Woke bullies have reached ever new levels of intolerance and decency. John McWhorter explains in this tweet:
You need to read the above tweet carefully. Professor Kilborn was unfairly attacked by the 250 students who signed a petition requiring many dramatic actions, including a demand that “Professor Kilborn should immediately step down as the chair of the academic affairs committee and from all other committee appointments he holds.” What was Professor Kilborn’s crime? As part of a law school exam, he used only the sanitized version of the offensive word, exactly this: “N*****”. This is the reason he was attacked by a mob of hypersensitive students. The following comment to McWhorter’s tweet was thus spot on:
After Professor Kilborn was unfairly attacked by the students, he was left twisting in the wind by the University of Illinois – Chicago (UIC) administration, which issued the following statement:
The Law School recognizes the impact of this issue. Before winter break, Dean Dickerson apologized to the students who expressed hurt and distress over the examination question. The Law School acknowledges that the racial and gender references on the examination were deeply offensive. Faculty should avoid language that could cause hurt and distress to students. Those with tenure and academic freedom should always remember their position of power in our system of legal education.
This pathetic defense of its own professor and other details regarding this incident can be found at Above the Law. Here’s an excerpt:
The petition is a call to action for “Insensitive and Racist Content” on the exam, and when I initially read the petition, my impression was that the professor had used the full slur on the exam. (And I bet a lot of other people that read — and potentially signed — the petition thought that too.) But that petition does not “summarize[]” the exam as it purports to do — it provides a direct quote. By that I mean the exam did not use the full n-word (or the b-word for that matter), opting instead for the euphemism. Which is… the exact sort of adaptation and awareness of potentially traumatic racial issues that folks have historically asked for when professors claim the right to drop the full n-word just because it’s an academic setting.
Will any lessons be learned from this incident? We shall see . . .
Nice to now know the ‘use-mention distinction’……….I doubt very much woke minded folks will care a whit for this distinction……..as they. steamroll forward to ‘socia’l ‘justice’
Nearly the entire Woke movement is based on pretending in order to signal virtue. For the rest of them, I defer to my favorite philosopher, Larry the Cable Guy:
“You can’t fix stupid.”
More news on the Use Mention Distinction. This time Planned Parenthood is the offender. Jesse Singal reports:
https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/theres-so-much-justice-going-on-i