Do Racial Epithets Have Any Place in the Classroom? A Professor’s Suspension Fuels That Debate

Last semester, during an honors seminar called “Scholar Citizen,” a student at Augsburg University read aloud a passage from James Baldwin’s book The Fire Next Time.

Hearing the quotation — “You can really only be destroyed by believing that you really are what the white world calls a n-----" — shocked some students in the class.

Phillip Adamo, a professor of history and medieval studies who was teaching the class, used the moment to discuss whether or not the racial slur should be referred to with a euphemism. In doing so, he used the word himself. He told Augsburg’s student newspaper, the Echo, that he had “used the word, not the epithet,” to introduce a discussion about it.

The students in the class reached a consensus that they chose not to use the word. Later Adamo sent them an email and shared further readings — “Good Teachers Use the N-Word,” by Andre Perry, and “In Defense of a Loaded Word,” by Ta-Nehisi Coates — that led some to feel they were being pressured to reverse their decision.

A student in the class told the Echo that Adamo had repeated the quotation once with the slur and once without, before asking the class, “‘Isn’t it much less impactful if we say, ‘N-word’?’”

Adamo declined to be interviewed for this article.

The university, in Minneapolis, suspended Adamo in January for an unspecified “range of issues raised by students” that involve bias and discrimination, respect for students, teaching competence, and program leadership, according to a response that the American Association of University Professors sent to Paul C. Pribbenow, Augsburg’s president.

A group of students not enrolled in the course observed Adamo’s next class, on November 1, according to the Echo. They secretly recorded him discussing the racial epithet and posted the recording online.

Adamo told the provost about the recording incident and wrote a letter to his students addressing their concerns about his approach to sensitive topics.

Nonetheless, he was barred from teaching and removed from his duties as honors-program director for the fall semester.

Last month the university extended Adamo’s suspension to the current semester and began a “formal resolution process” to decide appropriate next steps, according to a statement from the university.

The suspension has reignited a debate about how academic freedom plays out in the classroom. At issue is the tension between challenging students intellectually and building an environment conducive to learning.

Terrence Shambley Jr., a sophomore, heard about the incident from a friend who had recorded Adamo’s class. Shambley, who prefers to be identified by the pronoun “they,” wrote a column in the Echo arguing that the use of oppressive words effectively shuts down the open discussion that some claim is protected by academic freedom.

“If you have to evoke trauma in your students to teach them something, it seems counterproductive to me,” Shambley told The Chronicle. “It’s not a fair situation, especially because other students in class don’t have to feel that trauma. That trauma is only evoked for the black students in the room.”

‘Classes Are Live-Wire Situations’

Shelley Fisher Fishkin, a professor of English and director of American studies at Stanford University, called Adamo’s suspension “terrible.” For her the situation hits close to home: Most of her classes often touch on racism and sensitive language.

After one of Fishkin’s students said she felt uncomfortable hearing the word in class, the professor started projecting quotations on a screen rather than reading them aloud. When voicing them can’t be avoided, she gives her students the option of saying “the N-word.” Fishkin also holds sessions for her students at which they can talk through the history of the word and decide how they’ll use it during class discussions.

But, she said, in some situations it can’t be avoided — like when the word appears in the title of a work — and students should be prepared for that reality.

“I never use the word in my own voice, but when I do use it, it’s because it’s central to the critique and understanding of racism,” Fishkin said. “You don’t have to necessarily say the word all the time, but you have to discuss it and understand the word in context. The context is essential to learning.”

Leigh Patel, associate dean for equity and justice in the School of Education at the University of Pittsburgh, said situations in which professors must navigate racially fraught subject matter repeatedly come up in the classroom, but as a woman of South Asian descent, she will never say the N-word herself.

Academic freedom is invaluable for educators, she said, But it doesn’t guarantee clearance to use certain words.

“I come down a little bit harder on teachers and professors because despite academic freedom, if you haven’t been privy to the history of violence and abuse surrounding that word, you’re not entitled to use it,” Patel said. “There’s no reason why you still can’t teach that text, but now you get the added lesson of explaining why you would say ‘the N-word’ instead of pronouncing out it loud.”

Adamo’s supporters say he tried to have a conversation about the word by sharing further reading. A petition in support of the professor has gained more than 1,000 signatures.

The AAUP has condemned Adamo’s suspension. In a letter to Augsburg, it said, “An institution of higher learning fails to fulfill its mission if it asserts the power to proscribe ideas — and racial or ethnic slurs, sexist epithets, or homophobic insults almost always express ideas, however repugnant.”

The university was right to acknowledge and take seriously the students’ concerns, said Robert Cowgill, chair of the English department at Augsburg and author of a letter in support of Adamo on behalf of the AAUP. But Adamo was not allowed to have an open dialogue with his students: That was the mistake, Cowgill said.

“Classes are live-wire situations. You don’t know in advance what a student is going to say or how you’re going to respond. Academic freedom allows the professor the right to make a mistake in terms of what students will accept,” he said. “But with him out of the classroom, how is it possible for there to be restitution?”

Sarah Groeneveld Kenney, an assistant professor of English at Augsburg, said academic freedom extends to both professor and student. In an op-ed in the student paper, Groeneveld Kennedy and two colleagues wrote that “academic freedom in defense of language that harms students turns the very principle that makes true learning possible into a mechanism for enforcing institutional racism.”

Like Adamo, Groeneveld Kenney teaches material that deals with issues of race and other “difficult matters,” she said, like gender and sexuality.

“If I want my classroom to be as free as possible,” Groeneveld Kenney told The Chronicle, “that means making conscious decisions about the language I use, so that my students feel that they are in a space where they can have the conversations I’m trying to encourage them to have.”

While Shambley, the sophomore, said they wanted faculty members not to use academic freedom as an “excuse” for their actions, they acknowledged that Augsburg administrators and faculty members had used the Adamo situation as a catalyst for discussions about how to make the campus more inclusive for students of color.

“Issues like this obviously require nuanced conversations,” they said. “But you can’t ignore the racial aspects of this and just talk about academic freedom.”

Changes in the ‘Climate’ of Academe

David Bradley, a former professor in the creative-writing program at the University of Oregon, wrote an essay in defense of both the study of the N-word and the right to say it. Censoring the racial epithet in the context of literature removes honesty from the classroom, he said. Bradley once told CBS News that when teaching The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, he has students say the word out loud “six or seven times” to “get over it.”

When an instructor is quoting a text, there is no reason for a suspension, Bradley argued. “As a writer, I’m going to use the word that’s appropriate to the context. I will not use a euphemism. If you can’t talk about troublesome things in a classroom, where can you?”

A shift in the higher-education climate has made some people tiptoe around difficult conversations. That is a disservice to learning, Bradley said.

“I tell students that when you’re walking into a classroom, you’re walking into a dangerous place. You’re going to encounter ideas that are going to shock you — and that’s called education,” he said. “Education is about engagement with the unfamiliar.”

Conversations about what professors can do and say in the classroom are a familiar part of campus culture. Today’s students, however, have come of age amid great social change, said Patel, at Pitt. That affects how they approach subjects that may not have aroused attention a generation ago.

“That, to me, infringes in no way on academic freedom,” Patel said. “It may mean adjusting our approaches on how to handle loaded content in the classroom. But that is part of the job of an educator.”

Corrections (2/11/2019, 10:34 a.m. and 2:53 p.m.): A previous version of this article misspelled the name of an assistant professor of English at Augsburg University. She is Sarah Groeneveld Kenney, not Kennedy. The article also used the incorrect pronouns for Terrence Shambley Jr., a sophomore at Augsburg University. Shambley prefers to be identified by them and they.

Zipporah Osei is an editorial intern at The Chronicle. Follow her on Twitter @zipporahosei, or email her at zipporah.osei@chronicle.com.