The Fight Against Words That Sound Like, but Are Not, Slurs - The Atlantic
"When the news began circulating on social media, many couldn’t believe it was true––that the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California would remove a longtime professor from a class because a Mandarin word he used correctly in a lesson sounded sort of like a racial slur. One skeptic warned that the “ridiculous sounding story” seemed like a “fabricated Reddit meme.” Another was suspicious that it so neatly fit a narrative of “wacky campus leftists repressing free speech.”
Then angry faculty and alumni began confirming the story: During a Zoom class on August 20, Greg Patton, a 53-year-old professor, told students that in business settings they should avoid filler words such as um or er. Then he gave another example of a filler word that—I learned—he added to his lecture perhaps five years ago to be more inclusive of international students...
CNN reported reactions of disbelief and ridicule in the Chinese-language media, diminishing USC’s image as a Pacific Rim university that values academic freedom. Ninety-four recent graduates of the MBA program, purporting to represent “more than a dozen nationalities and ethnicities,” wrote that “a few of us, but many of our parents, lived through mainland China’s Cultural Revolution. This current incident, and Marshall’s response so far, seem disturbingly similar to prevalent behavior in China at that time—spurious accusations against innocent people, which escalated into institutional insanity.”
Scores of USC business faculty felt undermined by their dean––and many would only express their concern anonymously for fear of retaliation from students or administrators. “This situation has rocked the business school,” one faculty member told me. “Patton was thrown to the wolves, his reputation damaged, and his livelihood threatened. The dean’s letter … caused immeasurable damage.”
On Instagram, a Black member of USC’s class of 2024 wrote that Patton is a “scapegoat” being used by USC administrators “as a performative way to show they’re progressive,” adding, “Every other black USC student I talked to wasn’t even offended … I’ve already seen people reference this situation and say we blow everything out of proportion when the majority of us never took issue with this situation.” On the letters page of the Los Angeles Times, various YouTube channels, and Twitter, multiple Black commentators agreed that Patton was being treated unjustly...
Even The Daily Show weighed in. “As people, we’ve got to remember that there are so many things that are actually designed to offend us, they’re intended to offend us, that we’ve got to try to make sure that we don’t get offended by things that aren’t made to offend us,” the host, Trevor Noah, concluded.
“Exactly,” the comedian Ronny Chieng replied. “Because otherwise there is no limit to what can upset you!”
This controversy is most significant, however, as a bellwether of how administrators respond when young people take offense beyond reasonable limits. To mollify some of its business students, USC was willing to undermine a professor in good standing. Academics elsewhere are watching. They see the majority of faculty, alumni, and outside observers saying, “This goes too far,” and the bureaucracy holding firm...
As one professor put it, the treatment of Patton is “farcical,” but part of a larger trend: “Fundamental values––freedom of speech, intellectual freedom, equality––have largely fallen out of fashion in most elite universities, including USC. This has created a climate of terror among faculty.” Anyone invested in higher education would profit from studying exactly what went wrong.
In past years, when new MBA students gathered in physical spaces, Patton’s example was taught without controversy. But the class of 2022 convened for their first week of business school over Zoom. In that format, Patton could not assess body language or mood. And students couldn’t linger after class to air a concern. Both factors may have played a part in what followed. When Patton learned that some students were upset, “my heart dropped, and I have felt terrible ever since,” he later wrote in a letter to the business school’s Graduate Student Association. “I have tried so hard to deeply support every student at Marshall and to make them feel welcome and valued and seen.” He apologized to the whole class the next morning.
But the offended students did not talk with Patton or let the matter drop. In today’s campus culture, the sociologists Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning have observed, “complaint to third parties has supplanted both toleration and negotiation. People increasingly demand help from others, and advertise their oppression as evidence that they deserve respect and assistance.”
In their letter to Patton’s bosses, the students began by critiquing his pronunciation. “A couple of us reached out to our Chinese classmates as we were appalled by what we had just heard. It was confirmed that the pronunciation of this word is much different than what Patton described,” they wrote. “The word is most commonly used with a pause in between both syllables.” (In fact, numerous experts affirmed that Patton’s pronunciation was correct.)
“In addition,” the students continued, “we have lived abroad in China and have taken Chinese language courses at several colleges and this phrase, clearly and precisely before instruction is always identified as a phonetic homonym and a racial derogatory term, and should be carefully used, especially in the context of speaking Chinese within the social context of the United States.” (That passage upset some Chinese students and many outside observers, who pointed out that the social context of the U.S. is a land of immigrants where Chinese has been spoken for centuries and where non-English speakers shouldn’t have to self-censor their native languages)...
“To repeatedly use the word in each session and conveniently stop the Zoom recording right before saying the word, then resume the Zoom recording afterwards is puzzling to us, and makes it appear that his actions were calculated. In other words, he was aware of the grave and inappropriate nature of the example and purposefully chose to leave it out of his Zoom recording for the session.” (When a video recording of the controversial example from one of the classes was posted online, that allegation was proved factually wrong.)
The offended students next characterized the “burden” and harms that they purported to suffer. “Our mental health has been affected”...
Near the end, their letter invoked the names of two Black people recently killed by police officers...
Perhaps no one at USC’s business school is better qualified to analyze these events than Peter Kim, who studies social perception and misperception and the violation and repair of trust. His research sheds light on a question posed by many observers: Patton apologized. Why wasn’t that enough? Kim said apologies can be effective in the case of a perceived failure of competence. But if a transgression is seen as intentional, “an apology can be quite harmful,” Kim explained. Students attributed ill intent to Patton, claiming that he strategically stopped his Zoom recording in his classes. So rather than find his apology appropriate, they saw it “as confirmation of their belief that he’s done wrong and he’s got character flaws.”
Kim has also found that people are more likely to attribute ill intent when the actor is in a position of power, “because we believe the powerful have more control over their actions,” and that when people assess an ostensible transgression in a group, they tend to persuade one another that the act and the intent are worse than they would have concluded on their own...
USC’s response could hurt other students as well as professors, who will wonder, he said, “‘Well, if I say something that some group doesn’t like and they write a letter to the dean, will I get kicked out of class? Will the dean write a public letter vilifying me?’”...
"There is no academic principle at stake important enough to suppress the importance of diversity and inclusion"... He conceded that “thinking about what I say before I say it makes talking freely and thus teaching a bit more difficult,” but, he argued, “I think it might be worth it. Our students deserve at least that much.”
In short, one faction in this debate believes that educational institutions owe it to students to validate their lived experiences of psychological harms; another believes that students are owed tools to build resilience... "when students “feel pain and experience ‘damage’ because of an accidental similarity of sound, that reflects a way of thinking and reacting that’s unsound, and in the long-term (and even the medium-term) extremely counterproductive for those students. It’s an understandable human reaction, but something students need to learn to avoid––or else if they land around Mandarin speakers, they are going to be in constant pain and feel their work environment constantly damaged when they hear the word.”...
The fact that USC administrators sided with the aggrieved students is a departure from recent history and a marker of changing times. In the 1990s, using the N-word as a slur was utterly verboten; using words that merely sound like the N-word did sometimes result in pushback, but this was mostly perceived as political correctness run amok. In 1999, when a University of Wisconsin student complained to the faculty senate that her professor had used the word niggardly in a discussion of Chaucer, her grievance was dismissed as self-evidently ridiculous. That same year, when an aide to the mayor of Washington, D.C., was forced to resign for calling a city budget proposal “niggardly,” upsetting a Black colleague who misinterpreted the word as a racial slur, Salon characterized the matter as an absurdity that “opinion-makers right, left and center could universally agree on.” Julian Bond, then the head of the NAACP, told the Associated Press, “You hate to think you have to censor your language to meet other people’s lack of understanding.”...
Many privileged young people have been acculturated differently. A full-time MBA student in the class of 2020 emailed me, requesting anonymity due to the sensitivity of the controversy at the institution, “Can you expect a student to focus or feel safe after hearing a word that sounds like a racial slur? To tell my black classmates that they shouldn’t be offended by something is objectively wrong"...
Many lecturers would indeed find it complicated to self-police for any word that merely sounds like a slur. Insofar as students associate a no-homophones standard with respectful treatment, and departures from it as bigotry or a lack of “cultural competence,” many more instances of needless aggrievement will occur than under a standard where only pejorative uses of actual slurs are taboo. In that way, a push for hypersensitivity would actually increase the burden that students feel...
Teachers are already altering their lessons to guard against hypothetical affronts to the most easily offended. Business-school administrators ought to treat that chilling effect, which threatens the education of all MBA students, as a more urgent problem than the passing utterance of a Mandarin word."
Liberals pivot from claiming that you should shut up and listen when a minority is speaking to claiming that only the ones who are offended have a right to comment (just like they similarly pivot for abortion from claiming only women get an opinion to insisting that only the woman who is going to get one does)
Another example of why you should never apologise to liberals
The "myth" of the slippery slope strikes again
