As I’ve made clear in the past, I don’t use it. Not because I can’t. My mouth can form the word. Not even because my buddy Elie tells me I’m never allowed to. Elie’s got a lot of rules like that. It’s simply a matter of choice, and I choose not to. But that doesn’t mean others can’t, including University of Rochester Prof David Bleich or Harvard Law Prof Randall Kennedy, who made it really hard to avoid given the title of his book,

Bleich teaches, of all things, about race and gender, and in the course of his instruction, he read from Kennedy’s writings. Verbatim.

This semester, Professor Bleich is teaching a class on Gender and Anger. He read aloud from a short story that had been assigned to the class. The portion of the text he read included the n-word. Students objected, and there was a vigorous conversation about the use of the word. In a subsequent class, Professor Bleich read to the students a section of Harvard Law School Professor Randall Kennedy‘s Chronicle of Higher Education article on the use of the n-word in classroom settings.

Did he get a medal for teaching so well? Maybe an award? A prize for being bold? Have you not been paying attention?

The university responded by suspending him from teaching his class and putting in place various restrictive conditions that must be satisfied before he would be allowed to resume teaching. The university is taking the position that it is never appropriate for a professor to say the n-word aloud in a college class.

After all, “students objected” has become the tipping point of academic freedom, despite the fact that there is a strong probability that some student will object to pretty much anything within 100 feet of controversial, no matter how many twists, turns and theoretical leaps the student has to make to rationalize offense. But in fairness, this word, this one word, the N-word, arguably stands apart from all others, unlike the manufactured faux outrage at other commonly used words and phrases.

Keith Whittington has formed the Academic Freedom Alliance to fight for the freedom of  academic speech and thought, and has taken up Bleich’s cause.

“I write on behalf of the Academic Freedom Alliance to express our firm view that these disciplinary actions directed toward Professor Bleich are an egregious violation of his academic freedom,” wrote the AFA’s Keith Whittington in a letter to Dean Gloria Culver of the University of Rochester’s School of Arts and Sciences. “This interpretation and application of the university’s harassment policy would conflict with longstanding principles of academic freedom embraced by American universities, and it would be in breach of the University of Rochester’s own stated commitment to academic freedom.”

There is a fundamental distinction between the use of the word as a slur, to call someone the N-word, and its use within the context of “relevant scholarly contexts,” as Bleich’s lawyer, Sam Harris, argues.

“For 30 years, I have studied and taught about the use of language,” said Professor Bleich. “This includes texts by African Americans that utilize the n-word, many of which are important works of the civil rights movement. I think it is urgent that students be able to encounter these uses of the n-word without the idea that the mere hearing of the word causes harm – an idea apparently being encouraged by administrators who seem to believe that their students are too fragile to fully engage with these important and challenging parts of our history.”

And Randall Kennedy agrees.

“It is profoundly disturbing to see an instructor investigated and disciplined for grappling in class with a term that has had and continues to have a hugely consequential place in American culture.  The demand to make this term – ‘nigger’ – literally unmentionable is a demand that ought not be honored.  Compelled silence or bowdlerization is antithetical to the academic, intellectual, and artistic freedom essential to higher education.”

It’s not that an academic cannot make the choice that I’ve made, to not use this word even if substituting the N-word doesn’t change the fact that you know what it means and may well hear the actual word in your head when you see it, but that others who make a different choice should not be disciplined. It’s the use of the word, whether to attack or foster scholarly understanding, that should distinguish what deserves condemnation, not merely the sound of the word coming from the wrong mouth.