My immediate thought to your comment was that "frosh" is actually very common and accepted slang for "freshmen". That said, I did not expect to see it in the article's lede – or in the president's official statement [0]:
> We will continue planning with the hope and expectation of bringing undergraduates back to Stanford at the earliest possible time. If public health conditions allow, we plan to invite frosh, sophomores and new transfer students to be in residence on campus for the winter quarter, and juniors and seniors for the spring quarter.
I imagine that's because "freshmen" is problematic in $CURRENT_YEAR, but it sounds too weird to say "freshpeople" so they went with the existing slang of "frosh."
Considering it's a term that originated centuries before women were first allowed to attend college, I suppose it's reasonable to argue it has been long obsolete to the point of being problematic.
University administrators have now begun the process of replacing the terms “freshman” and “upperclassman” with the gender-neutral terms “first year” and “upper-level students” in official campus publications... “It’s really for public, formal correspondence and formal publications … we’re not trying to tell people what language to use in their everyday casual conversations,” Chun said. “We’re not trying to be language police.”
Although frosh refers to a first-year student and has a resemblance to fresh, freshman is not believed to be the source of the word. More likely, frosh is from the dialectic German word for a frog, Frosch. ... Students already had a slang term for freshman, the diminutive freshie.
The question "what it is slang for" is different from the question "what is the word derived from". The prior may well change if everyone has a group delusion and believes it is slang for something different. The latter obviously not.
