists “guru” as “an appropriation from Hindu and Buddhist religions” whose “nonchalant use … diminishes its importance and origins” (Pratt Institute). Thesaurus.com’s editors make the same point (Thesaurus.com). A corpus study of Indian-origin words in Western media documents how “guru” is “resemanticized … to denote superficial trends” and acquires a negative charge in scandal and fraud reporting (IJRISS).
4. McGill’s own standards point the same way. The University’s digital style guide asks units to “align our digital communications” with McGill’s equity, diversity and inclusion goals and, “unless it’s critical or relevant to your content, avoid descriptors of a person’s race, age, religion, gender, abilities, and sexuality” (McGill). A religious title used ironically about a critic is a religious descriptor, and it is not relevant to the article’s argument about literature curation.
5. My surname makes it worse. “Ji” is my family name, and it is Korean (지; written 池 or 智 in hanja; see Wikipedia). My father, Sungchul Ji, survived the Korean War as a boy and emigrated to the United States (National Health Federation profile, link). In Hindi, Punjabi and other languages of the Indian subcontinent, “-ji” is an honorific suffix, and “Guru-ji” is the standard form of address for a “respected master” (Wikipedia). My name is often mistaken for that Indian honorific. Indian usage attaches “-ji” to a name as a mark of respect (Gandhiji, Shivji), so “Guru Sayer Ji” reads as the form used to address an Indian spiritual teacher: a Korean-American’s family name turned into a mock-Indian religious title. That joins two separate Asian identities into one generic “Eastern mystic” caricature. I regard that as racially demeaning. I am not claiming you meant it that way. Whatever was intended, a McGill headline should not turn a person’s ethnic surname into part of a joke.

What I am asking

• Replace “Popular Health Guru Sayer Ji” in the headline with a neutral descriptor such as “GreenMedInfo Founder Sayer Ji,” keeping the rest of the title as written.
• Update the URL slug to match and redirect the old URL, so existing links (including the Wikipedia citation) continue to resolve.
• Add a one-line editor’s note recording the change and the date.

This asks nothing about the substance of your critique. It asks that a McGill publication not use a religious honorific as a pejorative in a headline about a living person. I would appreciate a reply by 21 November 2026.

Sincerely,
Sayer Ji
Founder, GreenMedInfo.com

Sources

• McGill OSS, “Popular Health Guru Sayer Ji Curates the Scientific Literature with His Bachelor’s Degree in Philosophy,” July 11, 2019: mcgill.ca
• Collins English Dictionary, “guru”: dictionary.com
• Hindu American Foundation, “8 Things You May Want to Know About Gurus”: hinduamerican.org
• SikhNet, “Guru Nanak Dev Ji, Truth and Shabd Guru”: sikhnet.com
• Wikipedia, “-ji”: wikipedia.org
• Wikipedia, “Ji (Korean name)”: wikipedia.org
• McGill University, Digital style guide, Diversity and inclusion: mcgill.ca
• Pratt Institute Libraries, Inclusive language guide, Religion: pratt.edu
• McGill OSS, article on Zach Bush, 2021: mcgill.ca

Errors in this record will be corrected and logged on the corrections page. Last reviewed November 1, 2026.