Decry profs for defending racial slurs, students urge
Ask president to reject academic freedom premise
OT TAWA • T he student union at the University of Ottawa is calling on university president Jacques Frémont to denounce a group of professors who defended the right to use “racial slurs” as a part of academic freedom.
The slur in question is the N- word, which was used by a part- time sociology professor last month in a Zoom discussion on language and the reappropriation of offensive words by groups such as people of colour, the disabled and the LGBTQ communities. In a statement posted online Sunday night, the University of Ottawa Student Union said that the N- word remains “offensive, hurtful and reprehensible.”
It also said there had been instances of the word being used in online Zoom classes in the faculty of law by students without a prof present.
“When you’re using the N- word or presenting the N-word ... you have a responsibility to know the weight of the word,” said Babacar Faye, student union president.
“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,” he said. “It was created for the express purpose to demean and reduce human beings. It has no other use in the English language.”
The union’s statement also decried an open letter signed by 34 professors and retired professors that defended the sociology professor and acknowledged “that certain lectures, certain concepts, certain words will hurt some susceptibilities” but that universities were the place where such topics must be discussed freely.
The student union called the professors’ stance “appalling.”
“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,” the union said in its social media post.
In response, Frémont sent an email to students and staff Monday morning of remarks he intended to deliver to the University Senate later in the day. In it, Frémont acknowledges that “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.
Notably, a Black student skateboarding on campus in June 2019 was stopped by campus security who demanded his identification and, when he refused, called Ottawa police, who briefly arrested him.
But Frémont also defended academic freedom even as he noted that it carried a cost: “The professor could have chosen not to use the full N- word. Yet she did and is now facing the consequences,” he wrote.
“And yet, contrary to so much of what has been written in recent days, the right to freedom of expression and the right to dignity are not contradictory principles, but complementary.
They must coexist with one another.”
The professor remains an employee of uottawa.
The president’s letter did a good job at striking a balance, said Amir Attaran, a law professor who has been outspoken in the past about racism at uottawa.
“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.” Attaran said.
“The idea espoused by some of my colleagues 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,” he said.
“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.”
But Frémont’s response didn’t satisfy Faye of the student union, who noted the sociology professor “doubled down” on the issue by inviting students to discuss her use of the N-word in another online session. The argument of academic freedom diverts attention for the need to discuss racism on campus, he said.
“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’s a conversation we need to have.”
(SHE HAD) THE RIGHT TO USE THE WORD BUT WAS UNWISE TO DO SO.