It or Its?

In formal writing we use the possessive form of a personal noun or pronoun in front of the gerund:

http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~nunberg/fish.html

There Are No Postmodernists In a Foxhole

Geoff Nunberg
Commentary broadcast on "Fresh Air," August 20, 2002

Like a lot of my favorite stories, this one begins with a pronoun, this from an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education that quoted Harvard President Lawrence Summers in an interview saying, "I regret any faculty member leaving a conversation feeling they are not respected"

The sentence was tailor-made to bundle puristic panties, particularly given the context and speaker -- and in fact a few weeks later, the Chronicle ran an extensive diatribe from a professor of English who took exception to Summers' grammar. According to the writer, Summers should have said "I regret any faculty member's leaving," not "any faculty member leaving." And the antecedent "any faculty member" required the pronouns "he or she," not "they," (Modern academics are particularly attached to the "he or she" construction, which enables them to sound politically correct and pedantic in the same breath.)

...


In short, it was an utterly routine grammatical harangue, distinguished only by the speciousness of the occasion for it. For example, that business about having to use the possessive "any member's leaving" instead of "any member leaving" is one of those mindless superstitions that have been passed on to generations of schoolchildren at the end of Sister Petra's ruler. As the linguist Geoff Pullum pointed out in a letter to the Chronicle, if you really believed the construction was incorrect, you'd have to take a red pencil to Shakespeare, Milton, Jane Austen, and most of the other great figures of English literature.

When it comes to language, it is amazing how similar your views are to those of OmSigDAVID.