Respect and Dignity in Academia

Babacar Faye uOttawa student union. T. Caldwell/Postmedia

"When you're using the N-word or presenting the N-word -- you have a responsibility to know the weight of the word."

"People should realize it's not a word that should be lightly used, especially if you are not yourself racialized."

"There was no academic value to using the word. It was created for the express purpose to demean and reduce human beings. It has no other use in the English language."
"I think there is a wider opportunity for more conversation and more dialogue instead of drowning in the issue of academic freedom."

"The thing is to bring this back to the conversation of race on campus and ... how they can work to ease the minds of students, especially Black students on campus."

"The academic world is one that's been developed in a very Western, a very white world and it has yet to confront its own institutional and historic racism. That' a conversation we need to have."

Babacar Faye, student union president, University of Ottawa

"For at least a year and a half now, uOttawa has experienced racist and racially motivated incidents [and that there have been ongoing] aggressions and microaggressions [against the school's Black and racialized communities."

"The professor could have chosen not to use the full N-word. Yet she did and is now facing the consequences."

University president Jacques Fremont

"My personal position is the professor had the right to use the word but was unwise to do so. There's a difference between what rights one has and what rights are wise to exercise. This clearly went too far for our students."

"The idea espoused by some of my colleagues [peer professors at University of Ottawa] that academic freedom is absolute and that students have to take whatever it is the professor dishes out is, to me, self-centred and wrong."

"Ultimately, students have to want their education and if a particular professor's exercise of academic freedom offends those students, then the students should have the choice to walk."

Amir Attaran, professor of law, University of Ottawa

Recently an associate professor at University of Ottawa saw fit to use a derogatory term more familiarly used in the deep south of the United States for generations to ensure that Blacks knew their place as beings inferior to whites in a culture that had condoned and relished slavery of black Africans. That word and its meaning is degrading, as much to the target as it is to the user. That someone with a shred of intelligence, a modicum of empathy and a sense of right and wrong would casually use that word or others similar to it when speaking of blacks is pathetic. That this took place within a university when an academic chose the word for whatever reasons are known to her is appalling.

Little wonder students are upset and call for an institutional change. When the student union first began its campaign to have the professor censored and perhaps removed from her part-time post as a sociology professor, a group of 34 professors at the university raised a counter argument in favour of Verushka Lieutenant-Duval's "critical thinking and academic freedom" [who was suspended on September 23], raising the freedom of speech banner and particularly that academic-speak should never be placed under a magnifying glass of censure. She had, in fact, abandoned 'critical thinking'.

 

Among those who appear to semi-defend Professor Lieutenant-Duval is a black uOttawa professor, Philippe Frowd, an assistant professor with the School of Political Studies..."I don't think it is never appropriate, but I do think the contexts in which it is are extremely limited. We have to be very, very careful before we go in that direction. Certainly for me as a Black person, I would find it extremely difficult to raise that in my classroom, especially spoken. I think it might be different if we were reading a text that contained the word that was particularly important. I find it difficult to say never. But I think that we have a certain freedom and latitude in an academic setting to make those choices. I just think those choices should involve a great degree of care."

 

The N-word was used by Professor Lieutenant-Duval in a Zoom discussion on language and the reappropriation of offensive words by people of colour, the disabled and the LGBTQ communities. Whatever the context and the purported purpose, the word, ill-disguised as a legitimate descriptive is, as the student union representative pointed out, "offensive, hurtful and reprehensible", and one needn't be black to feel that way. That the 34 professors and retired professors who saw fit to defend the sociology professor acknowledging "that certain lectures, certain concepts, certain words will hurt some suceptibilities" speaks to their own inadequacies as human beings.

 

That they insist the university setting is the correct place where topics such as those being discussed require free discussion overlooks the fact that it is not mere delicacy of feeling that assaults the sensibilities of anyone hearing or seeing the word used, but repulsion at what it represents. "They've found their voice in defending the use of a racial slur while discounting the vast majority of uOttawa's Black community's disagreement", responded the union on its social media post.

On the other hand, uOttawa president Fremont's response was carefully modulated and fairly reasonable, acknowledging that academic freedom of speech is vital to the exchange of opinion and information, but that the choice in this particular instance of a damningly offensive word was beyond unfortunate. That anyone with an ounce of sense would feel comfortable using it is a problem in and of itself. Even the Premier of Quebec joined the discussion, explaining that the word's use was forgivable since it emanated from the mind of a French-speaker, and in French the word means something 'different'.

Medical student Ibrahim Mohammad, left, and law student Hannan Mohamud, right, are among those calling for the University of Ottawa to institute a zero-tolerance policy regarding the use of the N-word on campus. (CBC)