ALBANY – A recent SUNY Albany student picnic to honor Jackie Robinson breaking the baseball color barrier erupted into a bizarre campus debate on the extremes of political correctness.

About 40 students at SUNY Albany objected that last Saturday’s event was being labeled a “picnic” – a term they wrongly alleged stemmed from racial lynchings.

In reality, the word is derived from the 17th-century French term pique-nique, a social event where attendees brought food.

Nonetheless, caving in to the pressure, SUNY Albany student leaders forbade the event from being publicized as a picnic.

But the planning problems did not end there.

When organizers considered calling the event an “outing,” a gay student leader objected, noting the term’s use to describe when one person publicly proclaims another is gay.

Eventually, the event was publicized without a title.

“My job is to make sure people from underrepresented groups are heard,” SUNY Albany’s Student Assembly Affirmative Action Director Zaheer Mustafa told the Albany Times Union, which broke the story.

“Whether the claims are true or not, the point is the word offended.”