MENTIONING, USING ARE DIFFERENT

Plato recounts his teacher, mentor and the father of philosophy, Socrates, being sentenced to death in 399 BCE in his classic dialogue, “Apology.”

Over 2,000 years later, I find myself in a similar spot, offering a defense of my mentor, teacher and former thesis adviser, J. Angelo Corlett, a professor of philosophy at San Diego State University specializing in ethics, epistemology and race. While Socrates was tragically sentenced to drink poisonous hemlock under charges including corrupting the youth of Athens, Dr. C — as I and his other students affectionately call him — has been removed from teaching two courses because a student complained about his alleged use of a racial slur in class.

The punishments for Socrates and Dr. C are quite different, but their crimes are essentially the same: offending the youth. If those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it, then it is clear that the administrators responsible for this decision need to brush up on their Plato. If we restrain our professors by demanding they never offend a student, we are no better than the Athenian jury admonishing Socrates for corrupting the youth by daring to challenge religious dogma. I would like to bring two points to the public’s attention: Dr. C never used a racial slur and the implications of his punishment go far beyond his classroom.

We are more than a month out from the incident, and headlines are still not accurately reflecting what happened, including in the SDSU campus paper, The Daily Aztec, where a March 16 headline read, “Corlett removed from two courses after using racial slurs in class.” Many such headlines suggest that Dr. C is guilty by framing the issue around his “use” of racial epithets when he did no such thing. This is obvious from the relevant philosophical literature concerning the use-mention distinction. This distinction in analytic philosophy, which Dr. C is expert on and was teaching in this very class, distin

guishes between the use of a word and the mere mention of that word. Although Dr. C mentioned racial slurs in the classroom to teach about why they are so awful, he never used them. The latter would only be the case if he had taken such a term and applied it to someone in anger.

As The San Diego Union-tribune’s Gary Robbins reported, the student who challenged Dr. C in his course was not enrolled in it. This student had likely never seen, let alone read, the syllabus and the required texts, or attended any lecture besides this one. Thus, someone with no understanding of the use-mention distinction central to Dr. C’s pedagogy alleged that he used racial slurs, after which the administration removed him from teaching two classes later that day with no due process whatsoever. At least Socrates had a trial by jury.

This decision was not well-reasoned but made from panic in the face of an especially offensive word, a phenomenon Dr. C had ironically previously written precisely about in his 2018 The Journal of Ethics article, “Offensiphobia.” This irrational fear of being offended affords no distinction between using a term and mentioning it, nor does it allow for concerns of free speech or academic freedom.

Endorsing this decision means abiding by the precedent it sets. Cancel culture has gone so far that even the mentioning of a word in a university classroom is taken as enough to warrant a professor’s removal. The rule moving forward would be that if a professor’s lecture contains content which might offend any student who visits the class at any time for any reason, then that professor is canceled. Such a rule would be neither just nor even tenable, as the lectures conducted at public institutions of higher education inevitably contain content which is likely to offend someone, especially the uninitiated.

Being offended is the cost of doing business in higher education if we value critical discussion of relevant, controversial topics; I think we all do. The chilling effect of punishing faculty for speech is quite real. If they can do it to Dr. C, a tenured professor, they can do it to anyone.

I am terrified to be teaching under an administration that insists in an Orwellian exercise of doublethink that “This is not about ... academic freedom, but about teaching assignments,” as Luke Wood, SDSU’S vice president for student affairs and campus diversity, has said. I respond, “Down with Big Brother!” Removing a tenured professor for his speech is a violation of academic freedom, no matter how the administration frames it.