The debate over whether “niggardly” is a racially offensive word hit academe last week, when a black student at the University of Wisconsin at Madison objected to a professor’s use of the term in the classroom.
The student, Amelia Rideau, related the incident before the university’s Faculty Senate meeting last week, when she urged professors to maintain a strict speech code on the campus. The linguistic dispute comes as professors are preparing to decide whether to revise or abandon Madison’s faculty speech code.
The word “niggardly” is defined as stingy, and although it sounds similar to “nigger,” the two words share no etymological link. The controversy over the word erupted last month, when the Mayor of Washington, Anthony A. Williams, accepted the resignation of a white aide whose use of the word in a meeting had offended some black people. Last week, Mayor Williams announced he planned to rehire the aide, David Howard, and said he had “acted too hastily” in accepting Mr. Howard’s resignation.
At Madison, Ms. Rideau said she had never heard the word until her professor, Standish Henning, used it last month in his introduction-to-British-literature course.
“We were discussing The Canterbury Tales, and he was talking about one of the main characters in the prologue,” said Ms. Rideau, who is president of the Wisconsin Black Student Union. “He described him as being ‘niggardly.’ I didn’t know what it meant. I found out later, but it didn’t take away from the offensiveness. I know the rest of the class heard it the way I did.”
At the next class meeting, she said she had told Mr. Henning that the word offended her. She said he had told her that that was not his intention and that “niggardly” had no association with the racial slur. From their conversation, she said, she assumed he wouldn’t use the word again.
But when the class met next, she said, Mr. Henning opened the lecture with a discussion of the meaning of the word. “He went on and used the word five or six times,” said Ms. Rideau, who said she was the only black person in class that day. “By now I’m crying. I looked in the girl’s notebook next to me, and she had written ‘niggerly.’”
Ms. Rideau said Mr. Henning had brought to class a newspaper clipping about the flap over “niggardly” in Washington. “He asked the class whether they thought it was appropriate for this man to be punished for his use of the word,” she said. “I felt he was really saying, Was I valid in my feelings?”
Mr. Henning could not be reached and has not commented publicly about the matter. But other professors on the campus said they did not find his use of “niggardly” to be a racial slur and suggested that he had probably discussed the word’s meaning in his class to clear up any confusion other students might have had.
Madison was one of the first universities to adopt a “hate speech” code prohibiting students from making derogatory remarks. In 1991, a federal judge struck down that policy, but a separate faculty speech code remained in effect.
Since last fall, professors at Madison have been debating how to revise the faculty speech code, adopted in 1981. The code is meant to punish faculty members who make offensive remarks, but it has been criticized as being too vague in defining what is offensive. The main proposal -- supported by a majority of a campus committee formed to revise the policy -- would reserve penalties mainly for professors who use slurs to directly demean individual students. A second proposal, favored by a minority of the committee, would water down the code even more severely. A third option is to abolish it altogether. The Faculty Senate is set to vote on the matter March 1.
Donald A. Downs, a professor of political science, attended the Senate meeting where Ms. Rideau spoke. A professor could be punished for using the word “niggardly” under the existing code, although that wouldn’t be possible under any of the current proposals for altering it, said Mr. Downs, who favors abolishing the code or seriously weakening it. “If that’s an example of the kind of sensitivity that’s out there, it shows you the danger of speech codes,” he said. “We couldn’t ask for a better example of why to vote against them.”
Carin A. Clauss, a professor of law at Madison who has argued strongly in favor of the main proposal, disagreed. “Absolutely everyone on the faculty understood, and agreed, that the conduct code would in no way subject anyone to discipline for using any of that kind of language in a class discussion,” she said.
Critics of the code keep “throwing up these absurd examples,” she said, “but I still haven’t heard anyone say why it ought to be okay to call anyone a ‘nigger’ in the classroom, and that’s what this code clearly gets at.”
http://chronicle.com
Section: The Faculty
Page: A12
